Thank you, Mr. Cameron!

I assume you've read my recent post saying that Owen Wilson's son is not in the cast anymore.  As this year marks the 100th anniversary of the sinking of R.M.S. Titanic, allow me to say: It's a shame that those people drowned and everything.  But if it hadn't happened, his daddy would be stereotypically cast as the lead role in ACTR.

"How is that so?" would be a reasonable question.  And I'll do my best to answer it.

I guess it all started the day after Christmas, 2010, when my sister and I were at Goodwill.  And, you know, VHS tapes today are a steal; it's been so long since they dominated the home entertainment market that movie collectors can save a lot of money on them almost anywhere.  I chose Two Rode Together (1961), a classic Western movie; Jurassic Park (1993), which I wanted to revisit and which I see so often in used-goods stores that at the time it had to be the biggest-selling video ever; and Titanic (1997).

When I first saw the doomed-vessel/romantic epic on the first day of spring, 2011, I thought it was pretty good—particularly the sinking sequence—but that a lot of the dialogue was cheesy, with Jack's line "This is bad" after the iceberg encounter making the 1999 book Stupid Movie Lines.  But as time has passed, I've come to look at it differently, and now I almost concur with Joseph McBride, who in his awful (as in "WAY too critical") 1998 Book of Movie Lists listed it as one of his top 25 movies ever.  In late 2006, the film peaked at #973 on the "1,000 Greatest [i.e. most acclaimed] Films" project at:
http://www.theyshootpictures.com/gf1000.htm.
I ultimately sided with its champions and at the end of August 2011 requested that the copy I'd purchased join my collection.  (This was about the time I got back into VHS, the way some people enjoy collecting LPs.)

I had thought of Owen for a long time in the lead role, but after watching Titanic the second time I literally dreamed about resurrecting my ACTR idea, and in this dream I got the idea that Leonardo DiCaprio should play it instead.  And I thought, "Why not?  He's about the right age now."  So the project was reinstated.  I got other ideas for the cast, but the only one I've kept to this day was the actor to play his grandfather.

By the way, Titanic is being reissued in 3D in just 7 weeks to commemorate the centennial of the disaster it depicts.  Now that it's grown on me, I would have gone, but since the revival of 3D at the beginning of 2009, the 3D has added very little to the experience (Disney/Pixar's Up is testimony to this).  Couldn't they have just given it a Blu-ray release?  I know Hollywood has been a lot more conservative about releasing movies on Blu-ray, but it seems to me like it would make a great candidate for the format.