'Titanic' as only Hallmark could tell it

Titanic (1996)

Starring: Peter Gallagher, George C. Scott, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Eva Marie Saint, Tim Curry, Harley Jane Kozak, and Marilu Henner

Writers: Ross LaManna, Joyce Eliason

Director: Robert Lieberman

Rating: 2.5 of 5 Stars

Intertwining stories on the Titanic.  Wynn Park (Gallagher) tries to hit on Hazel's (Saint) granddaughter Bess (Kozak); Captain Smith (Scott) celebrates (at the beginning only, of course) his last voyage; Jamie Perse (Mike Doyle) is obsessed with becoming an actor, fixates on Mary Pickford, and hits on a Danish girl (Sonsee Neu); and Alice (Felicity Waterman) has a recurring premonition that the children she's watching will drown.

In 2003, BBC fanboys who had obviously never heard of Hal Warren voted James Cameron's Titanic the worst movie ever made.  If you have any perspective on filmic quality, then of course this statement is ridiculous to say the least.  This 2.75-hour cable version, for starters, plays up the corny qualities of the Cameron version.  Especially towards the end, when a passenger challenges the crew members' command that only women and children board the lifeboats: "Don't talk to me like that, young man!"  Or when the Danish girl randomly says that she doesn't believe in God.

As VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever (which gave this flick 1.5/4 bones) points out, Scott is the most interesting actor to watch.  Between Gallagher and Doyle, it's hard to remember who's who.  The villain appears to be Curry, in a rather abrupt twist of situations.

Stupidly, when the other vessel arrives in New York, the skyline (including the Statue of Liberty) is entirely computer-generated, and looks like something from a 3D computer game of the time.  Yet the iceberg is the only other CGI effect, and since TV movies don't count as box office bombs, couldn't this have cost more than $13 million?

The video release boasts, "The story so few lived to tell," but 31.6 percent of the passengers were saved.  Titanic has a decent score by Lennie Nielhaus, who brought you Unforgiven, and the film succeeds in conveying the incident as the awful tragedy that it was.  The ending, though, draws parallels to Killer at Large, a dud of a documentary I saw 359 days ago that presents the obesity epidemic as all bad.  Maybe it was all bad, so why remind us?