Boy, what a great movie! I think it was the first Steven Spielberg movie I ever saw and it really made me sit up and notice him.
I was browsing the news last night when I read that Roy Scheider had died. The first thing that popped into my head was the “bigger boat” line from “Jaws.” Rest in peace, Chief Brody.
I liked Dan Bernstein’s short exposition on the differences with “terror,” “horror,” and “gross-out” movies on the DP Show today. Spielberg’s “Jaws” is Hitchcockian in how the audience is terrorized not so much by what is shown on-screen but by our imaginations running wild with the images we are given. The “Jaws” sequels aim more for the gross-out than for terror, which is why I think none of them lived up to the original.
Another noted passing is that of Tom Lantos, Congressman from California. I read about him when he was featured on the cover of the University of Washington alumni magazine several years ago. Even though I don’t live in California I’ve kept an eye on what he was doing on Capitol Hill. A remarkable life:
Lantos, born in Budapest to Hungarian Jews, served 14 terms in the House of Representatives. He is the only Holocaust survivor elected to Congress. …
Lantos was co-chairman and founder of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, a group that highlights human rights violations around the world. … In 2006, he was among several members of Congress willingly arrested for protesting outside the Sudanese embassy in Washington while trying to denounce what they called the government’s role in the killings in Darfur. …
In November 2007, Lantos sharply rebuked executives of Yahoo Inc., the Internet company, for complying with Beijing authorities in identifying a Chinese journalist and Yahoo account holder. The journalist, whose pro-democracy efforts were considered subversive, received a 10-year prison term.
“While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies,” Lantos told the Yahoo officials. …
During the Nazi occupation of his homeland, he twice escaped from a forced labor camp in Szob, north of the capital. The second time, he found safety in a Budapest apartment rented by Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg.
As a survivor of the Holocaust, Lantos took an interventionist stance on foreign policy:
For years, he sided with Republican neoconservatives who believe the United States should assert democracy abroad and use the military to intervene when a moral imperative or national interest is at stake.
In 2002, he supported the congressional resolution that authorized President Bush to invade Iraq and played a decisive role to gain Democratic support for the measure.
On the House floor at the time, he noted his own past as a Nazi-resistance fighter. “Had the United States and its allies confronted Hitler earlier, had we acted sooner to stymie his evil designs, the 51 million lives needlessly lost during that war could have been saved,” he said. “Just as leaders and diplomats who appeased Hitler at Munich in 1938 stand humiliated before history, so will we if we appease Saddam Hussein today.”
But after the Democrats gained control of Congress in 2006, Lantos became increasingly critical about the direction of the war and called for large withdrawals of American troops. He also held more than a dozen hearings on the situation.
So, kind of a hawkish liberal, if there can be any such thing.
But definitely an interesting and intelligent person. We are lucky he immigrated here and became an American.
