Did I use to like that movie?

Rating: 5/10 (19 January 2000)

It was the most amazing movie two years ago, but in 2000, the flawed fiction account of the most famous ship in history seems overstatingly unbelievable. Attempting to be faithful to fact while making Leonardo look overwhelmingly good to drag girls around my target age group to the box office now makes me embarrassed to be once part of the phenomenon that once was. Unfortunately, fact could not combine with romance on that one with a director who seemed more intent of running bills into the millions of dollars to break into the record books.
I will not be entirely venomous towards the movie, because it was after all, at one stage, my favourite movie. Kate Winslet's performance was perhaps the best in the whole film, but her lower key and lower profiled Oscar nominated performance in "Sense and Sensibility" as Marianne still exceeds this one entirely. She has a knack for costume period drama in a good showy part, but she has done better work elsewhere.
What once seemed to be perfection of movie making is quickly becoming evident with its misconceptions of film making. The screenplay at the time, and the musical score seemed completely breathtaking, but now merely looks the complete fluke that had enough star drawing power to get people to hand over their cash to the box office. Celine Dion assaulting the world with a maudlin ballad about a sinking ship of course increased the movie's success to a greater extent than it deserved.
Perhaps the art decoration, costume design and cinematography will outlast some of the mediocre elements disguised beneath the surface of the gloss. The "Titanic" hype lasted long enough to secure a record equaling amount of Oscars first reached in 1959 with "Ben-Hur".
During the 1990s, the Academy seemed to be handing the best picture statuette to the wrong pictures, with the exception of "Schlindler's List" and "The Silence of the Lambs".
Without a doubt, it will retain its place in history as a movie epic for all the generations. But it is certainly no "Gone With the Wind" or "Casablanca", and in sixty years we'll be wondering what we were thinking.

Rating: 5/10