The Amity Cinema

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...And Cinema For All

I’ve been in love with films for as long as I can remember. From the very first moment I saw a Star Destroyer looming overhead in pursuit of Princess Leia’s blockade runner ship when I was five years old or when I was terrified by E.T. hiding in Elliot’s shed or when Venkman was slimed, I asked my parents to keep letting me see as many films as possible, I was fascinated with this series of images and sounds that were telling me a story that held my complete attention, I was hooked.

But it wasn’t until I saw one film in particular that cemented my devotion to film.... a little effort by a small-time director called Steven Spielberg, that film is Jaws.

As much as Star Wars captured my imagination and took me to a new world, Jaws captured that and everything else along with it. The people felt real, the words they spoke felt real, and there was occasionally a shark. To this day I refuse to go into the sea any further than 5ft out, if I’m on a plane, the thought at the back of my mind is that we’re going to be over the sea and please don’t let me crash into that, that’s where sharks live. It feels like the whole film, scene for scene, has stayed with me, etched into my memory. I would struggle to pin down a single reason for this, every aspect of the film compliments the others, the acting, score, framing, dialogue, all of it, it just works (unlike Bruce the Shark). Jaws endlessly fascinates me off-screen as much as on-screen, it feels like one of those achievements that cannot be replicated in any way, the setbacks during production contributed to that immensely. Yet for all the behind the scenes complications and frustrations, the outcome is one of the most entertaining adventure films ever made, Raiders of the Lost Ark comes close but Jaws was there first for me.

As I’ve grown up and life has taken its many twists and turns, films have always stayed with me, I sought out as many Spielberg films as possible, which led me to Ridley Scott, then Stanley Kubrick, William Friedkin, Alfred Hitchcock, James Cameron, John Carpenter, Tim Burton, John Hughes, David Lynch, David Lean, Michael Mann, Robert Zemeckis, Brian De Palma, Terry Gilliam, Mel Brooks and so on. I’ve often found myself regretting that i wasn’t born early enough to be able to see a lot of these filmmakers productions on a big screen, with big sound, the way they’re meant to be seen.

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