I hated Titanic, District 9 and Forest Gump, here's why.

And while I’m on the subject of movies (see previous post) here is a post that will discredit all my opinions on movies. Oh well.

I hated Titanic, and not just because I find Leonardo DiCaprio annoying. I also hated Forest Gump, though I have managed to forgive Tom Hanks for Joe Vs. the Volcano.  And I hated District 9 and Life is Beautiful. Why you ask?  I found them extremely offensive.

Fifteen hundred people died in the Titanic, they froze to death or drowned despairingly.  Those who survived watched family, friends and strangers sink to their deaths in a boat that was unsinkable.  As human tragedy goes, it was pretty tragic.  Watching 3 hours of a trite little love story that was far from original, all the while imagining the real life despair of the people in that ship was offensive to me. Those were real people and their very real suffering was minimized, banalized by focusing the story on fictional puppy love.  It wasn’t a stupid jeweled heart that sank to the bottom of the ocean, it was people. The point isn’t that the bearably believable DiCaprio character died for true love. The point is that 1500 people perished in that ship. Real people.

I hated Forest Gump for the same reason. Real people live with physical and mental handicaps daily. In real life they are shunned by society, locked in institutions, abandoned by their families and struggle to exist in a world that was not designed for them. They are not All American players, they don’t meet presidents, become war heroes and don’t buy Apple stock and become rich. Real people, real difficulties, real struggles, that is the reality.  Making light of that reality by inventing a character that overcomes all of his difficulties mostly by sheer luck diminishes the efforts of those who live with their handicaps. And that offends me.

District 9, boy, oh boy. The slums of South Africa are not populated by giant insect aliens.  The freedoms of giant insect aliens are not curtailed and denied on a daily basis. Giant insect aliens don’t live in abject hopeless poverty. Giant insect aliens are not subjugated by a society that sees them as inferior. Giant insect aliens are not beaten and tortured because of their status in society or the color of their skin. Once again, people are. Real, living and breathing people like you and me and it pisses me off that that movie should portray that level of injustice, that unbearable suffering as being endured by giant insect aliens. People! People exist under those conditions. Shit.

Well, you can imagine what I have to say about Life is Beautiful. I only watched it once, and I’m angry now just thinking about it. It’s a waste of celluloid, it’s contemptible and vile. A concentration camp prisoner keeping his son with him, sneaking him into dinner with German children, pretending it’s all a game. Yes I’m sure that happened every day in concentration camps. If only everyone had done that, the war would have been so much more pleasant for everyone.  Say, let’s do that in Iraq and Afghanistan right now, what fun!

You might be justified in saying that I missed the point of those movies. Perhaps I did. But similarly I would say that you missed the point I made about the same movies.  It bothers me when fiction purposefully imitates real life while at the same time disregards the people whose reality it is imitating. And it bothers me that I’m the only one bothered by that.