I found Titanic interminable and overblown. And I kept thinking "You've got two minutes to live in the North Atlantic, die Leo, die!" And the more people cried around me in the theatre, the more hysterical the movie seemed to me.

I like Titanic a lot more now than I used to. I re-watched it very recently.

I hated it then because I was 14. And Every. Single. Girl. I. Knew. Saw it. Eighteen thousand times.

Which was just WRONG.

However, I actually like the romance - I always like cheesy romances - and I love that they at least are fairly accurate about the sinking of the ship, and I personally think the acting and directing and costume design and cinematography are all tremendous. The melodramaticism goes just a little too far with ice!Leo, but that's my only complaint, really.

Oh, and why'd she throw the frickin' diamond away? That was just stupid.

I'll never be able to tell you if Amistad is a good movie or not. I started crying before they reached American soil, and I didn't stop until I left the theatre. Its emotional impact on me and its quality, however, I see as potentially independent things.

Titanic was kinda like that, except the idea of waiting around for the human tragedy while the annoying people pranced? So not going to happen. And I didn't dislike Leo or anything. The A story was more boring than the truth, and distracting. I didn't need to be seduced into sadness. It's all over the story.

I found Titanic interminable and overblown. And I kept thinking "You've got two minutes to live in the North Atlantic, die Leo, die!" And the more people cried around me in the theatre, the more hysterical the movie seemed to me.

So much This. What was said earlier about cobbling a romance onto a historical treatment (perhaps silliest in Pearl Harbour?) also.

And I kept thinking "You've got two minutes to live in the North Atlantic, die Leo, die!"

I was hoping that hypothermia wouldn't be (melo)dramatic enough for Cameron and he'd go for a shark making off with Leo's lower half before he could freeze to death.

I saw Titanic with a full bladder, and the last 30 minutes agonized me somethin' terrible, what with all that water on the screen. Might have impeded my enjoyment of the flick a bit.

Overall, I think it's a decent flick with some really moving bits, but the hysterical audience overreaction about how it was the BFE got tiresome real quick. There was also the small matter of that Accursed Song That Played Everywhere All The Time for, like, 10 months. By week 4, it was inducing almost-Pavlovian homicidal response in me.

I'll never be able to tell you if Amistad is a good movie or not.

Unfortunately, and despite a number of good performances, it's not. It was about as anvilicious as one might hope to avoid, including one hilariously overblown Melodramatic Moment Of Articulating The Point Unnecessarily (tm Spielberg). It has its good moments, but overall -- felt like homework.

I think disaster movies of the fictional sort are the place where romances belong -- bring on the mooshy star-crossage, I say. But when it's theoretically real, then star-crossage just stands out in its obvious unreality: too clean, too nice, too fake. For some reason, couples never have a fight and then die still hating each other.

By the same token, nobody likes to make movies out of the awkward and/or disgusting disasters. Unless there has been a movie about the Molasses Flood I don't know about? I guess it is just hard to make drowning (or even better, boiling to death) in molasses come across in a cool/exciting way.

For some reason, couples never have a fight and then die still hating each other.

War Of The Roses. Which is the exception that proves the rule, I'll grant you.

Well, but in The War of the Roses, they weren't feuding in the middle of a ship flipped upside down in the ocean, or on the lip of a volcano, or anything.

It might have been even funnier if they had been, however. I could stand to see Michael Douglas drown in molasses.

I could stand to see Michael Douglas drown in molasses.

And then he could be eaten by molasses sharks.

(Which are not as fast as the regular kind.)