Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Titanic II: An Appropriate Title


















Back cover blurb: On the 100th anniversary of the original voyage, a modern luxury liner christened "TITANIC II", follows the path of its namesake. But when a tsunami hurls an iceberg into the new ship's path, the passengers and crew must fight to avoid a similar fate. 

Oh man, I was at Blockbuster the other night just skimming some titles when this straight-to-dvd beauty caught my eye. I started laughing out loud when I read the back cover. Ok OK! Let me just walk you through the logic of my back-of-the-video-store-hysterics. I don't know much about the sea-faring business, but I do know that they're a rowdy and superstitious bunch. For example sailors think having a woman on board is a bad luck good luck if she's naked, that's why so many Victorian era ships have a figure of a naked woman on the bow. Bananas are supposed to be a sign of disaster because in the early 1700s almost every documented ship carrying bananas as cargo sank (which is ironic since bananas float). There are a bunch of dates you're not supposed to sail at all since they were days of biblical disaster, and there are a bunch of other ones that include stolen pieces of wood, silver coins, dolphins, cutting your hair and nails, and avoiding flat-footed people and red-heads. 

With all of this in mind, I would imagine that the people in the fictional world of this movie would think to avoid naming their ship after the largest maritime disaster of them all! But then of course you don't get to use a sweet tagline like "100 years later, lightning strikes twice". Which is odd since it seems like the majority of their dilemma seems to be that darn tsunami that happened to smash an iceberg right up into them and nothing at all to do with a lighting. And if you were going to put an idiom in your title why wouldn't you pick something like "come hell or high water" or "a bunch of people get together and make bad decisions".  Not only do I love the fact the the fictional people of this movie decided it would be a good idea to name their new ship the "Titanic II", I love that the actual people of this world, responsible for this movie, decided it would be a good idea to name their move, "Titanic II". 

I realize that I've written too much about this and now I need to watch it before I say anything else, which is where my dilemma lies, I have no trouble judging a movie by its front and back cover because I've seen enough movies to know that this practice actually works wonders. My dilemma is that I really don't want to award any more film-makers for bad film-making by renting their work yet I want to watch them to witness the disaster. It can't be a luke-warm disaster though, I have little patience for that, it needs to be full on cringe-worthy embarrassment  like the opening night of the local middle-school thespian performance.

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