What I'd Watch 4/6/12

This weekend offers a pretty easy choice as far as going to the movies in concerned.  You can see a bunch of pretty people enduring one of the greatest disasters of all time.  Or you can see Titanic.

Honestly, did someone with money to waste feel sorry for Chris Klein and Tara Reid?  Because that’s the only fathomable reason I can come up with for the existence of American Reunion. Either that or some elaborate tax dodge involving the continued employment of Natasha Lyonne. It’s been nine years since the last theatrical American Pie film, with a string of forgettable direct-to-video sequels somehow keeping the franchise afloat, and I can’t imagine those have stoked the flames of nostalgia for sex with baked goods enough to justify going to this well one more time.  I don’t even get the impression that the original film is all that fondly remembered; I saw it, and beyond the aforementioned pie loving, I couldn’t tell you a damn thing about it.  Not that I expect the new film to depend on a strict adherence to the cherished American Pie canon, nor there to be fanboy rioting if this sequel contradicts anything from the previous films.  Hell, they’ll probably just be recycling the same jokes.

So while one film from the late 1990s gets a stale retread, another film from that period simply fixes itself up a little and comes back exactly as we remember it.  Well, not exactly; James Cameron has gone back to Titanic and corrected the positioning of the stars in some of the night scenes due to some astronomical inaccuracies in the original version.  But aside from the IMAX and 3D treatment the film’s been given, this is pretty much what set the world on fire back in 1997. It’s not the film’s fault that millions of teenage girls invested way too many hormones in Leonardo DiCaprio.  It’s not the film’s fault that that Celine Dion song got played for months.  It’s not the film’s fault James Cameron was just a bit of an ass at the Oscars.  Divorced from the hype and the backlash, Titanic just works.  It’s a big old-fashioned spectacle that’s incredibly comfortable being just that.  Cameron knows when to hold back and when to lay on the gas, and when he does, this thing is just unstoppable.  All in the wake of perhaps the worst performance Bill Paxton has ever given; if the film was able to overcome that, it really has to be something special.

And yes, nude Kate Winslet in 3D.  I hadn’t forgotten.