A bigger boat

Titanic

(1997)

Somebody with some nautical expertise explain this to me:

• Iceberg is spotted, belatedly, dead ahead;
• Order goes out clearly: "Hard to starboard" (at which point I think: I know what that means; that means to the right);
• Pilot (or whatever you call the dude at the tiller [or whatever you call the steering wheel]) cranks the wheel counterclockwise, or to the left (at which point I think: maybe on a ship, turning the wheel one way steers it in the opposite direction, but no . . . );
• Ship (as predicted in an earlier bit of exposition) responds slowly to the redirection, but ultimately moves . . . to the left, to what I've always thought was port.

So who will dispel my ignorance?

And who will take this leaky 194-minute behemoth off my hands? The perfect candidate for deaccession on a night when I have nothing to get up early for but a soccer match (coincidentally, from the same city that was Titanic's home port, and one that produced better damn musicians than theme-song-vocalist Celine Dion), and anyway, through the magic of DVR, it will wait if need be.

It's hard to believe I actually liked this in the theater, though I know I did (though even then, the Celine D. song made me want to violate policy and run screaming from the theater while the end credits were still rolling). This is the 3rd time I've seen it, and on each subsequent viewing the pie-chart wedge of "likes" has become narrower and less sustaining. Those are a pretty couple of kids, I'll admit that, but god, what lame writing, and has there ever been starker testimony to the metastasis of sentimentality in Hollywood than the Oscar nomination given to the woodenly arch Gloria Stuart, whose only actual accomplishment was continuing to draw breath throughout the shoot?

OK, perhaps that's excessive, but I have now given a total of 10 hours of my life to this waterlogged turkey, and I'm a little bitter. Never again.