In the August instalment of our Summer of Genre, we talked about that most ’70s of genres: the disaster movie. But the genre didn’t vanish after its heyday following the release of Airport in 1970: especially in the 1990s, as CGI made it possible to put bigger, badder, more destructive disasters on the screen, we got tornadoes, volcanoes, asteroids, often in double, as with Dante’s Peak and Volcano or Deep Impact and Armageddon. The biggest, most successful disaster movie of the era, however, was James Cameron’s epic Titanic, which combined the historical disaster with a love story between teen heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, who three years earlier had burst onto the scene with Heavenly Creatures and was well on her way to becoming a superstar. Titanic was at risk of becoming a disaster itself, but when it finally was released in late 1997, it became not just the highest-grossing film of the year but indeed the highest-grossing film of all time – until Cameron’s next film, Avatar. Join Sam and Julie for our August espresso as they sneak aboard that grand, doomed ocean liner. Did Titanic save the disaster movie genre, or did it sink it for good? And how well does Cameron’s blockbuster hold up almost thirty years after it originally came out?
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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 