Thank you to my girlfriend for finally getting me to see this classic.
I'm probably not going to add much that hasn't been said over the past 25 years, so this is just going to be a few notes.
Rose Dawson should be brought up in the same conversations as Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley. The only thing people give pause to that is genre.
This is DiCaprio's best performance that I've seen opposite an actress. That's partially due to a lot of movies keeping his character mostly apart from the woman, or not entirely devoted to her, but it's also probably because Winslet just brought out the best in him. The other movies I have to go off of are The Wolf of Wall Street, The Great Gatsby, and Shutter Island. Revolutionary Road, whatever it is, just shot up the watchlist. Also maybe something about his time as Jack explains why DiCaprio doesn't date people around his own age. The man needs to talk to a fucking therapist before he does something awful to somebody else.
The same can't exactly be said about Winslet. She's done great romantic work alongside Jack Black, Jim Carrey, and probably tons of people I'm forgetting.
There's one more actor to briefly highlight. I wish Kathy Bates did more stuff like this because she's usually taking on roles that are a lot more broad. This might be one her most straight-forward performances, and it's refreshing.
With the exception of the Avatar movies, James Cameron for the most part does not hit his audience over the head with the spectacle. It's all backed with just pure, solid filmmaking. Like when he talks about Terminator 2's CGI, he said it was only used when necessary and a lot of the T-1000 was done with practical effects.
Still, I did not expect to be swept in from the first sepia-tone shots of the movie, but I was. And that lasted until the iceberg, and until everything started going straight to the depths of hell.
This would've played out better if I didn't know the basics of the ending, and if I wasn't as anti-capitalist as the world has made many of us. It's just frustrating to watch that, and classism, go on for what feels like the bulk of the movie's runtime, murder most of the passengers, and one of our leads. The movie is smart to not overly hammer that point home, but it's just something we're all really attuned to now. So, I was just exhausted by the end of the movie.
It doesn't help that the shipwreck also stops the fun of watching the romance between Jack and Rose. Also, on that note, thank goodness that fun wasn't stopped early by Jack lying who he is and being found out later. Cameron's dialogue may be clunky at time, although that's mostly just in Avatar, but he always nails the big picture and plot.
Finally, I think I know why this movie hit with everyone at the time. Those scenes set in the present have a "current" style to them, with the Watchmen-style t-shirt. Something about things like that probably made the movie more accessible to people who wouldn't normally have seen it. It's that, fear of missing out and wanting to know what all the hype was about, and box-office was just a very different place back then.
After all this, I want to watch something relaxing. I'm going to watch the Futurama episode for the millionth time and try to catch all the new references I've been missing.
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