The makings of a much more interesting film.
[Editors Note, written immediately
before posting]
I haven’t seen Titanic
since December of 1997. That’s on purpose. I’ve accidentally seen
random scenes here and there on TV, but other than that, my memory of
the film is ENTIRELY based on my recollection from that one, single
viewing. I wrote this blog over the course of a couple of weeks,
and I discussed some of my points with some known Titanic
fans throughout the process. I’ve come to realize that some of the
details of my arguments (specifically relating to the ins and outs of
the specific plot) are possibly not entirely accurate. I’ve decided
to leave the points as-is, and am planning a follow-up post where I
re-watch the film in its 2D entirety, and adjust my opinions as
needed. I promise to be honest with my re-assessment.
Okay,
so it’s no secret that I think Titanic is just about the
worst. I’ve stated it on numerous occasions. I’m not trying to
hide the fact.
I guess I just always assumed that I’d
established my full argument as to WHY I feel that way, and looking
back through the blog, I realize I never really have.
My friend Annie, who has appeared as a
guest blogger here before when talking about Disney, has thrown down
the gauntlet, and essentially accused me of hating it only because
it’s popular.
Being a Muchacho of honor, I have
decided to finally and officially break it down. I assure you that
Titanic’s popularity is only a small reason I hate
it.
First off… I don’t hate Justin Bieber. I don’t hate
Miley Cyrus or Katy Perry or Avatar. At most, I have no real
opinion at all of Bieber. I can’t name a song of his, I didn’t
see his movie. My only thought about Justin Bieber is that he makes
me feel old. I always have this sneaking feeling that if I were 17 I
would understand his deal, and I feel like I’m so far removed from
knowing his deal that it sort of depresses me.
Avatar… If I’m being honest,
I have to say I don’t get it. I mean… I liked it as much as the
next guy, but I don’t get why this movie earned more than any
other movie ever. Despite that disconnect, I have no real negative
feelings about it. If it had beaten The Hurt Locker for Best
Picture, I’m fairly sure my perspective on the movie wouldn’t
change. I’d certainly yell and rant that it didn’t deserve to win
Best Picture, but I do that with Chicago also, and I like
Chicago just fine.
I guess the heart of this first point
is that I’m not anti-populist. I am no hipster who intentionally
seeks out only the most obscure and off-the-beaten-path movies to
like. Shit… My favorite movie of 2012 so far was The Hunger
Games, which is arguably targeting the same people that Titanic
targeted 15 years ago.
Titanic’s popularity isn’t
what makes me hate it, and more importantly, it’s not what makes me
argue that it’s actually not good. It’s part of what makes me
argue that it’s the worst movie ever made, but I’ll get to that…
I guess I have two separate arguments,
really… The first is that Titanic isn’t a good movie, and
the second is that Titanic is the worst movie ever made.
That sounds like varying levels of the same premise, but
really they’re very different, because while there are a million
terrible movies made every year, there’s rarely a movie, no matter
how bad it is, to merit consideration in the “Worst of All Time”
race.
Let’s start off with why I think it’s a bad
movie…
1) The main characters are almost entirely
unlikable.
Jack Dawson is a smug little d-bag who you’d
likely want to punch if you met him in real life. He’s the guy who
sings “I Gave My Love a Cherry” and says all the right things,
and offers to draw her. Amazingly he’s awesome at guitar and he’s
awesome at drawing, but certainly that is merely coincidental to his
volunteering.
The Kate Winslett version of Rose is okay I
suppose. Sure, she’s flighty, but she’s young and it’s Kate
Winslett, so it’s to some degree forgivable. Although, the fact
that she tolerates Billy Zane for even a half a second makes her
unlikable by association alone. HOWEVER… that old lady version of
Rose is the absolute WORST. Think about this for a second… That
old crone dragged a whole team of scientists out into the middle of
the North Atlantic to search for “The Heart of the Ocean”, when
she really had it the whole time. And then, once they decided it was
a lost cause, she tosses it! How many millions of dollars did that
damned expedition cost? Just so she could hitch a ride to say
farewell to the love of her life who she knew for two whole days.
Blech… I hate that old lady. Thank god Britney Spears’ astronaut
boyfriend retrieved it for her, or that priceless artifact would
still be at the bottom of the ocean.
Oh… and maybe it’s a
personal objection, but I feel like the relationship between Jack and
Rose could have existed just as easily without the existence of Billy
Zane at all. They could have given her some other hoity-toity rich
girl issue that Jack breaks down, but instead they just make her a
girl who cheats on her fiancé (odious as he may be), and that seems
unnecessary and unseemly.
2) The tertiary characters aren’t
much better.
The Italian guy who might as well go around
the whole movie going “Thatsa bigga pizza pie!”, or Kathy Bates
as Molly Brown, the most broadly painted character in history. Or the
aforementioned Billy Zane, who may as well have been wearing a
Snidely Whiplash mustache he was so fucking evil. There’s no grey
area with any of the characters. The Italian guy is merely Italian.
Molly Brown is a damned quote machine. Billy Zane is only missing the
railroad tracks and rope.
3) The movie is way too
long.
I’m sorry… but it is. Three hours and fourteen
minutes. We’re not talking about The English Patient, a love
story that spans years. We’re talking about a movie that lasts
longer than the actual sinking of the ship. If the writing was good,
or if the characters were super charismatic, I’d give it more
leeway, but it isn’t. Don’t get me wrong… I don’t shy away
from an epic. I love all three Lord of the Rings movies, and
they’re all longer. Again, though… the justification for that is
that the story spans months of time. It takes place in a hundred
locations. The books are hundreds and hundreds of pages. What it
always struck me is that Cameron was TRYING to make something big and
long and epic. It was a show-off thing. It was also a lazy thing,
because maybe a couple fewer loving shots of the boat (that look like
matte paintings anyway) and maybe one or two fewer annoying scenes
between Rose and Billy Zane… You may have yourself the start of a
picture. Oh… and the framework scenes with Bill Paxton, at his
absolute worst, talking to the old lying lady… terrible. I don’t
care.
In the end, the only explanation for it is that Cameron
is overly self-indulgent (Also potentially explaining Avatar’s
GIANT run time. I mean… learn to use AVID for fuck’s sake.)
4)
There are a lot of manipulative movies, none quite as overtly so.
I’ve often said that the movie is
manipulative, and I stand by that. There was a counterpoint made that
a lot of movies are manipulative, and yes… that’s totally true.
The Pianist is a decent movie that loses points because a lot
of its emotion stems from it being set during the Holocaust. That’s
like hitting a ball off a tee. It’s easy to make people cry about
one of the worst things to ever happen on the planet. One of my
favorite movies, Saving Private Ryan, includes a scene at the
end that is acutely designed to make a person weep. The primary
difference is that while there are manipulative scenes in most
movies, Titanic seems to be set to manipulate and steer
through every scene from start to finish. One would argue that this
is called “Directing” and as a theatre director myself, I can see
that logic, but sometimes the better choice is to let the material do
it’s own talking. Presenting something simply can be just as
powerful, and not quite as overtly manipulative. I’m talking about
watching Thomas Andrews setting his clock, or the old couple cuddling
on the bed as the water fills the cabin, or the all of the lingering
shots of the poor people drowning. I get that many of those things
happened (poor people dying) or may have happened (nobody fucking
knows about Andrews, besides that he went down with the ship, like
most men on board, and those old people are pure fiction.)… That
leads me to…
5) Something about it feels gross to
me.
The Titanic was a real ship. With real people. Who
really died.
“But wait, Muchacho… What about: Glory,
Gettysburg, Saving Private Ryan, EVERY WAR MOVIE EVER?”
Yeah,
that’s true too. Except that I kind of feel like every one of those
movies is primarily about those events, or honoring those events in
some way. I have always felt like Titanic was James Cameron’s
project ABOUT a love story that happens to take place on The Titanic.
I just feel like it’s somehow disrespectful. And when you lionize
fictional (and unlikeable people) while there are real, and powerful
stories to actually tell… it just feels like you’re talking out
of both sides of your mouth. On the one hand, you want to show off
how historically accurate you made the ship, and how much you care
about deep sea archeology. On the other hand, you ignore a hundred
compelling TRUE stories and completely make one up about a slick,
boyish con artist and a overly privileged rich girl who also cheats
on her fiancé.
Maybe I’m wrong, but it just feels icky.
In fairness, I also felt that way about National Treasure
when Nic Cage was tossing the Declaration of Independence around, and
shooting up Liberty Hall. It just gives me the willies.
So
anyway… that’s the primary thrust of part one of my argument that
Titanic is not a good movie. I have other, more petty, less
reasoned…um… reasons, but I don’t want to like…go on and on
when I’m maybe only about halfway
through.
__________________________
Now, on to how I can
possibly call this movie, even if we’re all accepting that it’s
bad, the Worst Movie of All Time.
This is a more complicated
premise, because, well… there are some horrific movies out there,
and it’s very difficult to make the argument that Titanic, a
movie with undeniable technical prowess, and clear talent can be
worse than a movie like Manos: Hands of Fate, or Plan Nine
from Outer Space. Both measurably bad movies.
In fact, almost all evidence regarding
Titanic would lead me to the counter argument, that it is, in
fact, the GREATEST movie ever made. It won Best Picture and Best
Director. It made something like 650 million dollars at the box
office. Meaning that it was both critically poplular and popularly
popular, which I will grant makes my argument possibly silly. Well…
it’s my argument, and I’m gonna make it.
Obviously, in
order to buy into my opinion that it’s the worst ever, you have to
first accept that my primary premise is correct.. that the movie is,
in fact, bad. So I’ll assume we agree on that point. Or at least
that I swayed you. Hooray!
As I said before, there are a ton
of bad movies. My buddy Brawny Hombre would argue that Bad Movies are
actually the best movies. He would also argue that movies like
Armageddon are bad, and while that may be true, I don’t
think he’d argue that it would be in the conversation for
worst ever.
What is the difference, then?
Well… in
the case of Plan Nine From Outer Space, it’s the sheer,
willful, almost GLEEFUL way Ed Wood ignored every facet of the
production. Writing. Continuity. Acting. Direction. These were all
secondary to “Getting the movie made” and that showed in every
frame. When Bela Lugosi died during filming, he merely hired his
dentist to walk around with a cape over his face and simply believed
nobody would notice. Scenes change from Night to Day to Night
depending on what angle he’s shooting from. It’s a train wreck.
It’s really, really bad.
In the case of a
movie like…
Showgirls, the production value was largely
fine, but the writing and acting completely sunk it, as did it being
fully lacking in even a modicum of self-awareness. It’s so goofy
and weird and badly written and acted, but you know that they
believed they were making art. It’s the obtuse self aggrandizement
that makes it especially bad.
For
Titanic, I believe
that it boils down to 2 major things.
1) James Cameron fully
believes it is the greatest movie ever made, believed it when he was
making it, and made it with the intention of it ultimately being
that. The mere fact that he set out to do it, and it ended up being
bad (as we accepted) puts it in the conversation. I have a problem,
as a director, with directors in general overstating their own
importance, brilliance, talent, genius, etc… The sort of shameless
self promotion turns me right off. Even 15 years later, James Cameron
re-released Titanic and acted like he was gifting it on us or
something.
I can just picture him saying something like : “I
know you’ve been slogging your way through year after year of
marginal movies by marginal directors… you know.. aside from my
very own
Avatar, but not to worry… I’m here to solve your
boredom and lift you out of the doldrums of film watching by
presenting you… with a movie you’ve already seen a million times.
You’re Welcome.”
The whole attitude is off-putting.
Michael Bay makes explosion vehicles. He knows it. We know it. He
accepts that’s his lot, so when he makes a clunker, we laugh and it
goes away, and then he makes another movie with explosions, and we
either like it better or worse than the one before. Michael Bay knows
who he is. James Cameron insists on telling us what kind of genius he
is, and it pisses me right off. The primary vehicle for him touting
his genius is Titanic, which… as I already explained, isn’t even
any good.
2) The main reason I believe it’s the worst ever,
is because “Worst’ is relative. And
Titanic has the
greatest (by a country mile) disparity between actual quality, and
purported quality.
Ed Wood liked
Plan Nine, but he
never said it was a masterpiece. Oliver Stone would never call
Alexander his best film, unless he was just being belligerent
(a real possibility).
There are many movies that, in a
vacuum, are far worse than
Titanic, but the claims to
greatness… the utter insistence from the legions of fans that it’s
the BEST MOVIE EVAR, the willful ignorance of any type of
disputation, the OUTRAGE and SHOCK when a person even deigns to
suggest it isn’t the GREATEST movie ever made automatically makes
the chasm between actual quality and purported quality so great that
no other movie can match it.
So that’s my argument.
Titanic
is the worst strictly in terms of proportion. If
Titanic had
simply been presented without comment, and had lived a fairly quiet
life, I may have very different feelings of it. Even if it wasn’t
quiet, and still made a crapload of money, like
Avatar, but
didn’t hold itself out there as being so fucking fantastic…
You
could say that part of this argument is that the popularity of it
makes me not like it, but that’s a real oversimplification, because
there are tons of movies that I love that are also popular. And
books. And TV shows. I love
Pirates of the Caribbean. I love
DISNEY movies. I love
The Hunger Games. None of those would
lose a popularity contest.
I hate that
Titanic is so
popular because it is bad. I don’t think
Titanic is bad
because it is popular. So I dunno… Maybe it is exactly what it
looks like.
