The Titanic Sinks       Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip, that started from an English port aboard a massive ship. On April 10th, 1912 the RMS. Titanic left the port of Southampton, England on her maiden voyage. The magnificent vessel was thought to be unsinkable until April 14th when it struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic. Through his film The Titanic James Cameron attempts to retell the story of that fateful night.       At the beginning of the film we are introduced to Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton), a treasure hunter looking for a famous diamond among the present-day debris of the Titanic. He finds a sketch in a safe box in which a young woman is wearing the diamond on a necklace. After showing the drawing on a TV program, Rose Dawson, a 101 year-old lady (who doesn't look a day over 86) comes forward claiming to be the woman in the drawing. She is brought to the explorer's vessel to help them determine the location of the diamond, but instead she tells everyone the "real" story of Titanic's sinking.       Unfortunately, James Cameron's version of the "real" story of the Titanic is a clichè love story. Upper-class female falls in love with lower-class male which makes rich fiancè mad and mayhem ensues. Oh yeah, and somewhere in there this boat hits an iceberg and sinks... or something like that.       Kate Winslett plays young Rose DeWitt Bukater, a prim and proper socialite who yearns for more than her elitist lifestyle. She is engaged to the wealthy entrepreneur Cal Hockley (Billy Zane) and is apparently so flustered with being a "poor little rich girl" that she attempts to fling herself off the end of the Titanic on the first night out at sea. She is rescued by the third class ragamuffin Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) who talks her away from the ledge by removing several articles of clothing and explains that if she jumps, he's going to go in after her. And from then on, it's love!       Also, from this point on Cal Hockley becomes the enemy because he is trying to come between Rose and Jack. Oh, what a scoundrel he is too. He has a posh upper-class accent, he doesn't like Picasso, and he disapproves of his fiancee having sex with some third class nobody she just met. What a rotten person!       Over the next three days (which literally feel like three days) we get to watch Jack and Rose bond. He teaches her how to spit like a man, she takes him to a fancy-schmancy dinner party, he takes her to a third-class hootenanny, he draws her naked and then they have sex in the back seat of a car. Suddenly two hours has crawled by and the mighty ship finally strikes the iceberg and begins to flood. But, unfortunately, the peril and chaos that make up a good disaster movie like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno are overwhelmed by the continuation of the love triangle and the stupidity of the characters involved. Rose won't get on a lifeboat because she wants to be with Jack, Cal won't get on a lifeboat until he's had the last laugh, and somehow Jack has become adept at knowing everything there is to know about surviving a ship sinking in freezing water.       James Cameron not only directed this movie, but he was responsible for the writing of it as well. The only problem is that the man has only written scripts for sci-fi action films such as Aliens, The Terminator, andThe Abyss. The speech in these types of films such as The Terminator's famous "Ah'll be bock" line don't lend well to romantic dramas. In fact, the dialogue throughout the movie is almost as bad as the chemistry between Kate Winslett and Leonardo DiCaprio. Both are exceptional actors seperately, but at times during the film it almost feels like you're watching a high school theater production. They play off each other like a pair of nervous teenagers worrying about the kissing scene in act two. The only saving grace to the film's poor screenplay and off casting is the comedic Molly Brown played by Kathy Bates. It's too bad that even with her appearance in the film she's not worth watching the movie for.       The film's score was written by James Horner and is a combination of Enya and Celtic music. The "Pure Moods" sound of it all doesn't help much in keeping the audience awake during the first two hours of the movie. James Horner was also responsible for the endless Celine Dion ballad "My Heart Will Go On" which nobody who was alive during 1997 will ever be able to forget!       The 200 million dollar movie ended up grossing over a billion dollars at the box office and tied Ben Hur and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King for winning 11 Academy Awards at the Oscars. Most of the awards it won were for costume design, visual effects, and editing. Still, it did win Best Director and Best Picture, which makes it seem as though the Academy saw all of those zeros in the budget and just handed over the awards without even watching the movie.       One would think that with a budget of 200 million dollars and a director who has spent countless hours at the wreckage of the actual Titanic, that the movie would be a little more historically accurate. There are numerous historical problems with the film, even if you ignore the fact that Rose and Jack didn't actually exist. And why would you spend 20 million dollars to build an exact replica of the original boat if you're going to make up a cheesy love story to go along with it?       The film is an astonishing three and a half hours long. The actual Titanic sank in two and a half hours. Which means that if you were actually on the Titanic as it was sinking and you were watching The Titanic, you wouldn't know how it ended.       The bottom line is this: The Titanic cost 200 million dollars to complete. It grossed more than $600,799,824 in the United States and $1,835,300,000 world wide. Ex post facto, rental tacked an additional $900 million onto that granting the epic a reimbursement surpassing the gross national product of Fiji. The movie was seen by an estimated gagillion people, and for a melodramatic shipwreck, that ain't bad. If you haven't seen The Titanic, the only reason I would recommend watching it would be to end the incessant cries of "What do you mean you haven't seen Titanic?!? You have to see it!!" Even if you lose all of your dignity by watching the film, at least you know your heart will go on.