I think a lot of the “hate” depends on the demographic mix of the forum. Go to a gamer’s forum and I expect it will attract universal and vicious condemnation. On a Buffy “shippers”[sup]*[/sup] forum, it will be likely highly-praised. We have a mixed group here, but movie threads are still (usually) dominated by younger male Dopers. As RealityChuck says, the romance aspects of the movie are really not attractive to that audience.
[sup]*[/sup]Fora devoted to analyzing and celebrating the relationships between characters on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and related shows.
OK, I admit it. I liked it. It’s not James Cameron’s best, but it’s not bad. Here’s what’s really going to get me in trouble around here, though. I actually didn’t mind Billy Zane’s character, and even felt a bit of sympathy for him. What I saw was a man who was clearly attracted to a woman, maybe even deeply in love with her, and who was going to destroy the very things he loved about her to make her just like everybody else. Mercedes Lackey did a similar riff on it in By the Sword for the science fantasy geeks out there. He was in love with an extraordinary woman because she was extraordinary, but to make her fit into his world, he was going to try to make her ordinary. OK, so he’s a stupid, arrogant twit, but it still struck me as sad, and it would have been even sadder if he had married her because he never would have understood why his marriage died.
I have been a Titanic buff since I was six years old, and I get a kick out of the fact that I own a book which has what may be a photo of the ice berg which sunk the Titanic. I also liked Clive Cussler’s Raise the Titanic. I’m not a true hard-core Titanic buff – I know there were dogs on the Titanic; I can’t tell you what their names were – but I’m fascinated by the tale. Maybe it’s because I came to America by ship, myself. Maybe it’s just the old question, “What would I have done?” I find the human stories touching and telling.
One thing to keep in mind is 1914 was very different from today’s world. Many things we take for granted didn’t exist. I’m not only talking technology and electronics; women in the United States weren’t necessarily allowed to own property in those days. A friend of mine who was born into Baltimore’s upper class society was bothered by the scene where the mother instructed her little girl because something similar was part of her upbringing. Roles were strictly prescribed. If I remember my feminism right, it was believed that educating women would literally endanger their ability to have children, thus rendering them unfit for their natural role in life.
As I said, I like the movie, but I freely admit to having no taste and no interest in changing whether I like or dislike something because others say it’s good. That’s one reason I don’t hang out in Cafe Society much. As for me, I’m going to do laundry and watch another James Cameron movie, one of my favorites: The Abyss!
To me it’s not so much a disaster movie or a romance movie as it is a movie about how evil and oppressive the class system is.
Upperclass women are cinched into restrictive undergarments, and equally restrictive marriages. Lowerclass women get to drink beer and dance on tables. Upperclass women are supposed to be the epitome of nonsexual yet feminine refinement. Lowerclass women can get nekkid and shag like animals. And so on, and so on for two freaking hours! Okay we get it already! You can’t be who you really are unless you can fly a plane and ride a horse and spit at whomever you want! Ugh. It was so overblown and preachy about the evil class system it was like “A Very Special Episode” of the Titanic disaster.
And that’s why I didn’t like it.
Also, everyone was too freaking nice when the ship was going down. Ubercivility be damned, they all would have been clawing, kicking, and shouting at each other because they knew they were approaching death. It only got halfway realistic when they were in the water and Rose almost drowned because of a panicking stranger.
Why I don’t like it the sum total of all the reasons mentioned so far .
I hate dicrappio. He’s like Tom Cruise. He plasters a stupid grin on his face for two hours while uninteresting dialog falls out of his mouth into a pile on the floor.
It was a huge waste of potential. It’s the Titanic, among the defining moments of humanity struggle against nature in the 20th century for christ sake, but you spend 90 percent on the story on a story to schlocky for a dime romance novel. At least they did Molly Brown justice(and I like Kathy Bateman as long as shes’s not naked)
I hated the fact it was a success because Hollywood likes to follow a pattern, and thought if this crap was successful they would kill all other big budget movies for clones. Forunately this one didn’t come to pass like I feared. Pearl harbor is the only clone I can think of.
As a musician, I got a little misty-eyed when the ship’s band stayed together to play as the ship went down. That was the most moving scene in it for me.
Aside from that, Kate Winslet was gorgeous, and the movie was entertaining enough. I saw it once in the theater, and have had no great desire to see it again. I think the outspoken “haters” show up to trash anything that is popular and successful with mainstream audiences, be it in movies or music or anything else. It’s not a terrible movie by any means, it just isn’t a fantastic one. However, I think L.A. Confidential deserved Best Picture in 1998 and got shafted by Titanic.
It bypassed Star Wars at the box office, and that is an unforgivable offense.
Where’s the love? Plenty of people like/love it (the box office alone will tell you that) it’s just that people who love it are tired of defending it (against some pretty silly reasons too), so the noisy haters are made to seem like the majority.
Its box office will never be surpassed. It’ll always have the Oscars. Its place in cinema history is assured. It doesn’t need defending.
Aside from the obvious flaws (the “love story” was just an infatuation, and James Cameron wouldn’t know subtity(spell?) if it bit him on the ass), I loved Titanic. I even loved that Celine Dion song.
The 1910s are one of my favorite time periods of history-the style of the times, the art work, the people, etc. And of course, for me, the costumes. (Say what you will, I want Rose’s wardrobe!)
I think though, it would have worked better, if Rose had merely posed nude for Jack, but NOT have slept with him. It would have been more interesting, I think.
And I think Frances Fisher also was good as Ruth. The scene where she’s helping Rose with her corset, and then before she leaves kisses her on the cheek-I think you can see that unlike Cal, Ruth isn’t a bad person. Yes, she’s a snob. But she’s also a product of the times, of her upbringing. She loves her daughter, but back then, Rose’s situation was all too common.
Actually, this is the discussion that bugs me the most. It is probably
true that it is the source of a fair share of Titanic-flaming. Not
necessary. Because…no. It didn’t.
More importantly, Star Wars was never ever number one.
“Gone with the wind” is number one when adjusted for inflation. Has been
since those hysterical days of 1939. It will probably stay that way for
the forseeable future.
Im guessing here, but chances are that adjusting for the number of people
in the world with access to the silver screen and a personal economy to
support movie going would mess up the numbers further.
As it is, the box office record adjusted for for inflation is as follows:
Gone with the wind
Star Wars
Sound of music
.
.
.
Titanic
Now, if we could get fans of Star Wars and/or Titanic to understand this,
maybe the argument could be grounded in their opinion of the MOVIES. To
steal a line from IMDB: As if “Jurassic Park” magically became better than
“the Godfather” the minute it passed it on the box office list.
For the record, I love the “myth” of Titanic, and think it is a
crying shame that the part of the ship and the rest of the people there is
drowned (pun not intended) by a badly executed love story featuring one
dimensional people delivering corny lines. Makes for a mediocre
experience.
And Leonardo DiCaprio is a great actor as far as I’m concerned.
Anyhoo, we all know that “Star Wars” wipes the floor with Titanic, just
check the box office
I remember reading an article comparing the critics view of the movie then and now. Then it was critically aclaimed. But now critics seem to be embarassed to have ever liked the movie. It seems to me that the movie has become a joke in the past seven years. All of the actors involved are still trying to climb out of the Titanic pit. Kate Winslet is a good actress, and I’ve love to see her become famous for something else. I thought she was good in “Eternal Sunshine…”. I don’t mind DiCaprio either, but he’s still stuck. And Billy Zane, well, he seems to have gone down with the ship.
James Cameron should have only concentrated on the diaster and the actual non-fictional people on it. This isn’t a passing fad for him. Cameron is always coming out with videos and specials about Titanic even now. You can tell he’s actually interested in the Titanic (that or he just can’t let go). He should have stuck with his interest instead of feeling obliged to throw in some stupid love story like he did. The best parts of the movie are the parts that have to do with the ship and the people like Molly Brown, the Captain, etc.
Which is pretty ironic and hypocritical, since I’m quite sure that James Cameron isn’t living in a bungalow or driving a Honda to stay true to his principles.
Shallow, wooden performances by the romantic leads.
A cartoonish conception of class relations (rich = bad, poor = good).
The core selfishness of the central characters, contrasted with the real-world bravery and nobility of many of the actual victims of the tragedy.
There’s a reason that the boats were mostly full of women and children that night. Many brave men stood back and died so that others might live.
(For example, in the actual disaster, almost half of the third-class women and children survived, while less than 1/3 of the first-class men survived. This despite the fact that the first-class passengers were first on deck and had first access to the lifeboats because of the location of their cabins.)
But Cameron was so locked into “evil repressed upper class vs. noble life-affirming lower class” that he threw out anything that didn’t fit with that tired formula. The result was a shallow movie with a moral vacuum at its heart.
I described it to my wife as “James Cameron’s jaunty little tap-dance on the graves of his betters … .”
If it hadn’t been so popular, I wouldn’t really care. But it’s depressing to see crap lionized … .
One of my favorite time periods, too, and the costumes were surprisingly good—I don’t remember seeing any glaring errors. But the makeup designer should have been sent to dea in a leaky boat!
Women did not pluck their eyebrows in 1912, or wear Elizabeth Arden Titanic Red lipstick, or mascara and eyeliner . . . A good makeup person should have been able to work around the period and still make the actresses look good to modern audiences.
I have a problem with this statement: she was in no way extrordinary, except that she was a hot, sexy female human. That was about it. Other than that, she was a self-centered, spoiled, whiny, self-indulgent whore.
Ironically, there was another certain female character who was only likable when she was naked…
I know about that, but that’s not the list most people know and quote, so I didn’t mention it.
I don’t think they’d care. In general, it’s not their kind of movie so they wouldn’t like it anyway and they’d find something to bitch about. (Full disclosure: I am a certified Star Wars fangirl, having seen the original movie over 100 times in the theater. However, I like all kinds of movies and genre-hop like mad. I’ve just been around too many SW message boards/usenet groups where the bitching about Titanic often reaches ridiculous levels. Over and over and over and over and over and over again.)
I think that without the love story, Titanic would have had trouble making back its budget. The love story did 2 things:
it allowed the camera to roam all over the ship so that even if you weren’t interested in the characters, you could see things like the boiler room and the storage area, the first-class dining room and and a third-class 4-bunk sleeping room. Without central characters to follow, it may as well have just been a documentary.
it allowed people who did like Jack and Rose (and they noisy naysayers who hated them are a minority) to feel emotionally invested their plight, not just faceless names on the passenger list. To focus on a real person would have been harder. Cameron could not have shown as much of the ship (see #1), could not possibly have been accurate to their lives and final hours (another point for people to pick on), and he would have had to jettison 3/4 of what we saw. Trying to show what happened through 2 or more real characters would have been a mess. Better to make up main characters and have them interact with the ship and some of the real people on board.
A lot of people did like Jack and Rose, and they cared about Jack’s sacrifice and Rose’s determination to go on to live her life the way she wanted (oh, and, hate the song or not, at least “My Heart Will Go On” was actually pertinent to the story, rather than a pop tune stuck on in the credits).
Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are two of our finest young actors. The dialogue they were given wasn’t all that great, but they still managed to capture millions of people’s hearts. Titanic is far from being each’s best movie, but it’s certainly not the worst. They had real chemistry.
Oh yeah, #6.
You must have gone to the bathroom when he showed…Vanderbilt(?)…sitting in a chair waiting for death. Or the first-class couple whose wife would not leave her husband.
There were good people in upper-class and there were bad people in upper-class. There were good people in lower-class and there were bad people in lower-class. Life WAS repressed back then, don’t you know? Especially for upper-class girls/women.
Most teenagers ARE self-centered, spoiled, whiny and self-indulgent. She grew up a lot during the course of the movie. And so she’s a whore because you don’t like her? She was set to marry Zane, so she slept with him. I think it was common then and now. She sleeps with Jack because she loves him. That’s common too. (and yes, I’m sure it was more “infatuation” than real love, but ask an infatuated teenager to tell you what the difference is)
Sex alone doesn’t make one a “whore” so where are you coming from?
Nitpick: It was Benjamen Guggenheim who got all dressed up and waited in a chair for the sinking. Alfred Vanderbilt had booked passage on the the Titanic, but had to forego the trip at the last minute. Unfortunately, he would perish three years later when he was on the Lusitania when it was hit by a German U-boat.
Okay, carry on.
One thing that annoyed me was Lovett saying that if Louis XIV’s diamond was still around, it would be worth “more than the Hope Diamond.” Um, hello, most experts believe that the Hope Diamond IS Louis’s diamond! That annoyed me.
While I love period pieces, the ones that work best for me are the ones where I can believe the characters really are Victorians or Edwardians–they have the attitudes of people of that era, or are at least written close enough to it so that the actors don’t come off jarringly as modern people who just happen to be wearing high collars and corsets. (Upstairs/Downstairs is a good example of this; I’m watching the 3rd season on DVD right now).
Titanic, on the other hand, is jarring in that respect. I never believed for a moment that Jack and Rose were people living in 1912. And since they were not real to me, it made impossible for me to care what happened to them.
In contrast, the moments in Titanic that did touch me were the scenes where the band kept on playing, and the elderly couple (the Strausses?) walked away to die together. But these are the same things that touch me whenever I see the earlier film versions, or read about the sinking of the Titanic in books, because they are stories about real people doing something extraordinary and wonderful in the face of disaster. I cared more in those few seconds than I did in the rest of the 3 hours. While I don’t hate this movie, I have no desire to see it again.
