I've renewed my interest in Titanic over the past year or so and happened across this movie. I thought it was an OK movie after I saw it about two months ago but since then there's been an aspect that I can't get around.
I can go for how the townspeople were entranced by Horty's stories. They knew him, after all. But once he took the performance on the road and was charging admission to complete strangers, things changed; the least of which is that since they didn't know Horty, I don't think they'd relate to him the way the townspeople in the tavern did.
Imagine you were one of his audience members, seeing his show in the weeks following the disaster.
To imagine yourself as a member of the audience at that time, imagine that it's November 2001 and you're going to the show of someone claiming to be a survivor of the World Trade Center. You sit there and listen to the speaker go on and on about his torrid love affair with the coffee shop girl on the 80th floor sky lobby. Wouldn't he -- and you, for that matter -- be more interested in what it was like to survive the disaster? And after we've seen the pictures of the poor souls plunging from the buildings, and keeping in mind that the 9/11 lost are as dead as those on Titanic, wouldn't you think that having a set with the side of the building and an actress pantomiming the death plunge, much as Zoe was mimicking the drowning Marie, be in incredibly poor taste? That aspect of his production alone would make me consider Horty to be a shameless opportunist, regardless of what he actually said.
I can go for how the townspeople were entranced by Horty's stories. They knew him, after all. But once he took the performance on the road and was charging admission to complete strangers, things changed; the least of which is that since they didn't know Horty, I don't think they'd relate to him the way the townspeople in the tavern did.
Imagine you were one of his audience members, seeing his show in the weeks following the disaster.
To imagine yourself as a member of the audience at that time, imagine that it's November 2001 and you're going to the show of someone claiming to be a survivor of the World Trade Center. You sit there and listen to the speaker go on and on about his torrid love affair with the coffee shop girl on the 80th floor sky lobby. Wouldn't he -- and you, for that matter -- be more interested in what it was like to survive the disaster? And after we've seen the pictures of the poor souls plunging from the buildings, and keeping in mind that the 9/11 lost are as dead as those on Titanic, wouldn't you think that having a set with the side of the building and an actress pantomiming the death plunge, much as Zoe was mimicking the drowning Marie, be in incredibly poor taste? That aspect of his production alone would make me consider Horty to be a shameless opportunist, regardless of what he actually said.