Brahm Stokers Dracula: girl is torn between guy with steady Real Estate Job and cool evil goth dude... (she chooses the cool guy in the film, but we all know it would have been captain boring AKA Johnathon Harker)
REality Bites: same girl... is torn between cool musician who loves her and Executive guy who wants to exploit her work and suck the "atisticness" out of it... (she chooses the cool guy in the film, but that's not what happened to me)
Titanic: another girl chooses between Rich guy who is abusive to her and poor guy who likes her (agian, another totally way of conclusion)
it's just creuwel!!!!
It's a tradition in American cinema that can trace its modern incarnation back to THE GRADUATE.
I mean, you're way out with DRACULA, because that seduction is played as the "bad" thing, but those other movies actually championed the annoying loser.
There's an odd dichotomy in the American mindset: success and wealth are good, they are goals to be worked for, but actually having them is always bad. In movies, at least: look at the succes of IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, a warm and folksy American film that has at its heart a genuine and warm message of communism. It's okay, the film argues, for your business to struggle along, so long as it is important and it helps people.
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Anyway:
I watched TITANIC the other day, and I didn't get it. There were these treasure seekers swimming around in the ocean in 1997. It was all so foreign to me, their lifestyles, their hair, their clothes. And when they flashed back to 1912, I couldn't connect. Maybe if the treasure seekers had been from somewhere closer to our own time, like last month at most, it would have been less alienating.
So too SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. I tried to watch it, but those people were walking around in a cemetary in 1998! I can't relate to their lives and their world!
(For those who need the explanation of this dull sarcasm, I really hate frame narratives that serve no purpose. And TITANIC was the worst: we spent 20 minutes on the opening, with some ridiculous McGuffin about sunken treasure. What rubbish. Deep-sea explorers are excited by gadgets to use in deep-sea exploration, not by dreams of pirate gold. Mr. Cameron could should have picked up on that in his research.)
Overall commentary: I liked watching the boat sink, and nothing else. Substandard plot, cutesy "English = Bad, American = Good; Rich = Stuffy, Poor = Vital" bullshit trotted out with all the panache of a shovel full of shit poured on the face of a retarded child. I saw people crying in the theatre, and we booked it time and again in the little second-run I co-managed for a while there, and we made a fortune at $3 a head. What can I say? It pulled in a billion dollars, making it the most profitable film ever made. There was genuine talk of a sequel (!!!) , where Jack somehow lived and signed up for WWI, but the talk was brief. Which is too bad: nothing would have put TITANIC in perspective like a shit-sucking sell-out.