Everything That’s Wrong with Hollywood

James Cameron plans to spend millions of dollars and millions of seconds painstakingly bringing his 1997 film Titanic back to the screens, this time in three dimensions. In case you weren’t alive between 1997 and 1999, where Titanic stayed in theaters for a full year, the story has something to do with a boat, a gem, and freezing to death.

Aside from being responsible for turning Leonardo DiCaprio into a household name and making all my ex-girlfriends put posters of him on their walls, what could be wrong with Titanic coming back to the big screen? Simply put, Titanic 3D is everything wrong with Hollywood in a tight 194-minute package:

Unoriginal

What is worse than a remake, a reboot, a prequel, or a sequel? Why, a re-release of a film. If we complain about the endless stream of franchises and reboots and otherwise unoriginal ideas in Hollywood, how can anything be more unoriginal than, line for line, shot for shot, credit for credit, the same film going into wide release again?

Post-Converted 3D

Most of us, the 3D fans and the haters, will agree though that post converting a film into 3D is generally poop. It doesn’t look as good and it’s generally a waste of time. If a film made approximately $2 billion, what more can 3D bring to it?

James Cameron is Good

Cameron has made some great films. He made The Terminator, The Abyss, Terminator 2, True Lies, and Aliens. After Titanic he took 12 years to make a few documentaries and then his big-budget 3D remake of Pocahontas. Why would we be happy he’s going to waste a lot more time not making movies?

James Cameron is Not that Good

Cameron’s filmography is actually quite limited (what I listed above covers the bulk of it) and while he’s got some absolute classics (namely T2 and Aliens), I’m no fan of Titanic or Avatar. So when viewing his career chronologically, one could say that over the past fifteen years, Cameron has only made bloated, melodramatic spectacles that were interesting visually but had stories with as much depth as a playground sandbox.

What We Care Aboot

You’d think our patronage and comments would maybe give them they hint towards what we really want to pay for: original, entertaining movies.

All I know is even the idea of this bloated thing wasting cinema screens and eating up $16 ticket prices, far across the distance, and spaces, between us, makes my boiling point go on and ooooooooon.

FROM: Boiling Point by Robert Fure, May 23, 2011.