Titanic? More like Craptanic!

With this year marking one hundred years since the sinking of the Titanic, it's time we showed a bit of sympathy for the innocent ice berg that was minding its own business in the North Atlantic sea lanes when some big old boat--which had the entire freaking ocean to travel in--decided to go ahead and ram it.

But the tragic loss of all that noble ice is not the only atrocity to result from the human folly of that day. The other, greater tragedy, was the release of one of the worst films to ever become a blockbuster. James Cameron's "Titanic"!

While the title of that film easily could have fooled viewers into thinking they were seeing a movie about Cameron's ego, it turns out that instead they were being tricked into seeing a film with a twist ending that everyone could see coming. A true twist, of course, would have had the captain quickly steer the boat out of the way of the ice, say "whew, close one! Imagine hitting that thing!" and then Rose and Jack could have lived on in poverty until he decided to pimp her out. No, we had to see a titanic of cliches, with a tragic love that could not be, a noble impoverished yet artistic and sensitive hero (in 1912, no less! Sensitivity was not invented until 1965) drowning so he could save the independent-minded heroine.

Now, this maudlin crap somehow managed to make gazillions at the box office and win a Best Picture Oscar (proof if there ever was that the Oscar is just a paperweight), and launched DiCapriomania. I've got nothing against DiCaprio and actually liked him in a lot of movies--and thought he and Kate Winslet were good together in "Revolutionary Road". But "Titanic" was a titanic piece of crap and the giggly teenage girls who made it a smash should all be deeply ashamed of themselves. They could have instead been spending their allowances on burlap sacks to put over their heads so they'd never have to see such awful cinema.

But the real monster in all of this was the director, James Cameron. He had a massive studio budget and a concept that could have been great, and as noted above, actors who could have pulled off something good. Something like a Terminator and Aliens emerging from an Abyss with the help of Avatar technology to take over the boat, or something.