A Trip Back to 1997 - Thoughts on Seeing Titanic on the Big Screen

As most of you should know, I'm a pretty big fan of Leonardo DiCaprio. My obsession started with him when I was 13 years old, and saw What's Eating Gilbert Grape for the first time. His performance in that is something fantastic - at age 19, he plays a young boy who is mentally retarded, and makes his brother's (Johnny Depp) life quite difficult with his hyperactive actions. I cried foul when I found out that he didn't win an Oscar for that performance. Until I saw Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List. How the hell did both of them miss out on an Oscar that year?

But I guess mine and Leo's story begins back at the beginning of 2007, when I was 11 years old. Titanic was on TV, and my mother had recorded it so she could watch it again later. Usually, I didn't watch movies with her, but I managed to catch the tail end of it, basically from where one of the lifeboats is going through all of the dead bodies. For some reason, I was ready to declare this movie as my favourite movie of all-time, and Leo and Kate were suddenly my favourite actors. Alas, it was another two and a half years before I saw the movie in it's entirety. While I had grown up a little since 2007 and wasn't ready to throw myself into calling something my 'favourite movie' after five minutes of it, Titanic was still a bloody good, if a little long, piece of cinematic history.

"Cheer up. The world's about to end in ten minutes anyway."

Movie: Strange Days 
Year: 1995
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Writer: James Cameron and Jay Cocks
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, Juliette Lewis, Tom Sizemore, Michael Wincott, Vincent D'Onofrio, William Fichtner.
Running time: 145 min


Despite being alive at the time, I don't really remember the huge event that was the turn of the millennium. Well, yeah, I was four years old at the time and I was probably more worried about reading books (apparently I was good at that). All I actually remember of this 2000 event was this magnet on the fridge explaining everything that we needed just in case 'Y2K' had a devastating effect on our lives. Oh, and this song that we had to sing at school about it in 2004. But it would seem that 2000 was a pretty big deal, so much so that there was a movie made about it in 1995. With Kathryn 'First woman to win Best Director' Bigelow directing and her ex-husband James 'King of the World' Cameron writing, the two managed to make a sci-fi/action movie, pretty much set within the architecture of the mind, against the paranoia surrounding 2000. Oh yeah, it's pretty awesome.

James Cameron is a cool guy.

He's also a fan of Black Swan. Yes, you want to follow the guy who has too much money and likes to make movies about big blue aliens. He likes Nolan. RESPECT.