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The Beat January 2003 Titanic "The horror. The horror. The
horror..." Your cultural identity is inevitably changed when you live abroad. One‘s innocence is lost at the altar of experience, slowly replaced by perspective. You are outside looking in, and what a world it is to see. The world order you once thought of as immutable is under direct assault. You turn on the tube and find three 24hr channels devoted to dorks sporting Capt‘n Crunch shirts and playing video games. They give you pickles with your pizza. Video games cost eight cents. You‘re told the most common form of plastic surgery is a dead-heat tie between eyelid rounding and hymen reconstruction. Finally, the death knell -- someone tells you why there are timers on all the fans. Your confusion reaches critical mass. It‘s a brave new world and you are Miranda. Either you go back and do tree planting, join your cousin‘s Amway “business team”, or acknowledge the nightmare and ride it out like a bad headrush. I had this same sense of bewilderment after I first witnessed the utter absurdity, the horror, of Titanic. Here are the facts and they are indisputable: Titanic received a gaggle of international accolades and set world box office and video sales records. It was a huge, obnoxious success and everyone loved it. It won lots and lots of Golden Globes and Oscars. It surpassed E.T. and Star Wars as the #1 box office attraction of all time. All this is true. Please understand - my hatred of Titanic is not a simple case of going against the grain. I didn't go in expecting the horror. In fact, I was excited about watching Titanic. After all, it was a James Cameron joint. He developed and directed 4 first-ballot hall of famers: The Terminator, The Abyss, T2, and Aliens. This isn't just a solid film resume; you'd be hard-pressed to name a more successful American director. Cameron also is a true Hollywood story -- he was a truck driver and never went through film school; he just up and decided that making movies was his manifest destiny and willed this career into being. Plus ILM was doing the special effects so I knew there would be cool shit blowing up and people dying. Here are 3 main reasons why Titanic is the horror that it is:
Cameron cast Bill Paxton in this movie because he's like a good luck charm. He was the punk with a switchblade who Arnold says "Give me your clothes..." to at the very beginning of The Terminator and he played Hudson ("We're goners, man... Goners!") in Aliens. Problem is, when I see Paxton I lose all suspension of disbelief and fixate on the fact that Chet from Weird Science is on screen. Those salvage operations at sea are no bullshit -- it cost the real company that salvaged the Titanic between $180-200,000 a day to stay in business. Who better to put in charge of an expensive, high-risk operation like that than Chet? II) Are you kidding me with the old lady? Anyone who liked the concept of using a dying old lady as the narrative voice in Titanic is a power tool. You should wear Starcraft gameshow shirts so we can more easily distinguish you from the other dipshits, tards and cretins we run across in our daily lives. With Chet calling the shots, they drop everything they're doing (again, costing $200K a day, $8.5K/hr) and fly in a wheelchair-ridden 90+ year-old woman to spin yarns about the time she banged this hot guy who painted her the night before they hit an iceberg. First off, she's an invalid, an old, old woman who experienced loss and tragedy of titanic proportions (finally fit that in). Why are you flying her out to the middle of the ocean, especially considering what happened to her last time she was in that very same water on a boat that was called indestructible? Here's a thought, Chet: Use the phone. Call her. Or fly back to land and meet her. Here's another thought: When you ask her where the diamond is and she launches into some old lady story about the johns she cuffed it with on the high seas, try interrupting her. Or slapping her. Or frisking her for the diamond. III) Un-fucking-believable - You throw the diamond in the ocean? Is there anything worse than when they wake up and it was all a dream? Or two people have switched bodies? Or old women throw diamonds into the ocean? This is the “fan death” part of the movie -- you talk to people who loved this movie and they're oblivious. You tell them what you see and it doesn't compute for them. They haven't considered the horrendous bitch it would take to do this. Chet is out there looking his ass off for that thing. That crew had to endure hours of granny waxing prolific about the time she put it on Leo D in a Model T. No one has listened to this old bag in years, and then these people fly her out, turn a kind ear to her and she completely fucks them over. Good drama? No. Unintentional comedy? Yes. Very, very yes. The ship going into the water and the people flailing on the decks was cool, but that was only 6 minutes of screen time. The roles were cardboard cutouts, not characters. Kabuki theatre has better dialogue. It was too long, infuriatingly formulaic, and totally void of wit. In summary, this film is to movies what colostomy bags are to fashion. It was made like bubblegum and candy for the #1 movie demographic -- 12-25 yr. old women. As an instrument to achieve the goal of pleasing lemmings worldwide I rate this film a Titanic success. But for my demographic at that time (fat, lethargic, stoned, hungry) it was a Titanic clusterfuck. I'd rather sit through 2 hours of bad movie credits than experience this film again. It is unwatchable. Titanic is the horror. The horror. The horror...
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