The Shark Film Office

Bee at the Beach  (1950) Dir.: Jack Hannah TC4P Rating: 7/9 Species: cartoon sharks (a whole six-pack of 'em!) Regular followers of my animation blog, the  Cinema 4: Cel Bloc ,  may well wonder where I have been for the past couple of months, since I have not posted a new review there since late in June. There are a trio of reasons, the first of which involves getting my mind and spirit refreshed via a pair of short vacation trips. I started off flying back to my hometown of Anchorage, Alaska for the Fourth of July holiday, and then zipped up the California coast at the end of the same month to Sonoma County for a brief family reunion. The necessity of said refreshment of mind and spirit was due in large part to being out of gainful employment for well over a year. Not from any lack of trying on my part, for in my downtime, apart from blogging and writing like a maniac, I started my own freelance writing and editing business. Unfortunately, a serious illness hit m...

Malibu Shark Attack  (2009) Dir.: David Lister Cinema 4 Rating: 3/9 Shark species: Goblin shark ( Mitsukurina owstoni ), but a prehistoric version, so it's OK that they do things a goblin shark can't. Right? The goblin shark has a face that only a mother goblin shark could love. Or an ichthyologist. Or me... With a long, flattened snout that looks like it was daddied by Jimmy Durante himself, jaws that stretch out forward to an improbable length, and a strange pinkish skin tone, goblin sharks seem like a nightmare scenario when seen in the light of day. But it's our light, not theirs, for the goblin shark goes largely unseen by human eyes. I suppose you could say, technically, such a thing about a great many sharks, since they live in the deep, and we only detect the slightest traces of their oceanic omnipresence from our surface world. But goblin sharks tend to live in the real deep  deep , dining on fish and other sea creatures in the relative darkness of deepwater c...