THE SHALLOWS
The Shallows is a movie about the relationship between Blake Lively and a killer shark. Blake Lively wants to surf and the killer shark wants to eat Blake Lively. The Shallows was filmed in Australia, so you know that when Blake was gritting her teeth through a press junket she would have copped a good dozen or so Karl Stefanovic types asking her what her favourite thing about Australia was.
We’re such an embarrassing country. The sort of place where you’d give Tom Hanks a box of Roses chocolates and say something like “Hey remember in Forrest Gump where you said that thing about a box of chocolates, well, in Australia we have Roses chocolates and they come in a box and we thought it would be fun if you and Samantha Armytage ate some of them together.”
I’m getting full body shivers imagining Amanda Bishop asking Blake Lively to “give us your best ‘xoxo Gossip Girl’ in an Aussie accent!” and Blake looking slightly off camera to her assistant and then saying “I didn’t say that in the show”.
Anyway, The Shallows is a lot of fun. I prefer killer crocs to killer sharks but there are so many fun killer shark movies that through sheer volume they outweigh all other killer animals combined. Blake Lively does a heck of a job as basically the only human in the film for huge stretches. I am very pro-Blake Lively, which is why I was so upset about that fictional encounter she had with Amanda Bishop that I just made up. Blake should do way more of these types of movies, and way less of the ones where she has to be serious because ‘being serious’ in her mind simply means ‘talking quieter’.
Blake plays Nancy who is stranded in the shallows off a beach in Mexico where there’s a shark about, she also befriends a seagull that she calls Steven Seagull. There’s a story in the Production section of the Wikipedia page about how the production team thought they’d have to use CGI and puppets for the seagull because they didn’t think they could train a live animal. But “While scouting for locations in Australia, Lively was able to feed a group of seagulls, at which point it was realized that it would be possible to use them for production.” Which is an important reminder: even though what they make is fun and good, a lot of people involved in making films are dumb.
Where would I fit into The Shallows? Well, I hate the beach, so I really wouldn’t want to be there and I can’t imagine how I would end up there. I certainly wouldn’t go into the water, absolutely no chance of that whatsoever. But for the sake of the movie we best put me on this beach and see what happens. I’m not going to be happy about it though.
IF I WERE IN 'THE SHALLOWS' I WOULD: DIE, AND AS MY HEAD WAS SWALLOWED WHOLE IT WOULD HAVE A SMUG LOOK ON ITS FACE KNOWING I WAS RIGHT TO NOT LIKE THE BEACH
