This post is a surefire way of bringing Blake Lively pics into it while also trying to make a point on what makes a better shark movie.
Let me take you back to 2003 when Open Water was released. I was a mere lad of 20 and mainly remember thinking the movie was short (79 minutes) which always bothered me when I spent $8.50. Last night for some reason I turned it on and watched the last 30 minutes. Already knowing the premise, I don’t know if you really need to watch all 79 minutes. Essentially 2 scuba divers get left behind and spend X amount of hours in, you guessed it, open water. Eventually sharks eat them but the film does a great job of giving you the feeling of what it actually would be like to be stranded. At the end, they show all the search teams being released but by then it was too late. Far too much ground to cover in the vast ocean and I walked away satisfied that the girl who showed her boobs (one of the few parts I remembered) didn’t survive. I hate happy endings.
Considering I was going to make a Blake Lively post to void this Katy Perry residue off my blog, Open Water was the perfect segway. To clarify on the annoyance of Katy Perry, her music flat out sucks. I’m sorry but I didn’t have any problem with Firework or Teenage Dream, but the latest album Witness is trash truck juice. Blake Lively, wife of Ryan Reynolds, turned my head in the Shallows and I’m happy to replace Katy off the hot list with Blake.
I knew she was hot from her role in Accepted but holy smoke show in the Shallows. Watching her in that orange bikini made the movie a rising, er, star from the get go. That being said, the movie was not good from a review stand point (I was surprised by the 77% on Rotten Tomatoes). Blake does some surfing, hangs out by herself for too long, winds up on a rock, then a buoy, then she pulls of an unrealistic move where she gets pulled down to the bottom and the shark impales itself. She helped some seagull along the way who I can’t remember if it survived. I watched the full movie so I wouldn’t say it’s a bad movie, I just prefer more realism.
The take away from both of these movies is that they both made money. Open Water had a $500,000 budget and made $54 million (2003 dollars) and the Shallows was a $17 million budget for $119 million in the box office. Shark movies sell. I liked the feel of Open Water more because it was realistic whereas Blake’s movie was just Blake being Blake with a giant animated shark roaming around. This is hardly an endorsement for either movie, but you can spend your time on worse shark movies like Sharknado, Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, or Attack of Jurassic Shark.
More Blake Pictures:
“Deep Blue Sea” with Saffron Burrows + Samuel L. Jackson is the premier shark movie…if we’re not discussing JAWS.
“Open Water” was nice as it attempted to be in “real-time”, which is a major movie feat.