The Invisible Counterpoint

Happy Oscar week, you third-class stowaways. Quoth the thespian Bill Paxton, “Are you ready to go back to Titanic?” The point is you’re not. It’s 2011 and we’re still 192 years away from comprehending Titanic’s world-paralyzing success, its Best Picture win, and Jack Dawson’s hack drawing skills. He’s just never going to get into Oberlin at that rate. You won’t find explanation for James Cameron’s sorcery here, but near, far, wherever you are — you will remember and recoil at the royal badness of Titanic. (Louis Virtel, “ Bad Movies We Love, Oscar Week Edition: Titanic,”Movieline, 23 Feb. 2011) - - - - - I have never understood why people liked this movie. James Cameron has never been the greatest at dialog, but this was by far the worst script he's written. You know it's bad when Billy Zane plays a one-dimensional character that would actually have been more complex and nuanced if they had given him a mustache to twirl. And I never understood the concept of a rich wom...

However, there may be no director whose themes are more schizophrenic than James Cameron, who constantly flips between worshiping grand technology and stigmatizing the kind of personality who employs it. In Avatar, as in Lucas’s Ewok battle, the high-tech invading troops are laid low by organic fighters who have no need for electricity at all. In Titanic, just the idea of the incredibly expensive boat is held up as the height of hubris, despite the fact that Cameron himself was making the most expensive film ever at the time, and he’s not exactly the first person you’d expect to scoff at hubris. The Terminator films vividly portray the apocalyptic future that results when technology is left unchecked, but Cameron is a constant innovator in those fields, consistently surfing a high-tech cutting edge and even inventing new technology himself in pre-production for his movies. (Tellingly, his undersea documentary Aliens of the Deep purported to show how natural ocean dwellers could be mo...

Alda, here you (in effect) equate pleasure with sin [and also sort of suggest to me that you might find a return to living in these old times, a bit overwhelming]: "You couldn't be more wrong. Who wouldn't love like to return to our childhood era of the 50's and 60's and 70's when most of us, blissfully unaware of environmental damage, enjoyed living in one big, happy, mindless, Disneyesque golden years patry expansion - new vehicles, appliances, industries, styles, architecture, etc? But we can't do that now, and sane, realistic people know that in their hearts." Here you (in effect) equate presumption with sin: "It's the PLANET itself -- the natural resources and fresh water supply that will ultimately determine its limits. The phenomenon of Peak oil should tell you that. Spend a year in India or Japan and come back to say that hindrances to development are caused by attitude. They're NOT. They're determined by a much bigger,...