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Rated: PG-13
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, et al.
Director: James Cameron Review
When the theatrical release of James Cameron's Titanic was delayed from
July to December of 1997, media pundits speculated that Cameron's $200
million disaster epic would cause the director's downfall, signal the end
of the blockbuster era, and sink Paramount Studios as quickly as the
ill-fated luxury liner had sunk on that fateful night of April 14, 1912.
Some studio executives were confident, others horrified, but the clarity
of hindsight turned Cameron into an Oscar-winning genius, a shrewd
businessman, and one of the most successful directors in the history of
motion pictures. Titanic would surpass the $1 billion mark in global
box-office receipts (largely due to multiple viewings, the majority by
teenage girls), win 11 Academy Awards including best picture and director,
produce the best-selling movie soundtrack of all time, and make a global
superstar of Leonardo DiCaprio. A bona fide pop-cultural phenomenon, the
film has all the ingredients of a blockbuster (romance, passion, luxury,
grand scale, a snidely villain, and an epic, life-threatening crisis), but
Cameron's alchemy of these ingredients proved more popular than anyone
could have predicted. His stroke of genius was to combine absolute
authenticity with a pair of fictional lovers whose tragic fate would draw
viewers into the heart-wrenching reality of the Titanic disaster. As
starving artist Jack Dawson and soon-to-be-married socialite Rose DeWitt
Bukater, DiCaprio and Kate Winslet won the hearts of viewers around the
world, and their brief but never-forgotten love affair provides the
humanity that Cameron needed to turn Titanic into an emotional experience.
Present-day framing scenes (featuring Gloria Stuart as the 101-year-old
Rose) add additional resonance to the story, and although some viewers
proved vehemently immune to Cameron's manipulations, few can deny the
production's impressive achievements. Although some of the
computer-generated visual effects look artificial, others--such as the
sunset silhouette of Titanic during its first evening at sea, or the
climactic splitting of the ship's sinking hull--are state-of-the-art
marvels. In terms of sets and costumes alone, the film is never less than
astounding. More than anything else, however, the film's overwhelming
popularity speaks for itself. Titanic is an event film and a monument to
Cameron's risk-taking audacity, blending the tragic irony of the Titanic
disaster with just enough narrative invention to give the historical event
its fullest and most timeless dramatic impact. Titanic is an epic love
story on par with Gone with the Wind, and like that earlier box-office
phenomenon, it's a film for the ages. --Jeff Shannon
------------- This isn't a bad movie by any
stretch of the imagination. If you want bad, see Battlefield Earth or
Hackers and THEN tell me that Titanic is worse...and I won't believe you.
However, I give the movie 3 stars solely based on the shameful showering
of awards at the Oscars. Okay, it was a good--if improbable, to say the
least--love story, but Academy Award material? Come on! Finer films like
Brazil, Saving Private Ryan, or Dancers In The Dark delved far deeper into
the human soul than Titanic did! And let's not get into the social
inaccuracies of this film...let's face it, it's about a modern-day woman
trapped in a not-so-modern world and it was almost unheard of for classes
to mix, much less for the upper class to so much as acknowledge the
EXISTENCE of the lower. The moment that Billy Zane's character was to hear
of this, it would have almost immediately broken off the engagement as
well as to render Kate Winslet a social pariah. I
inadvertently laughed at the theater as Billy Zane sulks like a child as
Leonardo and Kate run off: "I hope you're happy together!" Oh, waaaaah.
Still, with all its faults and undeserved acclaim at the Oscars, it's an
entertaining yarn. Just don't expect too much from it. Yes, it's a love
story, but if your heart is easily manipulated by those particular
springs, then beware that you may never appreciate any other genre of
film.
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