Titanic

1997 blockbuster

Rating: 12/20 (Abbey: 16/20; Becky: only watched enough to ruin the experience for me)

Plot: As you can easily tell by the above poster, this is about the historic boat that sank in 1912 after ramming into a giant poor guy and a giant slut who were impersonating icebergs in the Northern Atlantic.

I'd already seen this monstrosity for the 100 year anniversary of Titanic, but Abbey and I had some time to kill and decided to pop this in. Of course, I only wanted to watch it for Kate Winslet nudity and was hoping that my daughter would have fallen asleep way before that, likely since large chunks of this compete for Most Boring Chunks of Movie of All Time. But no, Abbey didn't fall asleep. Not only that, my mother-in-law came into the room to watch the movie with us and asked specifically about that scene. Talk about killing the moment. I mean, Gloria Stuart and her wrinkles butting in intermittently is nearly enough to make a guy flaccid for life anyway. And then you add a mother-in-law? There's a cure for virility if you're ever looking for one. So I did what probably any other guy would do in a situation as awful as this one--skipped over the best scenes of the movie and be forced to watch them on Youtube more than a week later. Eight times.

And that, dear readers, is as terrible as what any of the actual victims of the Titanic tragedy had to deal with.

In fact, one could watch Titanic as a metaphor for my personal tragedy.

1) Leo is dissatisfied with his life, wants a change, and finds his way onto Titanic. In my situation, I had just watched a movie called Monster from a Prehistoric Planet that, despite frequent references to "Playmate Island," lacked nudity. So I perused my mother-in-law's dvd collection, saw Titanic, remembered that it's got Kate Winslet's boobs in it, and popped it in.

2) Leo sees Rose for the first time. I also saw Kate Winslet for the first time, and like Leo, I liked what I saw. She's very nearly perfection in this movie. Leo and I both think, "I should just skip ahead to the scene where she's naked."

3) Leo and Rose develop a friendship, a development that lasts well over four hours. I develop sleepiness but stay awake in anticipation of the best scene in Titanic.

4) Bang! The boat hits an iceberg. That iceberg symbolizes my mother-in-law in my tragedy. The boat represents my journey to see Kate Winslet naked, of course.

5) People start drowning, falling to their deaths, and turning blue in the icy waters of the North Atlantic. In my tragedy, that represents me hitting the forward arrow button on the remote and skipping over the only scene that matters in this movie with the exception of the couple shots where computer-animated people are falling from the back of the ship when it's all ass-up and hitting parts of the ship and flipping around.

6) Rose lets go of blue Leo who dies and sinks to the bottom of the ocean. That's just like my dreams of seeing Kate Winslet naked!

Obviously, James Cameron didn't make this movie as a metaphor for my personal tragedy. No, he made it to make a buttload of money. That this movie starts with the money-grubbing explorer looking for a gigantic blue diamond, a grave robber tearing apart the ghostly remains of this beautiful and very real ship that once had beautiful and very real people on it in order to become a rich king of the world. And that's offensive.

Look, if I made a 9/11 movie in which two fantastic-looking young people, knowing that their plane has been taken over by terrorists, decide to have sex in the airplane bathroom, a lot of people would be offended by it regardless of whether or not one of them was Leonardo Dicaprio. My special effects might be spectacular, but it wouldn't matter. My movie would be offensive. This isn't different. Cameron's taken a historical tragedy and added a lot of flair, an unbelievable love story, and a pair of nipples. The focus is just all wrong here. The lessons of the Titanic are in this bulbous motion picture, but the viewer is distracted by what's going on with the two main characters.

Cameron does a lot really good here. The underwater footage of the sunken ship, whether it's real or not, is really cool. It's haunting footage, and any emotion I felt during this movie was during these early scenes and not when the boat was sinking and its passengers dying since the movie had essentially turned into an action movie with only two characters who matter by that point. There are other individual scenes--the death of some poor people, the captain's demise, the stuff with the musicians--that worked really well, and in a movie that was about Titanic instead of Leonardo Dicaprio and Kate Winslet, they would have contributed to an emotional piece of historical fiction. The ship looks great even though you can tell in all the grand sweeping shots that it was created with a computer. I can't imagine another movie giving a better experience of what it was like on this ship. Well, other than that cartoon with the rapping dogs.

Click on that link there if you want to see the dumbest thing ever made.

The Amazing Colossal Man

1957 man-who-changes-size movie

Rating: 11/20

Plot: Poor Lt. Col. Manning. After being exposed to radiation during a bomb test, he recovers but begins growing. And growing. And growing! Soon, he finds himself as a sixty-foot bald giant in a diaper. The growth disturbs his mind, and he begins terrorizing Las Vegas.

A Bert I. Gordon joint, and like the other movie of his on this blog (Earth vs. The Spider), it's almost exactly what you'd expect from this sort of 50s B-movie with only a few scenes that make it worth watching. The science doesn't make sense, and the plot goes exactly where you think it will,. It's a plot with some plot holes that are more colossal than the colossal guy's diaper! But the acting and special effects, with the exception of some transparent colossal man body parts, aren't as terrible as a lot of these cheapo affairs, and although it doesn't have as much of an existential subtext as The Incredible Shrinking Man, it does get moody and philosophical. Manning's growth and the parallel transformation of his mindset probably works metaphorically in the context of 1950's fears, but I watched this in 2010, a time when people don't have anything to worry about. I was left with one big question: There's a scene where Manning, big but not as colossal as he ends up, goes on a picnic with his wife. No, they don't "do it" afterwards, you perverts. But in the background, you can see an automobile that the couple apparently drove to the picnic site. However, there's no way Manning would have fit inside the car. These are the type of B-movie questions that keep me up late some nights because they inevitably lead to other questions. For example, how does Manning, big enough to be moved from a hospital to a circus tent, dispose of his fecal matter?

Attack of the Giant Leeches

1959 giant thing movie

Rating: 4/20 (Dylan: 2/20; Sarah: 2/20)

Plot: People start disappearing mysteriously in a friendly swampland community. The local law enforcement refuses to believe that it's the result of anything but human foul play, but a game warden named Steve believes there's something else in them waters.

The giant leeches look like floating meat-filled trash bags that somebody has glued some rubber things on. It's not a pretty sight. But I'll admit that I was strangely aroused at the sight of the meat-filled trash bags on top of the hillbilly victims. Who wouldn't be? I'm not sure the trash bags looked anything like leeches. In fact, it seemed like the producers of this thing (Roger Corman and his brother Gene were involved although they didn't direct this--that would be Bernard Kowalski who would go on to direct seven episodes of Knightrider) couldn't decide early on what the monster in the water was as the characters kept calling the thing an octopus or squid. Regardless, they weren't exactly terrifying. More terrifying was the amount of chest hair that Steve the game warden had. It was like the guy was wearing a sweater, and a horrifying sequel to this called Attack of Attack of the Giant Leeches' Steve's Chest Hair should have been made. There's one poorly-edited scene in particular that made this worth popping in. Two characters are rowing around looking for the leeches (which they think are swamp octopii) and one of them says, "Let's look over in them reeds." Then there's a shot of an oar poking at some of them reeds. Then there's a shot of the boat in the middle of the swamp. The characters exchange a few lines and then one of them says, "Let's look over in them reeds" again. Then back to the oar poking at the reeds. It's fantastic editing.

I'm going to try to learn a little something from each movie I watch from now on. Here's what I learned from Attack of the Giant Leeches: Giant leeches are ten times more dangerous when they're wounded. Take that bit of information with you the next time you go camping near a swamp.