Observe and Report: I know I just reviewed a Seth Rogen movie, but this looks like an intriguing dark comedy. Like Paul Blart: Mall Cop by way of Taxi Driver. Or is it the other way around?
21 Jump Street: I was actually a fan of the TV show, and I like what I’ve seen from Lord and Miller. I would have never believed a comic reboot starring Channing Tatum would be a huge commercial and critical success, but here we are.
Step Brothers: I liked the Will Ferrell/Adam McKay vehicle The Other Guys, and then add the great John C. Reilly from Walk Hard. And I hear this movie might be almost as good as Holmes & Watson was terrible.
Labyrinth: Jim Henson and puppets. Teenage Jennifer Connelly (I was 12 at the time). David Bowie’s pants bulge. And also David Bowie. What’s not to like?
That’s right, I’d never seen Titanic, so what? You wanna fight about it?! Why didn’t I see Titanic in the theater? It was still a time when I was going to see big movies with friends or my mom or solo. And I was impressed by James Cameron’s last two films, Terminator 2 and True Lies. I think it was ultimately the 3+ hour run time, much of it spent on star-crossed lovers, that soured me. My best friend’s younger sister, who was normally pretty cool, suddenly had this big old teen-girl crush on the kid from Growing Pains. Then it became so big that I feel like I absorbed it through cultural osmosis. I’m sure the Futurama episode covered any good stuff I missed. Still, maybe I lost out not seeing it on the big screen, so I turned to my 65-inch 4K Ultra HD TV to fix that. Spoilers coming for a 25-year old all-time megahit about one of the most famous disasters ever.
James Cameron parlayed his love of deep-sea diving into some fascinating opening footage of the actual wreck of the Titanic. The film uses the real ship that conducted the expeditions, but the team is led by the fictional Brock Lovett, a name that screams adventure and ridiculousness. Brock is a treasure hunter played with intelligence and cowboy charisma by the late Bill Paxton. A news report describes one of his successes ... and now I want the whole movie to just be about Brock and his exploits. Make it a whole TV show. Spanish gold and galleons and the Caribbean? That means pirates! Brock may have salvaged treasure from a ship sunk by Francis Fucking Drake! With a capable yet wacky crew and a pair of Mir submersibles brimming with personality, like ocean-exploring WALL-E’s. My favorite insight into Brock is when he explains how he tracked the valuable necklace lost in the wreckage through insurance records. Now, he could have ordered one of the poindexters on his team to do the dull stuff, while he banged models and got into barroom brawls. But I’m confident he did the research himself, between bouts of great sex and fisticuffs. Instead of these incredible tales, we have to settle for the doomed love story of a Titanic survivor. And in typical Hollywood fashion, Gloria Stuart is now too old to play young, hot Rose and now has to play the 100 year-old version.
The love story at the center will live and die by the two leads, because you really can’t count on Cameron to write great romantic dialogue. And they deliver. Both Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were relatively unknown, but had already been recognized for great work in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and Heavenly Creatures. I remember a story Winslet told about being in a hot tub with Leo, not for sexy fun times or movie star excess, but because you get really cold working in large amounts of water. She says they discussed whether or not they should hook up, but decided against it and kept their relationship as is. Personally, I could never imagine myself in my early twenties, having an attractive woman ask if we should have sex and be all “Nah, let’s stay friends”. It speaks to the chemistry and comfort level the two stars shared. It also helps that they’re ridiculously attractive and charismatic. When they’re together on screen, it’s like old-time movie magic.
The extended climax, where the ship sinks and 1,500 people die, is terrifying. I don’t think I’d really given much thought to exactly how shipwrecks happen. I may have even assumed that they just drop evenly into the water until it’s all gone. In a smart early scene, a Titanic expert shows Rose a computer animation of just how everything went down. Rose reacts like a grandma who’s proud of how smart her grandson is, but weirded out by what he’s studying. And the audience now knows enough to make heads or tails of what we’ll be seeing. The ship will actually split in half, with the front part diving into the water, and the back part rising up before slamming back down and then going under. I can never remember boating terms, and why do the front and back parts even need special names? I’m afraid of heights, so I didn’t like seeing screaming people falling a great distance before crashing into metal or a hard ocean surface and dying on impact. But I think it may be a better death than having your lungs fill with water, or slowly freezing over time before you slip into oblivion. At least falling a long way to your death can be thrilling in its own horrifying way. I think the scariest thing was seeing how the back part going down created a vacuum effect that risked pulling in stragglers or lifeboats that got too close. Imagine surviving the initial catastrophe, only to be sucked down to your death.
Overall, I enjoyed this movie. James Cameron strikes me as a filmmaker whose weaknesses barely even matter. His movies are so ambitious, that he can just play to his considerable strengths and overwhelm anything that doesn’t work. There is way too much melodrama on board this Titanic, peaking in the present day when Rose reveals she’s had the fabulous necklace all this time. And throws it in the ocean. Let’s not even talk about what seems to be Rose dying and entering a Titanic Heaven where ghost victims are waiting to welcome her. The production values, the recreation of the wreck, the chemistry of the leads, that’s what we’ll remember from this truly epic film.
Thoughts:
- “What could possibly be funny?” “I put the diamond in my coat pocket. And I put my coat on her!” We should listen to our friend Billy Zane. That is pretty fucking funny. You know, at some point I actually started rooting for Cal to survive. The other richies were getting dressed up and ordering the wait staff to fetch drinks while waiting for their doom. At least Cal was taking action. So what if he passed by that child the first time and only came back to save his own hide. No one else bothered to grab the damn kid.
- NewsRadio did an absurd Titanic parody that was nowhere near as good as Futurama’s “A Flight To Remember”. But hey, it’s still NewsRadio. The Leo DiCaprio role was played by Brad Pitt doppelgänger Brad Rowe, who was born and raised in Wauwatosa and apparently worked in a video store a few doors down from the restaurant I hated working at.
- Whenever I see Kate Winslet, I think of a quote from that magnificent dumb jock Ryan Shay of the late great Suburgatory. Some of his lines are creepy out of context (“Scarlett Johansson ... Dead), but I found a fuller quote from the Mothership. “It’s like when I saw Ace Ventura in that super confusing ‘spotless sunshine’ movie that had the Titanic lady with the mid-sized naturals.”
- No way Rose swings that fire axe and breaks the handcuffs on the first try, with no severed or broken body parts. Not that being able to hang on for longer did Jack any good.
- I know it did happen and was a beautiful, selfless gesture. But I still can’t believe the band kept playing to help keep the passengers calm, right up until they died. Now the gamblers playing cards up until their deaths? Hell yeah that happened, why the fuck wouldn’t they? Someone probably won a huge pot by hitting a straight draw and then drowned happy.
- I think upgrading my Netflix so I could watch the movie in the best resolution helped me enjoy it more. Especially when people were falling to their deaths. But I didn’t keep my new plan. I watch a lot of standup comedy on Netflix, and seeing Jim Gaffigan in Ultra HD probably isn’t adding to the experience. *Gaffigan’s quiet standup voice* “Who wants to see that tubby, pasty fella in high-def? Keep that resolution low, buddy” I did rewatch a space battle from Voltron: Legendary Defender (a surprisingly good show), and it looked amazing.
- So after this movie came out, were there any cruise ship deaths of people trying to recreate the scene of Jack holding Rose at the front of the ship? Did they have to put up barriers just to stop that? Did ship security officers have to work extra shifts just to keep an eye out? And then when they saw certain movies or even memes, mutter “Fucking DiCaprio”?
Next up is ... the first of these movies where I read the book first. In fact, I’d read the book so long ago, I kind of forgot how it ended. Which means either I’ll be wonderfully surprised all over again, or the book wasn’t interesting enough in the first place.
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