Well, then you must’ve loved Avatar as well! 
And the Star Wars prequels (Young Darth Vader’s pickup line: “I don’t like sand. It’s rough.”).
Seriously, there are movies I love because of their wonderful dialogue: Good Will Hunting, Shawshank, Fight Club, Moneyball, Big Lebowski… Heck, I grew up with great lines from The Big Chill, Annie Hall, and Manhattan.
And, to be honest, I like some of the dialogue in Titanic.
.
Well, of course. Because you’re remembering your car.
A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets. But now you know there was a man named Jack Dawson and that he saved me… in every way that a person can be saved. I don’t even have a picture of him. He exists now… only in my memory.
I like that.
"“BOOM, PLCCCCCGGG!”… Pretty cool, huh? "
Pretty much any dialog by Bodine, no. I think it’s his delivery. 
That’s like deep, man…
(Ok, I don’t like that, but some of Jack’s cheeky dialogue I like)
I think this is a really odd reaction. Of course he shows panic at the last moment… he’s human! Whereas the old hugging couple (who are historical figures whose names I don’t know) don’t.
And yes, Rose cheats on her fiancee. Who is an awful person.
Of the Rich people we actually get to know well, the three main ones are Cal (bad), Rose’s mom (bad) and Molly (good). And of the others we observe, I’d argue that the guggenheims and old-huggy-couple are generally portrayed as noble/sympathetic, and none of the rest do anything notable enough to really be either good or bad.
The most damning indictment of the rich-as-a-class is how they aren’t loading the lifeboats sufficiently. Which is, frankly, mainly the fault of the clearly-woefully-underprepared-crewmen.
I mean, yes, overall the poor people are portrayed more favorably than the rich people, but I think the main thrust of the class-aware-aspect of the movie is “people of all classes should have equal access to safety equipment and escape opportunities” and a bit of “rich people from the 1920s didn’t know how to have fun”, not “rich people are all moustache-twirling villains”.
Ida and Isidor Strauss:
On the night of the sinking, Isidor and Ida were seen standing near Lifeboat No. 8 in the company of Mrs. Straus’s maid, Ellen Bird. Although the officer in charge of the lifeboat was willing to allow the elderly couple to board the lifeboat with Miss Bird, Isidor Straus refused to go while there were women and children still remaining on the ship. He urged his wife to board, but she refused, saying, “We have lived together for many years. Where you go, I go.” Her words were witnessed by those already in Lifeboat No. 8 as well as many others who were on the boat deck at the time. Isidor and Ida were last seen standing arm in arm on the deck.
Now, understand, I’m not out to convince anyone. I’m just commenting. I love the movie. I’m not starting a class war with Cameron. Although I do think Cameron had a bias that shows through,
Molly Brown is known from the Titanic as a take charge person, and she did just that with her lifeboat. She berated quartermaster Hichens, the man in charge of the lifeboat, and made him go back and pick up survivors. Per wikipedia, “After several attempts to urge Hichens to turn back, Brown threatened to throw him overboard.” But in the movie, Hichens tells her to sit down and shut up, and she meekly does. Where’s the unsinkable Molly Brown we all know?
Compare Guggenheim’s panic with Jeanette Goldstein’s “Irish Mommy”*, who, with her children faces death with calmness. Contrast with Cameron’s The Abyss. When Lindsey comes up with the plan for her to drown and have Bud revive her, even though it’s her plan, you can see she’s fighting panic when the water hits her chin. A very powerful scene! I think Mommy and especially her kids would be in a panic, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I would be, too. That water’s COLD and the thought of freezing while waiting to drown…fill me with with such dread. How much does it hurt to drown? I know I’d be wondering as the water slowly comes in,
These are choices Cameron made. Cameron also ignored the second class passengers entirely, for reason I suspect are more than for time. He also avoided the Californian entirely. I’d rather have more Californian and less Bodine.
*Cameron may have liked third class characters better, but he couldn’t be bothered to give “Irish Mommy” a name!
Titanic is a fine movie, but if I never heard that god-awful Celine Dion song again, I would be grateful.
Good points.
I also noted that it was indeed a romance aimed at women (that men enjoyed also) where the female cheated on the guy, so that was okay. Because if the woman cheats on the man (in film) it is shown as deeply romantic, but if the man cheats on the woman, he is scum, and the female needs to get revenge.
However, it was too late.
But the film was beautiful, every bit of it.
Titanic is like Porn. Better with the sound off and fast-forward through the crappy parts.
I’m genuinely baffled that you seem so willing to die on this hill.
(a) If you want to randomly make comparisons, the Strausses seem like a far more reasonable comparison to the Irish mother
(b) And the situations are just not comparable. For the Irish mother, she presumably couldn’t have escaped, but is doing her best to keep her children happy as long as she can, which is incredibly noble. But… we don’t see how she acts when the water actually crashes into the hallway and into her room. For the Guggenheims, they presumably could have gotten seats on lifeboats, but chose not to, presumably on the theory that those seats will then be taken by someone else. Which is also very noble, in a totally different way. But, when they do panic/whatever, it’s when the WATER IS LITERALLY CRASHING INTO THE ROOM, so of course they panic.
I just can’t imagine someone who is a huge fan of the real historical Guggenheim, maybe a great great grandnephew or just a fan or something, watching that scene in the movie, seeing the obvious panic come over their faces, and in any way thinking that the film was in the slightest tiny bit being insulting or besmirching due to that shot.
Nah, not always. In the ur-romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle, for example, the hero Sam is already dating Victoria when he gets together with his “destined true love” Annie, the heroine. While we’re in classic-rom-com-land, hero Joe and heroine Kathleen in You’ve Got Mail are both partnered with other people when they fall in love. Johnny Cash in Walk the Line is married when he meets and pursues June. And so on, with all those infidelities and abandonments presented as romantically acceptable, because they’re how the Hero and Heroine get together.
The real ironclad rule for romance film seems to be that if you’re a “good-guy” protagonist, and you cheat on the other “good-guy” protagonist, you become scum and you get punished. If you’re a protagonist cheating on a supporting character, though, you can remain a “good guy”, especially if that supporting character is already flagged as a bad person.
The gender imbalance is mostly in the fact that a male good-guy protagonist is much less likely to be portrayed in an unhappy relationship with a bad person (and thus “entitled” to cheat on them) than a female good-guy protagonist is. Because being unhappily partnered with a person you don’t respect makes you appear weak and lacking in agency, and that’s fatal for a male protagonist’s heroic image.
Female protagonists, on the other hand, aren’t really expected to have strength and agency, so when they’re trapped in unhappy demeaning relationships, they come across as tragic rather than contemptible.
Which is the whole point of Rose’s engagement to the arrogant and domineering millionaire Cal in Titanic. It’s supposed to be so sad that this lovely helpless young girl is trapped and stifled in a loveless pairing, and her love affair with Jack gives her confidence and sets her free. So yay cheating, it rescues the heroine from miserable bondage!!! (Her voiceover literally compares her initial situation to slavery, jeez.)
If Jack had shown up in the movie engaged to a snooty wealthy young woman, on the other hand, and felt helpless and dependent on her because of his poverty, he couldn’t have been the movie’s hero at all. Because that situation would make him come across as laughably unmanly. In a second-juvenile comic role he might get away with it, and audiences might well root for his cheating on the horrid fiancee and ultimately breaking free of her. But he wouldn’t be seen as worthy of a heroic protagonist role, because heroic male protagonists can’t be trapped in an engagement with a horrid fiancee in the first place.
Did you even read what I wrote?
Avatar is a well-crafted large-scale crowd-pleaser, so of course I enjoy it, despite its minor flaws.
In an era where studios regularly vomit up crushingly incompetent dreck like Morbius and Rise of Skywalker, and mere adequacy in filmmaking skill has become a fading dream, an ambitious tentpole that delivers on its promise of entertainment deserves respect.
Did any moviegoers at the time actually notice the disparity? I sure didn’t, and I’m one of those cineasts who loves picking nits.
As am I, and a Titanic buff from 'way back, and I didn’t notice it either.
Great story!
As it happened, there was some controversy over the film’s portrayal of one of the liner’s officers: William McMaster Murdoch - Wikipedia
Oh yeah, Cameron make him out to be really bad. I’d have been pissed.
Fun fact No. 1: William Lightoller, the second officer (survived, with many others, by standing on the overturned lifeboat) used his own personal boat to rescue soldiers from Dunkirk
Fun fact No. 2: all the foggy breath in the post-sinking scenes was cgi
Hmm, Okay, you have clearly gone into this in much more depth than I have. The “rules” for Rom-Coms are a little confusing I guess.
I would say the most beautiful film of it’s decade… with one of the worst plots.
I think I put it more confusingly than I needed to, on reflection. Really, IMHO what it boils down to is the following:
Cheating by a sympathetic protagonist can be shown as not only acceptable but deeply romantic if it serves to “liberate” or “rescue” the protagonist from being helplessly trapped in a toxic relationship.
The protagonists depicted as engaging in this sort of cheating are far more likely to be female than male, because a male protagonist isn’t supposed to be helplessly trapped in a toxic relationship in the first place. That would read as “weak” and “unmanly” and make the protagonist less sympathetic.
(I tend to really loathe romantic comedies, with some exceptions such as some of Shakespeare’s and bitter noir variants like Sunset Boulevard, so I have become really good at analyzing how they work and what I think is wrong with them. My views on Titanic in particular would probably constitute threadshitting, but I will admit it’s an amazing spectacle and very good at what it does.)
How does this explain The Bridges of Madison County? Or are we off on a tangent?
I think “lonely unfulfilled spouse embarking on brief torrid affair with love of their life that they will heroically renounce in order not to wound spouse/family” is a pretty well-established variant. (See also: Casablanca, for example.)
Again, it’s much more likely that this lonely unfulfilled spouse will be female rather than male, because being lonely and unfulfilled in marriage tends to read as “sad loser” according to stereotypes of masculinity, which makes a male character less sympathetic. There are arguably exceptions, such as Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence.
But yeah, I think we’ve definitely gone O/T here.