10 Movies You Don't Want to Admit You Love - Part 4

4. Titanic

If this were made today, Jack Dawson would have been a sparkly vampire.

Until 2009, Titanic was the reigning Box Office champion. Since its release in 1997, Titanic was the highest grossing film of all-time without adjusting for inflation. So, even with ticket prices doubling and all kinds of hugely successful films being released since then (Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man, The Dark Knight), Titanic did NOT get beat for the top box office spot until Avatar. In other words, it took James Cameron to dethrone his own movie.

Why We Pretend to Hate It:

For one thing, it's arguable whether it deserved the Oscar for Best Picture or if the Academy was catering to what was popular. Titanic was a big, epic Blockbuster that made a whole lot of money. Like... a ridiculous amount of money. Teen girls went to the theater in droves to see it multiple times because OMG LEO DICAPRIO IS TOO HAWWWT!!! Yes, Titanic was the Twilight of the 90's. And it won the Oscar for Best Picture. Over L.A. Confidential and Good Will Hunting, films that many will argue were of better quality than Titanic.

Before you go and blast my comparisons to Twilight, let's play a game. I'm gonna put down lines of dialogue from Twilight and Titanic, and you have to guess which movie they're from. Whenever a name comes up, I'll put up both names it could relate to. Ready? Go.

"You are my life now."
"Where to, Miss?" "To the stars."
"I'm the king of the world!"
"I'd rather be his whore than your wife."
"You have a gift, Edward/Jack. You do. You see people." "I see you."
"I don't have the strength to stay away from you anymore."
"And so the lion fell in love with the lamb."
"Edward/Jack! This is where we first met!"
"I hate you for making me want you so much."
"Listen, Bella/Rose. You're gonna get out of here, you're gonna go on and you're gonna make lots of babies, and you're gonna watch them grow. You're gonna die an old... an old lady warm in her bed, not here, not this night. Not like this, do you understand me?"
"You're like my own personal brand of heroin."
"I'll never let go, Edward/Jack. I'll never let go."
"I'd rather die than to stay way from you."

So it won various Oscars many felt were undeserved, it thrived on the fact that its star was a major teen heartthrob at the time, and if its screenplay were any cheesier Pizza Hut would consider it an extra topping. By the way, if you didn't hate Titanic before our little game, I apologize for making you hate it now.

Why We Secretly Love It:

The one thing no one wants to admit is how much they loved Titanic the first time they saw it. There's a reason it was the highest-grossing film of all time for twelve years, in the face of rising ticket prices and better movies. People watched it. People watched it over, and over again. Because while it did kind of pander to the overly sentimental and played itself off as a big, expensive romance novel... it also offered something for everybody.

OMG YOU TOTALLY SEE HER BOOBS AND ITS LIKE PG-13 AND STUFF.

Aside from a sappy, sentimental romance, Titanic was a drama about class differences, an action movie, a crime/thriller, and a tragedy of Shakespearian proportions. Once the ship hits the iceberg, Titanic goes from sappy to spec-freakin'-tacular.

Oh, and another thing... we LIKE sappy shit. We do. Some of you can turn our nose up and claim to be above it. Those people are either just out of a bad relationship, or they're hipsters.

For sooth! I wrote of romance prior to the popularity of writing thus.

Like I said earlier, sometimes we like to be pandered to. And if James Cameron knows all the cheap tricks to tugging at our heartstrings, you can't really blame him for exploiting that. Be it the loud, boisterous and sometimes tragic score by James Horner, or those aforementioned cheesy lines that will get you sighing amorously at the screen. So scorn and scoff all you want, but deep down you know you shed a tear when Jack sinks to the bottom of the ocean.

And speaking of a bad romance...

3. Twilight (and all sequels thereafter)

Kristen Stewart's signature facial expression: blank.

I just went through an entire section of dialogue comparing Titanic to Twilight. While few can argue that the dialogue in Titanic is only slightly better, it's general consensus that you have to be a tween girl or an amusingly sappy person to enjoy Twilight. Many prolific authors have spoken out against Stephanie Meyer's novels, because apparently she's not much of a writer.

Sure, she didn't WRITE "Friday", but you'd probably believe me if I told you she did.

Why We Pretend to Hate It:

Because it's sappy as Hell and the dialogue is laughable to boot. You need only look at the above list to get a good chuckle before dying a little inside after realizing whoever wrote that was dead serious... no pun intended. We also grew up with the notion that vampires are supposed to be scary, demonic creatures of the night who feast on human blood like a fat man in a Vegas buffet. Oh, and they burn in the sunlight. But Stephanie Meyer had different plans for these scary creatures.

"Sadly, Bella, this is not a joke."

So a century of vampire lore which paints the being as bloodthirsty and just all around evil has been reduced to Seventh Heaven with fangs. Several decent directors have taken on the series, beginning with Catherine Hardwicke (Lords of Dogtown), Chris Weitz (About a Boy) and David Slade (Hard Candy). The next book's adaptation will be directed by a very good director, Bill Condon (Kinsey, Dreamgirls). The series has yet to receive a fresh tomatometer rating, and is among one of the most despised film titles amongst most film enthusiasts and bitter guys who were dragged to those movies by their girlfriends.

Why We Secretly Love It:

Our inherently sappy nature notwithstanding, these movies are flippin' hilarious. They're a goldmine for comedic riffers like the folks at Rifftrax, whose riffs on the Twilight series are among their best. There are two ways you can watch the film. You can watch it as a serious fantasy/romance, which will have you rolling your eyes. Alternately, you watch it like it's a comedy and you'll find it very amusing.

Last year, the infamous team of Friedberg and Seltzer attempted to parody the series with their movie Vampires Suck. The Twilight movies themselves were much funnier.

Watching it with the more ironic approach gives the series a new kind of enjoyability. If you pretend that the series is poking fun of itself (which it kind of starts to do with Eclipse), you'll find a very funny parody of the romance genre.

Taking the lead and making him look hideous without a shirt on? That's gold!

You can argue that that's not what the filmmakers were going for, but then you're leaning on the fallacy of intent. It doesn't matter what the filmmaker intended to do, but what the audience derives from it. For reference, Ed Wood was serious when he made Plan 9 from Outer Space. Tragically serious. But it became a hilarious enough movie to make itself a cult classic and even get a biographical movie made about its director. Starring Johnny Depp. Directed by Tim Burton. Seriously.

The story of an amusingly naive man, or of a comedic genius? We may never know.

Fallacy of intent. Ed Wood intended to make a serious movie about aliens who resurrect the dead to send a message of peace to the human race, which takes place in the future but somehow also the past (it had a very confusing opening monologue). But they weren't kidding when they said "future events such as these will affect you in the future" (actual line from the opening monologue). Because sure enough, there's Twilight.

Obviously, Twilight had much more technical polish than Ed Wood's film. The budget was substantially higher, the editing made sense, and even the cinematography was pretty decent. It just had laughably atrocious dialogue.

In the end, we realize that these films are actually quite harmless. They're based on books that were undoubtedly poorly written, with a protagonist who's a hollow shell of a character (played perfectly by Kristen Stewart, who also appears to be the hollow shell of a character) intended to make it easier for the reader to project themselves onto her. It's offensively misogynistic and panders to an audience who likes to read novels with Fabio on the cover. But there's comedy in poorly-made stuff, and Twilight is a goldmine for that.

And also, like I said before... some of us don't so much mind being pandered to.