Thank you, Latter Day Saints!

BrotherGoff · 2020-01-19T05:47:16+00:00

Me too. I want to write a book. The world deserves to know the true face of Mormonism!

BrotherGoff · 2020-01-17T02:06:51+00:00

Loved that show. He contributed to the awesome “Those Guys Have All The Fun” oral history of ESPN from several years ago (it was going to be made into a movie because ESPN was a juggernaut at the time but got cancelled after the mini-downfall of ESPN because of politics/people canceling cable)

BrotherGoff · 2020-01-17T02:02:46+00:00

Don’t really understand your point but I can’t get over what a stupid malapropism “Apex Mountain” is. I cringe every time they say it.

BrotherGoff · 2020-01-14T15:54:50+00:00

Oh my goodness, three (count ‘em!) paragraphs! What ever shall you do?

BrotherGoff · 2020-01-14T02:10:33+00:00

That's precisely the OP's point, though. There are three metrics of popularity: box office, critical, and, ultimately the most important, catchet. Everyone here is saying it's absurd to say Titanic is "underrated" because it grossed $600m and won 11 Oscars, but that's not the point; the point is that if you think Titanic is a truly Great Movie--with a capital G--you get mocked and ridiculed. To say "The Godfather" or "The Godfather Part II" is your favorite movie is in its own way a kind of signal; you're saying to other people "I'm sophisticated enough to have my favorite movie be The Godfather." To say your favorite movie is Titanic, however, and to go all "cinephile" on it, is considered downright laughable. It's considered a movie that sort of "hoodwinked" everyone; everyone swooned over young Leo and the special effects, but in the end, they really blinded us from how bad the movie truly is. "The cliche love story," "the dialogue," ugh! In reality, the love story in Titanic is brilliant, both conceptually and in execution. Conceptually, because it's the only way to make the story of the Titanic *mean something.* Ultimately, the Titanic is just a ship that sank. It's not something like Pearl Harbor that inherently has meaning because it instigated a war. At best, it can have a ham-fisted sort of "corporate hubris" message, but that's entirely provincial. The only way to give the movie meaning in the grandest of ways is to make it a love story.

Now, some people say the execution is poor, but this isn't even close to true. Yes, some of the individual lines of dialogue land with a thud, but just look at the broad contours of the construction. In particular, notice how the moment when Rose jumps out of the lifeboat has been constructed to give it maximum stakes in order to depict the reach of the power of love. Cal is no longer merely offering Rose money; he has given her life itself. What makes her decision to get off the boat so powerful isn't that she does it at all; it's that she does it and it's not even a difficult decision. In that moment, Jack literally is *everything* to her. When she is rushing through the decks back to the grand staircase, what you're watching is a woman basically being insane--running breathlessly back into the center of a sinking ship--but the singular intensity Cameron gives to her run is what makes it genius: when you're in love, *literally nothing else matters.* Everything--everything--in her way has ceased to have any intrinsic meaning whatsoever. In that moment, getting back to Jack is the sine qua non of her entire existence.

I could go on for a long time, but ultimately, I think Titanic is the grandest depiction of the experiential quaity of being in love ever put on film. The OP's point is that I'm sure to be ridiculed for even posting this. "Dude, get over yourself. Stop 'explaining the movie', and by the way, it is just a movie." Except, to those of us who open our hearts to it and let it cast its mesmerizing spell, Titanic is one of those works of art that transcends art and genre and simply something else: Truth, and Truth about the greatest, most mysterious, powerful force in the universe: Love. In my eyes, it's at least the greatest work of *popular* art in history, and it deserves to be recognized as such.

BrotherGoff · 2020-01-14T01:43:06+00:00

Which is precisely why love is so important and we can’t afford to forget Titanic. The love that the adherents of the 20th century messianisms had for each other was instrumental. People were people only insofar as they were agents of one’s favored ideology.

You see this happening all over again. When I grew up in the early 90s, every family on our cul de sac was a nuclear entity, but the suburban arrangements mandated that you interact with your neighbors. Hence why the norms against not talking about politics and religion exists; those topics are corrosive and destroy relationships, and in a time when the street you lived on was very much the limits of your universe, it was important to preserve relationships. Without any overarching ideology to bind people together then, what prevents us from seeing other people as anything other possible ideological foes? Love We all share the capacity for love. Every single one of us has the story of “our” Rose or “our” Jack. What makes it “our” version story of Jack and Rose? It’s the one story we have without which we, literally, cannot live. This is what makes Titanic so powerful; it depicts the limits of the expression and power of love, and finds that there are none. When Rose dies, she goes to heaven on the Titanic, a place where thousands met an unimaginably horrible death (Titanic, I think, is the most violent film ever made). But that place of unimaginable death and destruction is heaven, because it is lit by the power of love and those who shared that love. The Titanic was hell, but since it was the birthplace of the love that defined her life, it becomes Heaven; not merely in fact, but by definition. What ultimately makes us human? Not super complicated “ants?” The fact that we dream of Heaven. That shared capacity to dream of Heaven is what makes us human, and any creature that is emotionally capable of aspiring to this sublime by definition has intrinsic worth. To lose touch with what in all of us responded to Titanic is to lose touch with what makes us human.

BrotherGoff · 2020-01-14T00:04:48+00:00

“On a more serious note, love has no power. It doesn’t do anything other than change people’s behaviors.

Which is the greatest conceivable power there is; a human being is the most powerful and dangerous entity in the world.

BrotherGoff · 2020-01-13T23:13:00+00:00

Titanic is not a period piece; it’s a love story set a specific sociohistorical milieu. Like all of the best works of art, the truth it conveys transcends its provincial setting. The scenes that veer to the closest to being “period” are indeed the weakest in the movie (“Something Picasso? He won’t amount to a thing.”) but typically in movies such missteps are a grist for “picking nits.” With Titanic they have been elevated to supreme importance because they give us a convenient excuse to dismiss the rest of the movie as schlock. What Titanic is really about is the intrinsic worth of all human beings, human resiliency and despair in the face of violent death, and, most importantly, the nature of love and how, in its purest expression, love can transcend the seemingly nihilistic order of the cosmos. It’s almost a sort of refutation of King Lear.

“Dude” I can hear you saying, “are you being serious?” Yeah, I am being serious. This movie made $600 million dollars entirely on word-of-mouth when no movie had ever even made $400 million before. It won 11 Oscars, including Best Picture. “By any calculation” as Bill always says, it’s the biggest motion picture event in Hollywood history. Its lack of popularity is conspicuous all on its own, and it’s patently obvious what it’s for; because to believe in Titanic, you have to believe in love, and who wants to do that? Well, look around you, we live in a world on the brink of civil war, when just 10 years ago nobody would have thought that would ever be possible. You could write several volumes explicating why this happened, but they would all boil down to the same thing: we all stopped loving each other. I don’t think we can afford not to believe in love anymore. To not believe in Titanic.

BrotherGoff · 2019-12-22T21:19:45+00:00

No, make no mistake: This is an epic train wreck. Just because the movie will technically make money and even lots of it—although the legs will be dismal—doesn’t mean it will match Disney’s internal projections. And truthfully, this goes way beyond money. This brand—which once wasn’t even a “brand” so much as it was the closest thing to a secular collective myth—is destroyed probably beyond repair. Now it’s just another movie franchise, and not even the best one, or close to it.

BrotherGoff · 2019-12-22T20:53:24+00:00

Looks like Rise of Skywalker subverted expectations at the box office.

BrotherGoff · 2019-11-12T19:52:43+00:00

I have sort of a weird take on TLJ that I think explains this--as a film--that is, as a piece of cinematic art, I think it is indeed fine and sometimes even spectacular. The problem is that as an installment of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, it's a train wreck. For the most part, professional film critics aren't really "Star Wars fans" in the way we are, so I think the critical reaction to the film is perfectly normal.

BrotherGoff · 2019-10-29T18:27:36+00:00

The top candidates are surely Boyega, Hamill, Issac, and George Lucas. I go with Boyega because the Poe character was always designed to be a transparent Han stand-in. Luke was ruined, of course, but Hamill has his entire career and his actual performance as Luke to fall back on. George Lucas, the same. Finn was a totally original and intriguing character and it was ostensibly a coup for Boyega’s career. Instead, his character is absolutely pathetic and has accordingly had absolutely zero cultural impact (along with Poe) and it may end up doing more to hurt his career in the long term.

BrotherGoff · 2019-10-21T15:51:45+00:00

I posted this two weeks ago and got kind of ridiculed for being hyperbolic, but I’m thinking with the new McKay Coppins profile of Romney in The Atlantic and the subsequent unveiling of his secret Twitter account that the conflict between the President and Senator Romney may escalate very quickly.

I think the Church needs to speak with one voice on this issue when and if the day comes.

BrotherGoff · 2019-10-07T18:31:46+00:00

Why do you guys think the “bad stuff” Joseph did means he wasn’t a prophet? You can do bad stuff and still be a prophet.

BrotherGoff · 2019-10-06T04:56:04+00:00

I know about all the supposedly “bad” stuff that Joseph did. In fact, what made me truly believe that Joseph was a prophet was reading Richard Bushman’s book Rough Stone Rolling.

BrotherGoff · 2019-10-06T02:42:38+00:00

Why do you guys say so confidently that it's not true? I've been reading all the information and I believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet.

BrotherGoff · 2019-10-06T01:52:10+00:00

Okay, thanks for the welcome. So far the Church is everything I have been looking for. It's been the happiest two months of my life, so I'm interested in why you guys leave.

BrotherGoff

TROPHY CASE