Word: shipped
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Bigness was, of course, an attraction of the actual ship. In the film, the ship company's boss says, "I wanted to convey sheer size." Cameron could be his spiritual heir. The man who made The Terminator for $6 million has become the high priest of Hollywood bloat. He is also the movies' mad toymaster: he keeps falling in love with an imposing machine (a cyborg, an alien, a submarine, a Harrier jet, an ocean liner) that he then spends great amounts of time and energy destroying...
Fine, Jim--build the damned ship, sink the damned ship. But in the 90 or so minutes before the iceberg slices open the starboard side, some compelling romantic fiction is in order. Here the film fails utterly. It imagines an affair between free-spirited artist Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) in steerage and Philadelphia blueblood Rose Bukater (Kate Winslet), unhappily engaged to wealthy Cal Hockley (Billy Zane). DiCaprio has a smooth, winsome beauty, and Winslet, who at first seems bulky beside him, comes to look ravishingly ravaged by the climax. Everyone else is a caricature of class, designed only to illustrate...
...Once the ship starts sinking, people do die becomingly, and the R.M.S. Titanic takes on the personality of a magnificent beast--King Kong or Moby Dick in extremis. The brilliantly realized visual effects are invisible and persuasive. The digitized water looks like real water; the computer blobs look like human beings tumbling down to their deaths from the severed ship's nearly vertical stern. But the narrative events that should add emotional heft are substandard action tropes: kids in jeopardy, bad guys menacing pretty women, Jack manacled to a water pipe. "I'll just wait here," he says gamely...
FALSE. It is a love story. But don't worry--the ship does sink...
Amistad Is Freed For Now A federal judge lets Spielberg's slave ship pic sail onto screens Wednesday--but he's still considering the plagiarism suit against the Oscar favorite...