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.)

For Alibelle, from IMDB:

Universal is aiming at women ("Not everybody is watching the Super Bowl" Universal distribution chief Nikki Rocco told Daily Variety) with the romantic comedy The Wedding Date, in which Debra Messing plays a woman who hires a male escort (Dermot Mulroney) to pose as her boyfriend at a wedding party. Universal might have been well advised to withhold that film from critics as well. It was thoroughly drubbed by them today. Lou Lumenick in the New York Post described it as a "witless, stale and half-hearted rehash of clichés." Michael Wilmington in the Chicago Tribune calls it "a tossed bouquet full of dead flowers and bad jokes that belongs in the nearest trash receptacle." Female reviewers were no kinder. Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times concludes that it's "an oddly depressing, lost, little movie that eventually caves in on itself." And Elizabeth Weitzman in the New York Daily News figures that it "isn't bad enough to send you rushing back up the aisle, past the popcorn and into the winter weather. But once you've admired the expensive clothes, the beautiful couple and the pretty setting, you'll be more than ready to call it a night."

Sue and JohnSweden are me when it comes to that boat movie.

Sure, shiny, pretty costumes, and shiny pretty Kate Winslet, but the only part I really dug was the last moments of SpyDaddy. (And that was partly because VG rocks, partly because I love seeing actors from Molly Dodd, as so many of them kick serious ass.)

And then he could be eaten by molasses sharks.

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

That depends on how cold it is.

My problem with Titanic was, as others have said, that there are so many real dramatic stories associated with the Titanic that I was irritated with the "Hundreds of people died but I learned to live" A plot.