All’s fair in love and eating.

Sometimes you eat fish. Sometimes they eat each other. Sometimes they eat you.

The following films give new meaning to eating shark’s fin in China.

According to a shark named Bruce (voice of Barry Humphries) and his colleagues in Pixar’s animation Finding Nemo (2003), “Fish are friends, not food.”

Nemo’s sharks are supposed to bring fish friends to their Alcoholics-Anonymous-type meetings but one of them confesses that “Oh, um, I seem to have misplaced my, um, friend.” Because Bruce’s eyes turn black when he smells a little fish blood, the other sharks have to do an intervention to keep him from taking “just a little bite.”

Most of the sharks in Shark Tale (2004), a Dreamworks animation, are enthusiastic supporters of the food chain. Lenny (voice of Jack Black) is the exception. He’s a vegetarian, much to the chagrin of his bada-bing Mafia-boss father (Robert De Niro). A major theme of the movie is that Lenny should be accepted for who he is (or is not).

Bruce and Lenny are great white sharks like the monster in Steven Spielberg’s classic shark picture, Jaws (1975).

I always thought the Jaws shark was frighteningly effective but egregiously exaggerated. The mechanical shark was amplified and the real sharks were made to look bigger by miniaturizing items like the shark cage.

But great white sharks really are big. They can be more than 20 feet long and can weigh as much as 4,000 pounds.

They like to bump and bite.

The scene where the shark comes up under the boat is fairly accurate. According to Terry McCarthy in a 2001 Time magazine article, a great white can knock its prey out of the water and shoot 15 feet up in the air with the victim in its teeth.

And speaking of teeth, sharks can have up to 3,000 teeth at a time arranged in about five rows.

Perhaps the only comforting, or perhaps insulting, thing about great white sharks is that they don’t much care for the taste of people and tend to spit us out after one bite.

So Jaws, with perhaps the most memorable shark music in history (reprised humorously in Shark Tale), is truer to life than we might think. Its major theme, greed versus tourist safety, certainly has some historical veracity.

Jaws is a modern version of Henrik Ibsen’s play, An Enemy of the People (published in Norwegian in 1882), in which a doctor is condemned for spreading word that a town’s bathing complex, important for the tourist trade, is contaminated. Similarly, the mayor in Jaws doesn’t want visitors to know about his town’s beach shark.

You can bet that the owners of the boat in Open Water (2003) don’t want any publicity about abandoning a couple in the Caribbean. This movie supposedly is based on a real dive boat accidentally leaving two scuba divers in the South Pacific.

Open Water, 80 minutes long, a low-budget film made by a husband and wife team, is the most boring movie I’ve seen.

It’s boring, totally horrifying and I’ll never forget it.

Wendy Ide from the British Times Online said that it’s a good thing that the movie is short. “Any more of Open Water’s exquisitely uncomfortable, slow-burning tension and my nerves would have been shredded like, well, a diver after a shark attack.”

Although we never see their bodies, Open Water’s sharks might be tiger or bull sharks.

Tigers like to introduce themselves to their dinners and we see a lot of movement around the abandoned couple. Tigers eat anything. According to McCarthy, in addition to seafood, they tackle “dogs, boots, beer bottles and unopened cans of beans.” Once they bite you, they come back and devour you.

Bull sharks are little, 500 pounds or less, shorter than 10 feet. But they have lots of testosterone, will eat critters as big as themselves and are masters of the sneak attack.

The best kind of shark to meet face-to-face isn’t in any of these movies. The whale shark is the biggest, up to 46 feet long (bus sized), but it doesn’t eat people, only little animals and plankton.

Even though you are more likely to be struck by lightning or die from a bee sting than be bitten by a shark, you might want to watch Jaws and Open Water before heading out to the beach.

Myself, I put Bruce and Lenny’s “trust me” in the same category as lines my old boyfriends used.