Post by Capo on May 9, 2007 14:49:00 GMT
Titanic
James Cameron 1997 USA
On the fatal voyage of the Titanic, an upper class woman falls for a lower class young man.
Tragic by all accounts if you can accept the central romance - which is a lot easier than it sounds, because even if the story time takes place over only a few days, the narrative time is long enough, and the scale is epic enough, to be seductive enough to seem plausible. It's an impressively assembled film, though the modern day, retrospective arc which begins and ends the narrative is wasted and cheap - it needs to be expanded further in order to work, or cut out altogether - and it's very muddled, in being the memory of one character but being told through the perspective of another for much of the time. It is expertly and interestingly catered to two different demographics: the first half appeals to women, with DiCaprio falling in love with Winslet, the second half to men, with Winslet wading through knee-deep water in a soaked-through dress, and as a whole it is filmmaking ambitious and varied enough to please genuine cineastes too. It's fully manipulative, but who can deny the gutwrenching power of the fatalistic montage towards the end, set to the diegetic music of the string quartet aboard a ship destined for death? In the end, it's drowned in melancholy, and the acting is more than adequate at delivering such power with conviction... even if things are caricaturised into a black-and-white, historically misleading epic.
James Cameron 1997 USA
On the fatal voyage of the Titanic, an upper class woman falls for a lower class young man.
Tragic by all accounts if you can accept the central romance - which is a lot easier than it sounds, because even if the story time takes place over only a few days, the narrative time is long enough, and the scale is epic enough, to be seductive enough to seem plausible. It's an impressively assembled film, though the modern day, retrospective arc which begins and ends the narrative is wasted and cheap - it needs to be expanded further in order to work, or cut out altogether - and it's very muddled, in being the memory of one character but being told through the perspective of another for much of the time. It is expertly and interestingly catered to two different demographics: the first half appeals to women, with DiCaprio falling in love with Winslet, the second half to men, with Winslet wading through knee-deep water in a soaked-through dress, and as a whole it is filmmaking ambitious and varied enough to please genuine cineastes too. It's fully manipulative, but who can deny the gutwrenching power of the fatalistic montage towards the end, set to the diegetic music of the string quartet aboard a ship destined for death? In the end, it's drowned in melancholy, and the acting is more than adequate at delivering such power with conviction... even if things are caricaturised into a black-and-white, historically misleading epic.