Titanic (1997)

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Bill Paxton, Billy Zane

Have I Seen It Before?: I’m relatively sure I came to the film late. In December 1997, the stink of the massive delays with the movie led me—my analysis of the movie business as a thirteen-year-old were not to be dismissed—to insist that Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) would win the box office that particular opening weekend. I may still owe a school chum a couple of Star Wars CCG cards as recompense for my folly.

I did eventually see the film during its unparalleled run at the box office over the next few months. Everyone did. Girls wanted to see the movie. Now, of course, I ended up seeing the movie by myself, but one did want to be conversant in the vernacular of the age.

Not that I was talking with too terribly many girls either.

Ahem.

Did I like it?: There’s an interesting trend with the writer James Cameron. His tastes are pretty basic*. The Terminator (1984) is essentially just a slasher movie. Aliens (1986) is a war movie. True Lies (1994) is a Bond movie merges with what is essentially a family sitcom. Avatar (2009) is a pulp sci-fi novel. Even Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) is essentially Shane (1953) with robots. So, too, is this film a very basic romance story. In the hands of any other filmmaker, Cameron’s scripts could be a real drag.

Cameron the filmmaker is at or near the top of his field. I hesitate to think of a filmmaker who has been able to more successfully buck the studio system in favor of his gigantic budgets. Even Orson Welles was only able to pull of the trick once. Cameron does it time and time again. Even when he had to work with a shoestring, he knew better than most how to make each shot work in symbiosis with one another. His words may be pedestrian, but the way he speaks the language of cinema are second to none. The cast is fine, although I don’t think I’d be alone in thinking that DiCaprio’s best work still lay ahead of him, after he was sufficiently freed from the burden of being a teen heartthrob. Package that all together with one of James Horner’s finest scores, and you might not even notice that the film runs over three hours, entering that hallowed ground of movies that had to be split up into two VHS tapes (and even had to run on two discs in the here and now).

But let’s get serious. If Jack (DiCaprio) and Rose (Winslet) hadn’t been making out so close to the crow’s nest, then none of us would be still talking about the damned boat, I’d imagine.

*I know. Who am I to judge?

Steve Jobs (2015)

Director: Danny Boyle

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, Jeff Daniels

Have I Seen it Before: Yes. Hell, I’ve read the book it was (loosely) based on twice.

Did I Like It: It feels like my opinion about the film seems like a fait accompli dependent on the answer to two questions:

1)     How do I feel about Steve Jobs (Fassbender) and the company he created going into the film?

2)     How do I feel about the work of Aaron Sorkin?

The answer to the second question is I enthusiastically love Sorkin’s work. I have no problem with The Newsroom, and I even like Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, if you manage to ignore the last five episodes or so. Even if he’s starting to repeat himself a little bit and has never quite been as sharp as he was before he sobered up, I watch anything he has written, and I suddenly want to work harder at everything I do. Some people have some track of music or a particular recording artist to get them pumped, I have Sorkin.

Here, he has constructed a film story that reflects the products made by its subjects. Splitting a basic three-act structure across three of Jobs’ product launches, it bobs and weaves through many of the idea introduced in the Walter Isaacson biography upon which it is based. It was the only way to fit the essence of the book and the man into the confined package of a prestige drama. Sure, it creates fictions throughout that narrative, and in a vain attempt to make Jobs a gentler soul end the film at an arbitrary point in its central relationship. These are the realities of the biopic, even when it’s difficult to call this a biopic when it barely glances at the pre-Macintosh Jobs and only hints at the things he will do in the last decade of his life.

Which brings us to an attempt to answer that first question I mentioned above. Steve Wozniak (Rogen) may be the tragic, doomed hero of the piece, imploring his old friend that he can be gifted and kind. For a moment—as I indicated above—that it artificially seems like the lout Jobs was throughout the film may have found that his heart grew two sizes just before the launch of the iMac, but the reality and the text indicates he remained prickly and often hard to deal with for the rest of his life. The man didn’t really change, and he didn’t really mellow, but that’s not what the film is about. To watch him terrorize his colleagues is entertaining in and of itself, but I’m not sure I would have wanted to know the man personally.

Then again, I am typing this review on an iMac, so what do I know? He was probably right.