1/9/04

James Cameron

"What do you think of James Cameron?"

Oh, he's an action filmmaker all right, pretty good one. I'd call his The Terminator the best Dick adaptation I've ever seen (sorry Harlan), all the more ironic considering Dick isn't even mentioned, and easily his best work. Aliens was fun, and I like the mother vs. mother subtext (not subtle, but effective).

His succeeding stuff had topnotch action sequences in them, but a gigantism and loutishness began to infect his films...misogyny in True Lies, a head scratching ending in The Abyss, a rather repulsive moral hypocrisy in T2 ("this extremely violent popcorn movie is anti-violence"). Then there's Titanic, which is two hours of the Love Boat in the Edwardian era that you have to slog through before you get to the sinking. Better to have cast DiCaprio as the bo'sun and film it as the story of an overconfident crew shown the error of its ways.

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