The Shark Film Office

Yes, there was more shark stuff going on during Shark Week . Not willing to fully step on their neighbors’ toes nor put that much money into competing against them, Nat Geo Wild loves to promote themselves as having the “#2 week for sharks” in television. SharkFest has been matching up against Shark Week for a few years now, and it is decidedly a lesser beast in terms of number of shows. If you don’t count previews and recaps (and I don’t) Shark Week tossed out 16 new hours of shark documentaries for 2017. SharkFest has just four. But the quality, thanks to being part of National Geographic, is of equal measure to anything on Discovery (some might even argue more quality, but I see them being pretty equal, considering that some of the same people work on shows for both networks). Where Nat Geo Wild has Discovery beat is in being self-effacing. Discovery likes to use humor  to talk about their shows , especially on Shark After Dark  or in their promos using Seal the s...

When I began what turned out to be an unexpected 8-month break from working on The Shark Film Office site last October (due to grievous bodily injury), I had already been damaged severely by a shark film which I had, at the time, been planning to review next on the site. The film was called Shark Exorcist , and with all seriousness, that straight-to-video piece of sheer dreck – after three viewings attempting to make sense of the damnable thing – broke my brain. Really, my brain was broken after the first two viewings to the effect that I stared blankly at an empty document on my computer’s screen for about two weeks before I watched it the nearly fatal third time. Then my brainpan cracked to such a degree that I then and now truly blame my hip injury in late October at Disneyland (on the Matterhorn, no less) on the fact that I had forgotten how to operate my body in a normal fashion following three misbegotten viewings of Shark Exorcist . [Of course, I could also blame it on the...

I have always been a bit cynical towards the notion of "Christmas in July". Everyone complains about how long the winter holiday season has gotten – even the wackos who continually yell about "putting the Christ back in Christmas" – but I have seen even the staunchest of their like get thoroughly disgruntled over being reminded that there are "just 87 shopping days until Christmas" sometime in late September. With the ever-inching advance of seasonal marketing over the past few decades, it is often unbearable. So, why is there this stupid notion of what should be a once a year, winter month thing also being forced upon us by various concerns in the middle of the summer? As far as I can ascertain, the thrust of so much (but not all) of this "Christmas in July" fanfare seems to revolve around and come from fairly secular activities and quarters. If anything, that probably makes all the Fox News alarms about the "war on Christmas" even mor...