Why Titanic is one of my favourite movies.

I'm currently watching Titanic. The movie is about halfway through. It is one of my favourite movies, and for good reason too. The romance element of the movie is fairly well done. I think that the best scene is the one where Jack sketches the picture of Rose. There is so much passion in the simple act of drawing, the simple act of moving his hands and sketching, more than words can describe. Hahaha.. I'm a hopeless romantic!!

I have watched the movie for goodness knows how many times. I know that I've certainly spent more on the cinema tickets for this movie than it costs for the DVDs. I do think that I'll get the special edition DVD one of these days. It is supposed to hold an extra 47 minutes of cinematic scenes.

It has all the necessary elements: a tragic love triangle (Rose, Jack and Caledon), a life ending catastrophe (the sinking of the greatest engineering marvel the world had seen at the time), great hopelessness and despair (when everyone realises that they're going to die), and endless self sacrifice by many normal people (think the instrumentalists, ship crew, and of course Jack). What's not to like about the movie.

Some people claim that the dialog (or rather lack of it) is cheesy. Well, at times, it is true. Some of the dialog is quite cheesy (think "I'm the king of the world!!"). However, a couple of the one liners are really nice and almost got me crying. I particularly like the older Rose in the movie. She's got a really nice voice. The visual effects were of course staggering. They had actually built a scale model of the ship, along with it's various internal trappings.

Almost everytime that I watch this movie, it never fails in eliciting some tears from me. I wonder if it'll still have that affect this time around. The movie certainly deserved the 11 Oscars and 1.8 billion dollars it grossed worldwide. Oh, and the fact that an engineer had one of the main roles to play is a Good Thing (tm).

UPDATE: This movie never fails.

* image from wikipedia *