I was a Freshman in college when Titanic came out; a friend and I sincerely exclaimed to our professor that “it was the best movie we have ever seen!!” She raised an eyebrow at us, we were ridiculous. Oh to be young and silly and full of hyperbole. I miss it.
I was a 16 year old movie theater employee when it came out and would see the same 5-10 teen girls rewatching it every day. I rolled my eyes until I finally saw it on a date and it frickin ruled but I’ve never watched it since. My strongest memory is of the string quintet doing another round of “Nearer, my God, to thee.”
I loved Titanic then and now! And yes love at first sight happens. Met my husband at a party, took him home that night, and haven’t been apart since. Will be celebrating our 38th wedding anniversary this year.
As to crushing on Leo - he was never my type. I consider him a Beta male, and I’ve always preferred the Alphas. Biology at work!
As for favorite romantic movies: Say Anything, because my husband is Lloyd💕💕💕
Professional reviews I translate in my head to “What do people who are already bored of life think of it?”
When the world is new to you, you recognize where the good stuff is that brings *you* something new. Something that sparks your imagination or feeds a hungering part of you. For me, it was the warm chestnuts a girl living under a bridge held in her chilled hands. A crayon you could draw with and then walk in, be in the picture you just drew. Entering into a dollhouse, suddenly living doll-sized with the dolls you had been playing with. I didn’t even notice the titles or authors of these books back then; forget reviews.
When teenagers or younger people rave about books or movies or video games, I ask them for recommendations. These recommendations have a special place for me.
Movies with true love: I watch mostly Japanese anime. In Japanese with subtitles. Although some of the stories in anime are based on western novels, they have a different feel, a twist from anything I experience in western films.
My favorite, with love, but also for so many other reasons, is Makoto Shinkai’s “Your Name”. *Spoiler* with the experience of waking up in the other person’s body.
Giovanni’s Island, set during the Russian occupation of their Japanese island in WWII. Love between children/young people.
In this Corner of the World. Also Japan in WWII. The love part I would describe as soft. The drawing is so beautiful that I got the manga that the anime is based on.
My favorite video game with a love story is Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride.
I was a full grown adult, watching the movie in a theater with my husband, beginning to get hysterical a the thought of how many people we were going to see die. I'll never forget the elderly husband and wife tucking themselves into bed, holding each other...
I loved the Titanic movie and always acknowledge that April day of the real-life sinking each year by remembering it and saying a prayer.
Anyway, I love the movie Casablanca for the true love Elsa has for both men - that women can have complex desires and choices...she would have loved and been loved either way.
An implausible love story is my favorite. Not a movie, but a television series, South Korea’s Crash Landing on You (Netflix) is sweet, funny, angsty and the best love story I’ve seen in years (no, I don’t get out much). I was obsessed with the characters and their plight! It is also an interesting look into another culture, which is my favorite thing to watch.
"Titanic is the John Wick of romance movies - its excess is the point."
Girl, yes. That made me laugh and the ending made me nostalgic and cry. I was around your age when Titanic came out and loved it at the time. I never thought to think about that movie from the context of when i first saw it—thank you
I think my friends and I saw Titanic in the theater seven times. It may have been more. I remember being spellbound by it. My brother once dismissively presented math to my parents that he’d done, to show many minutes of my life I had spent watching Titanic. It was excessive.
In college I brought our old VHS tape and would regularly put on Titanic as background noise while I studied. I watch it a couple of times a year, and I still love it.
I have two distinct memories of seeing Titanic in the theater with my friends. One was during the drawing scene it was so quiet you could hear a pin drop and when the close up happened of Jack shading Rose's breast with his finger my friend Michael involuntarily gasped so loud that it broke the tension and many people around us laughed-in a fun way not a mean way! The second memory is the collective gasp the *whole* theater let out during the shot when the camera pulls back and you see a tiny little Titanic in the middle of the big dark ocean. Good, bad, indifferent and whether or not it holds up, that movie took everyone in that theater on a RIDE that night. (Personally I think it does hold up-IT HAS AN ACT STRUCTURED PLOT and CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT-which is more than I can say for a lot of stories these days plausible or not.)
We took our kids to see it about 5 years ago at the Cinerama (boy is that one of the biggest non-human casualties of the pandemic). It was the first time I had seen it since it was originally released. I really enjoyed it!
My true-love movie is weird, but here goes: Bram Stoker's Dracula. I was a 14yo girl in NYC who heard a lot about HIV/AIDS. Coppola's Dracula was an epic fairytale with a dark metaphor: sex might kill you but (as the tagline said) "love never dies."
The love in question was transcendent, interspecies, aching, violent, and devoted. Dracula renounces God to avenge his beloved's postmortem excommunication, then "crosse[s] oceans of time to find" her reincarnated soul. Mina's voluntary conversion to vampirism is a specific expression of "loving someone so much you’d give up material things and cultural expectations to keep them." And she loves him in many forms: as gorgeous prince, as a fierce warrior, in decrepitude, as a green mist, even a monstrous bat. Yet, after all that, they ultimately release each other from a tragic future. He asks her kill him and to return him to God, releasing both of them from the curse of vampirism, freeing her to return to mortal life with her own soul intact.
"I’d feel panicked both at the thought of being violated and not looking good enough while being violated." Wow this really sums up the exp of being in a woman's body in a way I have never heard expressed! I don't have strong love or hate feelings toward Titanic, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. One of my best friends is a book editor who once specialized in romance, and of course she got a lot of shade for the romance genre. She dismissed all of it--she swears that romance is the original feminist genre, and that is why so many, especially men, make fun of it. It centers female desire and earnestness and some people can't handle that, you know? Long live Kate and the bodice rippers.
The podcast You Are Good did an episode on Titanic a year ish ago that is such a loving discussion about why Titanic is such a valuable (and also good) movie! One thing that I distinctly remember from that episode is that the hosts pointed out that only the first half of titanic is a romance… the second half is actually a quite intense disaster movie that critics of the film like to ignore!
I was a Freshman in college when Titanic came out; a friend and I sincerely exclaimed to our professor that “it was the best movie we have ever seen!!” She raised an eyebrow at us, we were ridiculous. Oh to be young and silly and full of hyperbole. I miss it.
I was a 16 year old movie theater employee when it came out and would see the same 5-10 teen girls rewatching it every day. I rolled my eyes until I finally saw it on a date and it frickin ruled but I’ve never watched it since. My strongest memory is of the string quintet doing another round of “Nearer, my God, to thee.”
I loved Titanic then and now! And yes love at first sight happens. Met my husband at a party, took him home that night, and haven’t been apart since. Will be celebrating our 38th wedding anniversary this year.
As to crushing on Leo - he was never my type. I consider him a Beta male, and I’ve always preferred the Alphas. Biology at work!
As for favorite romantic movies: Say Anything, because my husband is Lloyd💕💕💕
Professional reviews I translate in my head to “What do people who are already bored of life think of it?”
When the world is new to you, you recognize where the good stuff is that brings *you* something new. Something that sparks your imagination or feeds a hungering part of you. For me, it was the warm chestnuts a girl living under a bridge held in her chilled hands. A crayon you could draw with and then walk in, be in the picture you just drew. Entering into a dollhouse, suddenly living doll-sized with the dolls you had been playing with. I didn’t even notice the titles or authors of these books back then; forget reviews.
When teenagers or younger people rave about books or movies or video games, I ask them for recommendations. These recommendations have a special place for me.
Movies with true love: I watch mostly Japanese anime. In Japanese with subtitles. Although some of the stories in anime are based on western novels, they have a different feel, a twist from anything I experience in western films.
My favorite, with love, but also for so many other reasons, is Makoto Shinkai’s “Your Name”. *Spoiler* with the experience of waking up in the other person’s body.
Giovanni’s Island, set during the Russian occupation of their Japanese island in WWII. Love between children/young people.
In this Corner of the World. Also Japan in WWII. The love part I would describe as soft. The drawing is so beautiful that I got the manga that the anime is based on.
My favorite video game with a love story is Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride.
I was a full grown adult, watching the movie in a theater with my husband, beginning to get hysterical a the thought of how many people we were going to see die. I'll never forget the elderly husband and wife tucking themselves into bed, holding each other...
I loved the Titanic movie and always acknowledge that April day of the real-life sinking each year by remembering it and saying a prayer.
Anyway, I love the movie Casablanca for the true love Elsa has for both men - that women can have complex desires and choices...she would have loved and been loved either way.
An implausible love story is my favorite. Not a movie, but a television series, South Korea’s Crash Landing on You (Netflix) is sweet, funny, angsty and the best love story I’ve seen in years (no, I don’t get out much). I was obsessed with the characters and their plight! It is also an interesting look into another culture, which is my favorite thing to watch.
"Titanic is the John Wick of romance movies - its excess is the point."
Girl, yes. That made me laugh and the ending made me nostalgic and cry. I was around your age when Titanic came out and loved it at the time. I never thought to think about that movie from the context of when i first saw it—thank you
I think my friends and I saw Titanic in the theater seven times. It may have been more. I remember being spellbound by it. My brother once dismissively presented math to my parents that he’d done, to show many minutes of my life I had spent watching Titanic. It was excessive.
In college I brought our old VHS tape and would regularly put on Titanic as background noise while I studied. I watch it a couple of times a year, and I still love it.
I have two distinct memories of seeing Titanic in the theater with my friends. One was during the drawing scene it was so quiet you could hear a pin drop and when the close up happened of Jack shading Rose's breast with his finger my friend Michael involuntarily gasped so loud that it broke the tension and many people around us laughed-in a fun way not a mean way! The second memory is the collective gasp the *whole* theater let out during the shot when the camera pulls back and you see a tiny little Titanic in the middle of the big dark ocean. Good, bad, indifferent and whether or not it holds up, that movie took everyone in that theater on a RIDE that night. (Personally I think it does hold up-IT HAS AN ACT STRUCTURED PLOT and CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT-which is more than I can say for a lot of stories these days plausible or not.)
We took our kids to see it about 5 years ago at the Cinerama (boy is that one of the biggest non-human casualties of the pandemic). It was the first time I had seen it since it was originally released. I really enjoyed it!
My true-love movie is weird, but here goes: Bram Stoker's Dracula. I was a 14yo girl in NYC who heard a lot about HIV/AIDS. Coppola's Dracula was an epic fairytale with a dark metaphor: sex might kill you but (as the tagline said) "love never dies."
The love in question was transcendent, interspecies, aching, violent, and devoted. Dracula renounces God to avenge his beloved's postmortem excommunication, then "crosse[s] oceans of time to find" her reincarnated soul. Mina's voluntary conversion to vampirism is a specific expression of "loving someone so much you’d give up material things and cultural expectations to keep them." And she loves him in many forms: as gorgeous prince, as a fierce warrior, in decrepitude, as a green mist, even a monstrous bat. Yet, after all that, they ultimately release each other from a tragic future. He asks her kill him and to return him to God, releasing both of them from the curse of vampirism, freeing her to return to mortal life with her own soul intact.
SWOOOOOOOOOOOOON.
"I’d feel panicked both at the thought of being violated and not looking good enough while being violated." Wow this really sums up the exp of being in a woman's body in a way I have never heard expressed! I don't have strong love or hate feelings toward Titanic, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. One of my best friends is a book editor who once specialized in romance, and of course she got a lot of shade for the romance genre. She dismissed all of it--she swears that romance is the original feminist genre, and that is why so many, especially men, make fun of it. It centers female desire and earnestness and some people can't handle that, you know? Long live Kate and the bodice rippers.
The podcast You Are Good did an episode on Titanic a year ish ago that is such a loving discussion about why Titanic is such a valuable (and also good) movie! One thing that I distinctly remember from that episode is that the hosts pointed out that only the first half of titanic is a romance… the second half is actually a quite intense disaster movie that critics of the film like to ignore!