"jaws"

 Tonight, make it real; watch a doc.  Here’s a bugaboo of mine: while the documentary form offers viewers incredible rewards, it rarely gets the attention it deserves. Theories abound as to why, the most prominent being that people tend to watch movies to be transported, to actually get away from life as it is. Perhaps there’s some truth to that, but to avoid the best of these films is to miss out on something truly special. In examining real life, its myriad characters and society as a whole, docs can be wildly entertaining, yet still deliver a form of insight and impact quite distinct from narrative films.

Michael Caine has been a lot of things to a lot of people. To the ladies of “Alfie” (1966), he’s the conflicted bad boy they’ve both dreamed of and dreaded, the working-class womanizer who broke all the rules (including kicking down the 4th wall to talk directly to the audience). He’s a British super agent in “The Ipcress File” (1965), and the scientists he saves are glad to have a “thinking man’s James Bond” on the scene. He’s been an alcoholic English professor (1983’s “Educating Rita”) and a stout British soldier standing up to wave after wave of Zulu warriors (1964’s “Zulu”). He’s one of the most universally beloved actors of his generation, a charismatic talent that steals nearly every scene he’s in. 

An opening scene of a movie is like a cinematic thermometer. You take a movie’s temperature by that first scene. It holds you, intrigues you, grabs you — or it doesn’t. Though it’s true that plenty of great movies take their time building up our involvement, obviously they can’t take too long. Then there are those others that start off with a bang. It’s this latter group we’re celebrating today. Here are fifteen of our favorite movie openers, covering seven decades of filmmaking: