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...

OK, I didn’t get to watch most of Shark Week last week on television. Because it is easier to take notes right on my computer, I chose to watch the bulk of Shark Week on Discovery Channel’s online site. But where it made one part of the project easier to do, I had to deal with the fact that I couldn’t easily skip the commercials like on the DVR had I watched everything in the living room or bedroom. And so, stuck by choice with seeing each episode online, I was forced to sit through the requisite amount of commercial breaks. This might have been fine, but it also meant that I was forced into a couple hundred viewings of the trailer for The Hitman’s Bodyguard . This gave me great exposure to a film of which I was not even aware of in the least before Shark Week came along. To say that I have now been driven to madness to the degree that there is not a chance that I will see the film when it comes out in mid-August. Even with Sam Jackson, Ryan Reynolds and Gary Oldman, there is l...

I thought that posting my recap of Day 1 (and more) of Shark Week yesterday would serve to get me out from behind the eight-ball in attempting to catch up with everything going on shark-wise right now, but all I see before me is a whole lot more that I have to do. So without further ado, let us begin the recap of Nights #2 and #3 from last week's Shark Week . (And if you think this is going to keep me from watching the new Sharknado Week flicks this week, you've got another thing coming. I already knocked out 5-Headed Shark Attack yesterday morning, and – hoo! hoo! – is it ever ridiculous. More on that film later this week...) #5 – Shark Vortex (premiered Monday, July 24, 2017) One of the things that I love to gripe about during Shark Week is that there is too much focus on the great white shark. I admit, the great white is the most iconic of all sharks, which is both a good and bad thing. Great white sharks are pretty awe-inspiring, have a great menacing presence,...