Titanic (1997)

Music to Drown by.  Now I Know I’m in First Class.

I was really perplexed by today’s request from my friend Loni.  I typically review movies and video games, and have only rarely reviewed random things like hair dye.  But, I said I’d review anything and I meant it.  Today’s review is for the Titanic, or more officially the RMS Titanic, built by Thomas Andrews and the Harland and Wolff shipyard, and captained by John Smith.  I couldn’t do any personal research on this boat, but everything I’ve read about this boat leads me to decide that I cannot recommend this boat.  Sure, it was big and pretty when it first came out, but it has not held up well.  It’s practically a pile of rust on the bottom of the ocean by now!

I think I drained that joke for all it was worth, and that was not much.  I’m guessing (based mainly on the fact that Loni has a vagina) that she was requesting that I review the MOVIE Titanic.  I had seen this movie already because I’m a member of the human species, and it’s viewed as a requirement.  I was dragged to see this movie because I grew up in a household of women and it could not be avoided.  But, though I had already seen this movie, I really didn’t remember that much about it.  What I remembered about the movie was more accurately what I remembered about the actual Titanic.  So when it was requested of me, the only thing that made me delay the review for as long as I did is not having the desire to dedicate a large fraction of my day to watching a movie.  I finally decided that it’s time had come.  Thus, here is my review of Titanic, written and directed by James Cameron, and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Gloria Stuart, Bill Paxton, Billy Zane, David Warner, Victor Garber, Kathy Bates, Frances Fisher, Bernard Hill, Jonathan Hyde, Danny Nucci, Jason Barry, Suzy Amis, and Ioan Gruffudd.  Also, it should be noted that I will not entertain the notion that spoilers are possible in this movie.  Even if you’re one of the three people in the world who hasn’t seen this movie, I’m sure you have heard plenty about it.  And if you’ve managed to avoid that, then I’m sure you know about the actual event.  And if you don’t know that, then you’re an idiot and you haven’t understood half of the words I’ve used.

In 1996, Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton) and his crew are searching the wreckage of the RMS Titanic, looking for a valuable diamond that was last seen aboard the ship known as Le Coeur de la Mer (the Heart of the Ocean).  They get excited when they find a safe, thinking it would contain the diamond, but find only papers inside.  But, as they are cleaning the papers, they find one of them to be a drawing of a naked chick wearing the diamond.  When it’s shown on the news, 100-year-old Rose Dawson Calvert (Gloria Stuart) sees the picture and calls Lovett, revealing that the girl in the picture was her back when she was young and extremely fuckable.  Lovett flies her and her granddaughter (Suzy Amis) to their boat above the wreckage and Rose unfolds her life story to a group of people that just want to know where she left her jewelry.  The story then turns to Rose back when her name was Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) who boards the Titanic on its maiden voyage with her fiancé Caledon Hockley (Billy Zane) and her mother Ruth DeWitt Bukater (Frances Fisher).  She starts a love affair with a drifter/artist named Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio).  Later, the boat hits an iceberg, Jack dies, and Rose is rescued by Mr. Fantastic (Ioan Gruffudd).

Yes, I did only decide to tell the entire story of the movie so that I could make a joke about Mr. Fantastic saving Rose.  …WORTH IT!!!  And here’s another thing: this movie is WAAAAAY too long, but ultimately it is also worth it.  I feel like I had a very masculine reaction to this movie, but I was not totally against the female, lovey-dovey parts.  The love story occupied the bulk of the movie, and tended to make the movie feel a little slow and drawn out to me, but I liked that it was vaguely Romeo-and-Juliet-esque in how the two of them were like star-crossed lovers whose status was trying to keep them apart.  Also, we know that their relationship is probably not going to end well.  Speaking of which, though I thought the love story part of the movie was fine, I admittedly didn’t really get interested until things started going wrong and people started dying.  That’s when the movie got exciting and, sometimes, a little funny.  C’mon!  You tellin’ me that you didn’t snicker at all when that CG dude fell off the vertical sinking ship and hit the handrails, sending him into a crazy spin until he hit the water?  If you didn’t laugh, you just don’t know funny when you see it.  I didn’t find that quite as funny as the fact that it seemed as if Cameron was trying to build suspense right before the Titanic hit the iceberg.  Fer real, dude?  You want me to wonder whether or not the boat’s going to hit the iceberg?  I probably knew that was coming before I knew anything else about the movie, including who James Cameron, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Kate Winslet were.  But I suppose it’s what a filmmaker was inclined to do, and I’m not sure just how much of my generation actually paid any attention to what the Titanic was before this movie made it a household name again.  And I can’t deny that I got a little choked up at the end of the movie.  It didn’t reach tears, but it got close.  And I also like the message of the movie.  The bulk of the movie is just about how classes are bad, but that message doesn’t go quite as far with me.  The one that resonated with me was what showed up at the end of the movie as the camera panned over the pictures from Rose’s life that she had endeavored to live to the fullest because of her promise to Jack.  Although it seems like something you should always have on your mind, sometimes I do need a movie to remind me that life is finite and you should really try to live it.

There’s not a whole lot to say about the look of this movie.  It goes for epic and it blows epic out of the water.  The launching and the sinking of the Titanic were both as epic as they should have been.  They even had some impressive transitions, like how they morphed the corroded image of the sunken ship’s bow into the recreation of the brand new ship.  Of course, there’s one thing that cannot be ignored when talking about this movie and that’s that Céline Dion song, “My Heart Will Go On.”  I remember finding that song somewhat annoying around the release of this movie, but it was really more due to the fact that it was entirely overplayed.  I feel prepared to say right now that it is a good song.  And I don’t care how gay it makes me.  It sets a great mood, and it’s actually fairly versatile, which you can tell by how often they used it in the movie.  Sometimes it was the score and sometimes it was the version with Dion singing, played fast and up tempo or slow and melodic.  But it does make me laugh on the few occasions when I see a movie that does this kind of thing.  Some movies just like the song they picked so much that they beat the audience over the head with it, demanding that they like it too.  Armageddon did it with that Aerosmith song, and I think one of the Transformers movies did it with a Linkin Park song.  At least this movie bothered to change the tempo on the song to change the mood.

I couldn’t think of much of anything to say about the performances in the movie.  I didn’t particularly find anyone that mind-blowing, but they all did very well.  And I think we all know the performance that stood out for me.  Was it the Academy Award nominated old broad?  Nah.  She did fine.  Was it Mr. Fantastic in his pivotal tiny cameo role?  Nope.  I’m more of a Human Torch person.  Obviously it was Kate Winslet’s boobs.  I could look at that lady naked all day.  And I have.  I also think there’s a chance that they revealed that Winslet would be nude in the end of the movie early on so that the male audience would sit through all the lovey crap to see the boobs.  It would’ve been off-putting at first because we’d be thinking that the nudity they were hinting at with that sketch was going to be that old lady, but then that old lady turns into Kate Winslet.  Alright, I’ll stick around for an hour or two, but you better deliver, movie!

So there’s a really long review to accompany a really long movie.  I would say Titanic holds up as one of the most watchable chick flick type movies that I know of.  You do have to sit through a good deal of a romance novel (albeit a decently written one) to get to the boobs and mayhem, but if you give it a chance it actually pays off in a way that surprised me with the expectations I had going in.  It’s mainly hindered by its ridiculous length, much like the Titanic itself.  I don’t know if that metaphor makes any sense, but I do know I will be saying that Titanic is a good movie.  Go check it out.  Titanic gets “It’s over a hundred feet longer than the Mauritania, and far more luxurious” out of “That’s one of the good things about Paris: lots of girls willing to take their clothes off.”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook and Twitter.  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

The Scorpion King (2002)

Live Free.  Rule Well.

This review request serves two purposes.  The first is that it’s a trilogy and one that, by the end of these reviews, will probably make the Jurassic Park trilogy look so much better.  The second purpose it serves is to knock out another review request from coworker Eric.  Today’s movie is not the movie that was requested, but the first part in the trilogy.  Eric suggested that I review the third movie, which will most likely be awful.  I decided to watch all three, so that I don’t get left out of the highly cerebral storyline.  Well, let’s jump into it.  The first movie in this trilogy is a spinoff of another movie franchise called The Mummy, making this movie The Scorpion King, written by Stephen Sommers, William Osborne, and David Hayter, directed by Chuck Russell, and starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Steven Brand, Kelly Hu, Michael Clarke Duncan, Bernard Hill, Grant Heslov, Peter Facinelli, Branscombe Richmond, Roger Rees, Ralph Moeller, and Tyler Mane.

The Akkadians are the baddest group of assassin’s in the land.  The last three remaining Akkadians – Mathayus (The Rock), his half-brother Jesup (Branscombe Richmond), and some other random dude – are hired by King Pheron (Roger Rees) to kill the sorcerer that is bringing victory to the Egyptian Emperor Memnon (Steven Brand) with her prophetic powers.  The three Akkadians get into Memnon’s camp and are instantly ambushed, having been betrayed by King Pheron’s son, Takmet (Peter Facinelli).  Mathayus escapes the ambush, but the other two Akkadians fall.  Mathayus gets into the tent of the sorcerer but finds that it is not some old dude as you’d expect.  Instead, it’s super hot Cassandra (Kelly Hu).  Memnon and his troops enter the tent and capture Mathayus, but Cassandra predicts that horrible things will happen to Memnon if he orders Mathayus executed.  Instead, Mathayus is sentenced to be buried in the sand and have ants eat his head, along with horse thief Arpid (Grant Heslov).  Together, they escape, and Mathayus sets his sights on getting revenge on Memnon.

Much like the majority of the movies that this movie spun off from, I found this movie to be a lot of fun.  It’s not particularly smart or well-written, but it’s fun and has some great fight scenes in it.  And, since that should be what you expect when going into a movie like this, you should leave fairly satisfied.  The opening of the movie serves little purpose to the story and is only there to show that The Rock is a badass.  He’s just going in and saving his brother from some small group of people that are going to kill him, and he does with extreme prejudice.  Immediately afterwards, this scene is completely forgotten about because, as I said, it had nothing to do with the story.  But it was a pretty badass fight.  It sets up how badass the Rock is by having him inexplicably climbing up a cliff with a giant boulder attached to his back (the point of which I still don’t know), then he drops in through the chimney, emerges from a cloud of smoke, and whoops ass on everyone in the tent single-handedly.  He even knocks someone out by wrapping his bow around their head, pulling it taught, and letting it snap on their face.  That’s the international sign of a badass.  The movie’s actual story picks up right after this scene.  It’s a decent story without any surprises, but it’s mainly just set up for more fights.  It’s a basic tale of revenge that is then superseded by taking out an evil ruler for the greater good, then you throw a little love story in the middle.  But the action and the fights are fun, some of the dialogue borders on clever, while other parts of the dialogue are just cheesy.  Like at the end of the clash of the titans (The Rock and Michael Clarke Duncan) where the Rock says “We are brothers in the same cause”, and should probably be given an award for delivering that line while keeping a straight face.  It’s the kind of movie that you just need to shut your brain off and look at all the pretty colors.  If you don’t, you may get bothered by the fact that they totally ripped off Indiana Jones by having him cut the giant gong thing off and rolling it out the window to escape a hail of arrows.

The performances accomplished what they came to do.  Personally, I like watching the Rock.  I don’t know if everyone feels the same as I do, but that guy’s charismatic.  And, above that, he’s so much better at fake ass-kicking than most action movie stars.  One person I like watching way more than the Rock is Kelly Hu.  Gundamn that’s a good lookin’ bird!  And this movie features her in one of two phases: nearly naked, and completely naked.  Yeah, you don’t see anything because of strategically placed hair, but I’m okay with it.  I know that Michael Clarke Duncan can really bring it in the acting department, but he left it at home for this movie.  He didn’t need his acting chops for this movie.  It seems like he likes to just do a couple of dumb movies that he’ll have fun with, and that’s what he did here.  I never really believed Steven Brand as a badass.  I just can’t see this unimpressive white boy being a threat to the Rock.  It’s kind of the same thing they did in Shanghai Knights, where they decided the bad guy would be this unimpressive white guy so they just said that he was the greatest sword fighter ever so you have to just give it a pass.

An unimpressive story and some corny dialogue does very little to remove this movie from the soft spot in my heart … that I still need to get a doctor to look at.  Good action, fun times, and an appealing cast – including the Rock in his first starring role and super hot Kelly Hu – makes this movie enjoyable.  I actually purchased this twice, but I’m not saying that as cause for you to purchase it at least once.  I just upgraded to BluRay.  I cannot promise that you will have the same kind of fun with this movie as I did, but it’s at least worth watching.  The Scorpion King gets “I’ll kill half, you kill half” out of “No need for concern, Miss.”

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