Movieline

Why Titanic Works

"The movie has a big, babbling, stupid, awesome heart, and its hokiness and dopiness is central to its charm. All the great universal entertainers, the ones who moved the world rather than a select group of cultish admirers, have had a certain crazy tunnel vision to them, a total inability to see shades of gray, or understand jaundiced views of the world. (Think Michael Jackson, or Charlie Chaplin, or Steven Spielberg.) Titanic went huge — dominated the movie world, even still to this day—because it touched on basic, universally held human concepts of love and fate and time and loss. It did this in an extremely obvious way, but that's a reason to admire it and to mock it." [Deadspin]