In The Shallows (out now in the US and 12 August in the UK), the isolated vacation spot is not a California seaside town but a Mexican beach. In what may be a deliberate Hitchcock homage, Nancy is knocked off her board by a brief seagull swarm – but for the most part the malevolent natural world is represented, not by improbably aggressive birds, but by an improbably aggressive and determined shark. The creature injures Nancy while she’s surfing and then traps her on a barely person-sized outcrop of rock. As in The Birds, the director and the fauna seem to conspire together against the blond, beautiful heroine. Director Jaume Collet-Serra’s winking camera-work repeatedly gives you the shark’s eye view of Nancy paddling oblivious on her board. Hungry, toothy sea creature and hungry, toothy director salivate together at the anticipated carnage.
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Collet-Serra is a talented director; The Shallows slides across the screen as gracefully and swiftly as its finned antagonist. Salvation is proffered and then whisked away with split-second, mean-spirited timing. Would-be rescuers are dismembered, ships pass blandly in the distance, the life-saving buoy crumbles in Nancy’s hand. The film is a brilliantly constructed mechanism for torturing a skilled, independent woman who has clearly waded out of her depth. In recompense for her folly, her virgin blood is spread across the water, for the delight of sharks and viewers alike. A seagull stranded with her on the rock even seems like a stand-in for Hitchcock himself; the bird master looking on approvingly with his head cocked, and even getting in the occasional peck.
Even if Hitchcock would approve, he wouldn’t feel threatened. Collet-Serra is good, but not that good. Compared to the eerie scene in The Birds where the birds roost waiting on the jungle gym, The Shallows is as bulky and bloated as the dead whale that Nancy climbs onto for safety. There is no scene in The Shallows as good as that sequence in The Birds where Melanie is attacked in the attic, flailing haplessly against her avian attackers, the only sound her own desperate breathing. Collet-Sera may get to show giant gaping toothy maws, people bitten in half, and gouts of crimson across the water – but nothing approaches the terrifying parasexual cruelty that Hitchcock manages with a handful of birds.
So, yes, to no one’s surprise, Collet-Serra is not as controlled, or as masterful, as Hitchcock. But that lack of mastery actually adds to the pleasure of the film – and gives Nancy, trapped on her tiny outcrop, more room to breathe. One of the clumsiest conceits in The Shallows is the repeated use of inset screens; you see large images of Nancy’s phone as she texts, or of her watch as she reads the digital readout counting down the shark’s terrifying circuit around her outcrop. These frankly ugly image-within-image compositions (Hitchcock would be appalled) split apart control of the screen. Suddenly Nancy, typing or testing, is in command of at least part of what you see.
This is especially the case when Nancy obtains a waterproof camera and records a plea-for-help selfie video. Collet-Serra often has his camera trace over Lively’s bikini-clad form, but when Nancy gets to dictate her own image, she doesn’t linger on sensuality. Instead, you just see her face distorted in a fish-eye, as she tearfully says good bye to her sister and father. She even orders the person who finds the picture to erase an earlier portion of the tape, which shows a frightening shark attack, lest it disturb her family. It’s as if she’s taking the director’s seat away from the putative director. Collet-Serra wants terror and shark attacks and blood, but Nancy insists on erasing them all so she can say (a provisional) goodbye to her family with dignity.
Melanie in The Birds pretty much never has control over the camera or the action. She’s a beautiful adornment on the screen, to be bloodied and despoiled. This is literally the case, in the attic scene, where Hitchcock, whose relationship with Hedren was frankly abusive, tied birds to her and let them peck her for the camera.
Nancy, in contrast, may have nature and the director against her, but she’s more than capable of fighting back. When her leg is torn open, she uses her med school knowledge to create stitches out of her jewelry, and sews them through her own leg. When the part of the buoy she’s reaching for comes off in her hands, she uses it to stab her adversary. If the world throws a jellyfish at her, she’s going to catch that jellyfish and chuck it at the shark.
The Birds is a manifestation of Hitchcock’s genius; his control is like a natural force, permeating each exquisite frame. In one stunning, vertiginous bird’s eye view of the flaming town below, he even seems to be become a kind of hovering, distant, omnipotent god. He punishes his hapless victims not so much for their iniquities as because their suffering is so satisfyingly beautiful.
Nancy’s suffering is, and is meant to be, a pleasure too; 50 years after The Birds, directors via the natural world are still torturing blondes for the entertainment of movie goers. But because Collet-Sera has few pretensions to genius, the torture is less total; even stranded on her rock, Nancy has more room to move.
Male directorial genius in Hitchcockian suspense demands complete control, especially of the leading lady. The Shallows, though, isn’t genius; it’s shallow, trashy fun. Which is why Nancy, in contravention of logic and good taste, gets to shoot a flare gun and set a giant shark on fire. The special effects are garish and the idea is preposterous. But when beauty and mastery are defined through women suffering, garish and preposterous exploding sea life can seem a welcome alternative to virgin snow.
blake lively bikini pusy crotch?
Why would you post the whole of this garbage?
It's all so utterly preposterous. The Birds is a 10/10 masterpiece- of many by AH-, and some fag comes saying a good summer movie is better because of 2016 gender politics bullshit. Fuck me
Noah Berlatsky is a massive faggot.
>“Blondes make the best victims,”
Alfred Hitchcock will never experience the SJW liberalcuck era where homos, trannys, brown people, niggers, fat/insecure women and a dogmatic bronze age religion from the middle-east make best victims of the century
Can someone please tell these "journalists" that not every movie is a platform for social commentary?
It's a throwaway movie about a B-list actress fighting a shark for christ's sake
Just let it go, the clicks don't matter that much
they need that paycheck.
The journalists know that. When these people talk about social commentary, it's not because they have bleeding hearts. It's because they want more people to watch the movie. They are trying to sell that movie to another audience.
what the fuck is this shit, fucker never actually goes in depth about either movie, and only says one is better than the other out of the most superficial of comparisons
what.the.fuck.
Fighting back is for action movies not horror. Anyone who think differently is a mouthbreater.
>Why The Shallows is better than The Birds
the Birds stood the test of time. 30 years from now somebody dig up that "analysis" of a forgotten movie like Shallows throw it back at her.
You should see his other articles and tweets.
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>(((berlatsky)))
I've read enough of this idiot's articles in the past to just ignore everything he writes now. And so should you.
>natural world punishes sexually adventurous women
m.youtube.com
Doesn't sound like a bad idea in 2016
Is there a term for low-rank jews who make their money by ironically shitposting the most puerile advocacy pedowood's preferred narratives possible to attract negative attention and clicks for himself?
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wtf I hate classics now
Excellent. I always get annoyed by how people use that term for pretty much anything they just don't like looking at. See Oblivion for example. That game just has shitty textures, it's not "uncanny valley".
vice.com
>So it's not exactly a surprise that the makers of Ant-Man settled on a white protagonist. And yet, it's something of a disappointment, for a couple of reasons. The first is that, again, Ant-Man isn't that well-known, so all things being equal, why not challenge the tendency to, by default, make heroes white?
>The second reason is that in the movie, the guy who becomes Ant-Man, Scott Lang (played by Paul Rudd) is a recently released prisoner. In a nation that disproportionately imprisons non-white people—in 2013, America's male prison population was 37 percent black, 32 percent white, and 22 percent Hispanic—if Ant-Man is going to be an ex-con, he's twice as statistically likely to be black or Hispanic as he is to be white.
>if Ant-Man is going to be an ex-con, he's twice as statistically likely to be black or Hispanic as he is to be white.
He's more than twice as likely to be either white or one of the other two than any third option.
Why is the author writing like directors and actors are in direct competition? Am I confused as to how this was produced? Were these ladies abducted and forced into these roles? Or did they audition for a role requiring them to pretend to be scared of a fake situation?
>Ewoks are clearly supposed to be blacks
>If Ant-Man is a criminal, he should be Hispanic
The fight against racism