Titanic in 3D

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Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, helms our dispatch, a running recap of the latest digital culture news. This week: on watching Titanic 3D in theaters, Tubi, and more fashion news.

I first watched Titanic when I was ten years old on DVD, and rewatching it has since become an informal ritual I embark on every year. Until this Tuesday, I had never seen it in theaters. I figured I had to for the 25th anniversary re-release, even though I dreaded watching it in 3D. (Nothing is more distracting than putting on glasses that manipulate a movie’s depth of field. They’re fun for kids, not for adults. We’re already at the pictures; use your imagination!)

I love Titanic—for the plot’s equal devotion to disaster and romance, its saccharine endorsement of adolescent love, its commitment to closing the arc of every side character, the absurdist rollercoaster of events lobbed at Jack and Rose in the hour before the ship sinks, and of course, “draw me like one of your French girls.”

For a movie that mostly takes place on a boat, there’s a lot of running and chasing. The most exhilarating chase sequence takes place after Jack sketches a naked Rose. The two carefree lovers run through the boiler rooms, Licorice Pizza-style, away from Rose’s fiancée’s manservant. Things haven't gone south just yet, and they end up in the cargo room where they proceed to have sex in a carriage. "Where to?" Jack asks Rose, while pretending to be a coachman. "To the stars," she responds—a line that James Cameron is probably still applauding himself over.

How much can happen in one catastrophic night? A lot apparently. It’s a movie that really feels like a movie… because Cameron is a blockbuster fiend with an expensive and expansive vision, requiring a then-record-breaking $295 million budget to execute his shipwreck fantasy. And he delivered! People (namely, teenage girls) returned to theaters to see the three-hour movie again and again and again.

The special effects—computer-generated and makeup—have aged incredibly. The 3D becomes less distracting over time, although the added depth of field amplifies the scale of the ship and the disaster. The seats shudder, seemingly with the Titanic when she scrapes the looming iceberg. The passengers’ desperation feels more potent, and the wreckage is biblical in proportion. There is no reprieve for Jack and Rose—or for viewers. The couple wades through freezing cold water and almost drown twice. There’s a random crying child the two try to rescue. Rose seems to reject survival at every turn, twice refusing to board the lifeboats. She leaps out of the second lifeboat and runs to Jack. The music swells, and they kiss furiously at the grand staircase. It’s enough to move you to tears. Then, Rose’s evil fiancée grabs a pistol and begins shooting at the couple, commencing another anxiety-inducing chase sequence.

Titanic is as epic as it is silly: I cannot take seriously Fabrizio's “Italian” accent or the surfer bro disposition of the Titanic treasure hunter. One of the third-class Irish passengers looks like Jack Harlow. There’s no logical explanation as to how Rose didn’t lose (or notice) the 56-carat-diamond in her coat pocket. As the end credits roll, someone behind me starts to loudly wail the lyrics to “My Heart Will Go On.” It’s been 84 25 years… and yet Cameron insists on flogging the blue Avatar horse until it’s culturally dead. A romance disaster movie is long overdue.

(The aforementioned tweet is a joke.) Another fun Titanic fact I learned while reading Dirt contributor Katy Kelleher’s forthcoming book, The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Since the late 1990s, the US Armed Forces have sourced their face paint from special effects artist Bobbie Weiner, known for her work on the film.

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PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• Netflix’s password police has come for viewers in Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, and Spain.

• The owner of AMC Networks, James Dolan, is searching for a new CEO. A possible contender: Kristin Dolan, his wife. (WSJ)

• The possibility of a Writers Guild strike. The WGA contract ends on May 1, but the Director’s Guild told members it will wait until “later this spring” to negotiate new contracts, which expire on June 30. (Puck)

• Fox turns down a $2 billion offer to buy Tubi, a free, ad-supported streaming platform. (Bloomberg)

  • Pitchfork’s Alphonse Pierre says it’s the best streamer for rap cinephiles: Tubi’s “catalog is stacked with just about every overlooked, forgotten, or possibly imaginary movie to ever feature a rapper … I treat Tubi like a virtual Best Buy dollar bin, digging up everything from Master P’s ridiculous, No Limit-produced 2000 prison drama Lockdown to Treach training a prisoner to fight in an MMA tournament to fulfill a debt to a kingpin in 2022’s Lord of the Streets.”

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• ✊ In other union-related news: The HarperCollins union has reached a tentative agreement with the publishing company after a three month strike. (NYT)

  • The deal includes an increase in minimum salaries from $45,000 to $50,000 and a one-time bonus of $1,500 to union members.

• LVMH names Pharrell as creative director of Louis Vuitton menswear. The position was previously occupied by Virgil Abloh until his death in November 2021.

• Fashion newsletter BlackBird Spyplane on the questionable ethics of “showrooming”: going into a brick & mortar fashion shop, seeing or trying on a piece you like, and then bouncing to buy it online at a lower price.

• The long-awaited return of Phoebe Philo. Philo made her name at Céline, and will debut her new brand in September. (Harper’s Bazaar)

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