MUSIC REVIEW | ***AUSSIE WEEK 2*** Easybeats – Good Friday (1967)

My whole life, I’ve had to listen to my dad bang on about the Easybeats.  “George Young and Harry Vander from the Easybeats are the only reason there’s an AC/DC”.  “They sold more albums in Australian than The Beatles”.  “Your mother’s a terrible cook.”  I’m not sure what the third one has to do with the Easybeats, but I just felt like I needed to round out his top 3 topics of conversation.

Reading an AC/DC biography, I learned that the first statement is absolutely true.  Without the guiding hand of their big brother George, Angus and Malcolm Young would never have had the business brains to make their band one of the biggest in rock history.  I still have no idea if the Easybeats really sold more records in Australian than the Beatles and this is no forum to discuss my mum’s culinary skills.  So, if for no other reason than to maybe have a fresh response next time my dad insists on talk about this band, I listened to Good Friday.

MOVIE REVIEW | ***AFI WEEKEND*** #83. Titanic (1997)

“The American Film Institute’s list of the 100 Greatest Movies was selected by AFI’s blue-ribbon panel of more than 1,500 leaders of the American movie community to commemorate 100 Years of Movies”. Every weekend(ish) during 2015, I’ll review two(ish), counting them down from 100 to 1.

 

“I mean, I got everything I need right here with me. I got air in my lungs, a few blank sheets of paper.”

Titanic plays a pretty important role in my development as a movie nerd.  It came out when I was about 16, and like everyone else alive at the time, I saw it in the cinema.  It was important because it was the first time I was really consciously aware that big budget, prestige movie making didn’t make a movie exempt from predictable clichés and lazy story telling.  Before that time, I’d recognised predictability and familiar structure in cheap comedies and bad horror.  But for some reason, I thought movies like this were above it.

Then I spent three hours in a cinema with Titanic refusing to surprise me in any way.  I haven’t watched it since, hoping and assuming that I never would have to.  Then I decided to do this AFI countdown, and shot myself in the foot.  So, almost two decades later, does Titanic still live down to my huge disappointment?