‘JAWS’
THURSDAY 8/28. Riverdale 10 VIP Cinema. 7 p.m. $12-$14.
When a film’s been in the lexicon for half a century, its impact tends to get muted in collective memory, whatever clutch it once held on the public imagination loosened over decades of familiarity. Such is the case with “Jaws,” which, in 1975, gripped the public with white-knuckled shark panic. Not only was Steven Spielberg’s name newly minted to moviegoers at the time, bereft of any heft besides that conferred to him in 1971 by the success of “Duel,” but new, too, were the movie’s signature aesthetics: the substitution of underdog Richard Dreyfuss’ bespectacled conscience for the chiseled machismo movie heroes of the era, the visual terror of a massive mechanical shark (that, in fact, barely worked well enough to get the film made), the menacing two-note interval from composer John Williams that would be mimicked in swimming pool horseplay across the country for decades hence. So powerful was the film’s impact on the public, in fact, that oceanographers have spent the interim years battling the misconception that Great Whites are monsters; see the rise in shark fishing for sport in the years following the film, or the so-called “anti-Jaws” imagery in the absolutely stunning 2025 Netflix documentary “Shark Whisperer,” surely timed as a counterpoint to the 50th anniversary celebrations of Spielberg’s ramshackle masterpiece. Get tickets at riverdale10.com.
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