Titanic Part 2
Join us as we discover the real history behind the sinking of the Titanic. Is James Cameron’s epic Hollywood blockbuster Titanic accurate to the true story? In the final part of their Titanic series, Gaz and Mel relive the unsinkable ship’s final hours, discover the facts behind the movie, and learn about real life figures Molly Brown, Bruce Ismay, Thomas Andrews, and Captain Smith. Was there a way for Rose and Jack to both survive? What is James Cameron’s one regret? And can the movie still be considered a classic? Let’s go back to 1997 to revisit Titanic and put its history and box office success into perspective.
It's a movie that peaks behind the curtain into the domain of a world renowned ballet company, Ballet Lermontov. Fiction of course, which is just as well as it allows its audience to escape into a world of beauty, art and heartache.
If the prospect of Len Wiseman directing and Keanu Reeves being retained in a supporting role inspires little confidence, the collaborative oversight of producer Chad Stahelski ensures that the high water mark for John Wick’s standard of visual quality is thankfully maintained.
You have to admire Wes Anderson’s steadfast artistic principles, prolific and yet wholly dedicated to a type of sly, cute, irony-laden, self-conscious aesthetic that comments on filmmaking itself as a form, as a deconstruction.
With the eighth entry, Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning, the franchise has unfortunately decided to fully commit to romanticizing its own mythology, providing us a film that feels weighed down by self-serious grand-standing and a retconned story that’s only interested in looking to its previous entries with rose-tinted glasses.
Adding to the growing list of art about tempestuous chefs in the trenches of the service industry, La Concina, within its stark black and white framing, speaks righteously to those of us disillusioned and chewed up by the gears of capitalistic greed.
In a movie pining to celebrate independent journalism, Kriv Stenders’ The Correspondent straddles the line between award-baiting sincerity and unsettling docudrama, managing to be both convincing in its need to exist but also unconvincing in its emotional execution.
For the scores of films claiming to be ‘anti-war’ films, Ray Mendoza’s and Alex Garland’s Warfare has a strong argument, not least because it is a film I don’t particularly want to experience a second time.
For over two hours, Coogler transfixes us, hypnotises us with the exuberant energy of black culture under fire from the social forces of Jim Crow-era Mississippi and the insatiable blood lust of vampires.
When the Iranian government decided the endeavour of making The Seed of the Scared Fig was worthy of sentencing it’s director, Mohammad Rasoulof, to 8 years in prison, the irony was that this was the kind of endorsement that makes the world take notice.
If there is an indulgence to Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here, it’s an indulgence of an emotional kind. Salles channels such intense love and empathy towards his character’s, he simply cannot bear to part with them until he must.
Film Critic Gaz Mallon co-hosts the Real Movies Fake History podcast and writes extensively on new movies here.