One thing I forgot to mention about Monday's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (that's hard to type around a plate of toast) is the guy in a wheelchair who looked eerily like a young James Cameron. He babbles about the Titanic at one point, and at another, Cameron (the Terminator named after the director) cradles his arm while teaching him how to shoot a gun. I think most of us know about James Cameron's almost erotic obsession with guns. It went so far as to lead to a gun in the movie Titanic that wouldn't be invented until fourteen years after the sinking.
But Titanic is astonishingly replete with anachronisms and factual errors; just look at the list on imdb. Maybe the real tragedy of Titanic is a perfectly good action movie director trying to be something he's not. I caught the end of the movie on television with my sister a couple weeks ago, and the scene at the end of Rose moving through the ship looking for Jack was so like Ripley looking for Newt at the end of Aliens, which I guess makes Billy Zane the Queen Alien. The combination of a love triangle's running gunfight with the loudly melodramatic recreation of the actual disaster of the Titanic seems even tackier and more confused as the years go by. This is definitely a movie for the young, for older adolescents whose selfish, centre-of-the-universe mentalities are just blossoming into an ability to empathise. But James Cameron is always trapped in that place, not suspecting how much truer to himself he was with Aliens and his Terminator movies.
Looking at the Wikipedia entry for the RMS Titanic, I find myself struggling somewhat to feel for the actual tragedy through the silly pageant Cameron made of it. Mostly I just can't help giggling at, "Nearly every first-class woman survived." Right-o!
So I sort of suspect the people of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles are trying to seduce James Cameron into directing an episode. Come on, James. Cameron's a first class woman.
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