Delorean90

Jaws
This is a film that I have always enjoyed. I always thought it was great, but like many other big Spielberg films, it never rose above to a level that a lot of other members hold it on. I haven't seen it an inordinate amount of times. I saw it when I was young, certainly, and probably a handful of times in my early period, but during the portion of my life where I really became film and score conscious, I never revisited it. I last saw it at the AFI in Silver Spring on 35mm a couple years back. Enjoyed it like usual, but in this rare form of presentation I was sitting next to a deranged obsessive creepo from my first job and then screenwriting class. Plus the print wasn't that great. Lots of noise and other distracting film elements. I'll attribute those factors to the level of enjoyment I got out of Spielberg's big break.
I watched in on Blu today, and followed it up with the feature-length documentary chronicling the film's production. I tend to avoid those most of the time, simply because I don't feel like sitting down for another one hour plus after the movie. Anyway, I feel like I have finally seen this film in the way that people like Joey, Steef, and Quint see it... as a perfect film. I find it difficult to find where to start off in giving it praise, since every department plays off each other so incredibly well. From the script, to the direction, the acting, the production design, the scoring, the cinematography, and the editing. Universal's restoration is gorgeous, and the new 7.1 sound mix is incredible. At first I found it to not mesh with the visuals and sound separated from the movie, but that soon went away after the first few minutes.
This film affected me on a level that it never has before. I got chills from the opening scene and the attack on the fourth of July. The editing and camerawork when Brody is looking on from the beach chair, the Hitchcockian zoom when Bruce strikes, the beautiful sunset shots, particularly the one of Quint on the Orca's bow. The cabin scene with Quint's monologue, which I always loved, was even better this time around. Shaw's delivery, and entire performance, is flawless. Filmmaking at its finest.

I'm absolutely in for the trilogy screening. I haven't seen any of the originals in a theater. I think the Boston Common showing is sold out.

A giant curved screen? There's something I wish we'd see more of. Theaters have been mostly standardized. It may have been a gimmick, but Cinerama was some friggin' hardcore shit.

Man I hope so.
As a developer, I'm compelled to (rhetorically) ask whoever wrote this board's software - why???

It's probably from the scene where

Oh, so much to say here. I won't try to respond to all criticisms at the moment, but I will say that I definitely loved this film. I was both satisfied with it as a conclusion and also relieved that, IMO, they really pulled this thing off. While I enjoyed TDK a lot, it left me with some nagging issues, and TDKR almost completely addressed those. Alfred's speech to Bruce was excellent--moving, and addressing the beefs I had with the conclusion of TDK. In fact, I love the fact that this film is, in many ways, a response to the Joker's philosophies and the actions taken on both sides in that film. I've felt that there's been a bit of a Tyler Durden effect with the Joker that I find more disturbing than anything in this film, and the reason I find the film less disturbing is because it's saying, "Yeah, it's all manipulation. This doesn't go anywhere good." You could argue that the execution of that could've been more potent, but I'm glad Nolan went where he did with the film. Having seen it in a marathon at the theater (which I'm SO glad I did), I see a very clear growth arc with the three films: the young optimism of Begins (at least by the ending), the adolescent confrontation with previously unmet darkness and evil in TDK, and finally the facing of truth and reality with a balanced maturity, neither naively ignorant or fatalistically bleak.
I thought the music was, in many ways, an improvement, with an expanded palette of chromatic melody (Selina Kyle) and orchestration (the trumpet runs associated with Bane's actions). There were even some rather memorable musical moments--I quite appreciated the handling of (I think) the second attempt to escape from the pit, with the slowing string passage. Seeing all three films, I found that, partly in TDK, but even moreso in TDKR, a lot of times the weak link was the heroic moments for Batman. I felt that Zimmer fell back too much on what always seemed like a tracked bit for Batman suiting up for the climax of Begins--one of my least favorite musical moments from the film, BTW. It was almost as if he spent so much effort on scoring everything else that he didn't put any into finding interesting ways of varying the heroic material. I do think that, given the fact that he wasn't going to simply change the entire style on the third film, we got about as good a score as we could have hoped for.
Even though spoilers are allowed here, I am reticent to speak on the ending since people are reading here that haven't seen it. I will say that I thought it was superb, and even though it theoretically could have gone certain ways, I feel that the ending we were given best suits the trilogy as a whole, and puts the thing in perspective as the story of Bruce Wayne in an amazing way. It really makes the grounded tone of the films make a whole lot of sense, because they have managed to both pay tribute to the established mythos and go in a different direction from many incarnations up to this point.

Don't try. There are some things that they wouldn't understand, couldn't understand...shouldn't understand.

"Where did you get that dress?! It's awful! And that coat and those shoes--GEEEEEZ!"