Wrecked References

For the last couple of days my TV and news feeds have been clogged with reports about the cruise liner that ran aground off the coast of Italy. I'm not surprised - people have gotten some amazing pictures of the wreck and nothing takes a news story to that next level quite like a great visual aid. Now, before you get all worried because you know the smart-ass voice that this blog usually takes, I'm not about to make fun of an accident that resulted in 11 deaths and where over a dozen people are still missing. I think it is absolutely correct that the Captain of the ship be charged with manslaughter as well as abandoning his ship, although I'm not sure why every seems to be focusing on the abandoning of the ship part of it - you would think manslaughter would be the headline-catcher. However, there is one thing about this story which continues to bother the hell out of me and that is how everyone keeps saying it is like a real-life version of the movie "Titanic". Not only is that factually wrong (which we'll get to in a second), but what offends me is that it's not even the right movie reference.

As my friends and family can tell you, one of my biggest pet peeves is when people quote movies incorrectly. I'm a stickler for getting the line exactly as it was said in the movie, otherwise I think you just shouldn't say it at all. (I was near someone the other day who was misquoting "Anchorman". Seriously, that movie has been out for nearly a decade and runs once a week on basic cable. If you're getting a quote from "Anchorman" wrong you're just lazy.) However, even worse than that is when people reference an entire movie incorrectly. So when I see a ship which has nearly capsized to one side my brain immediately goes to one boat movie above all the others: "Poseidon Adventure." To bypass what is clearly the obvious choice for a more popular movie is just annoying. Let's say you found yourself in a car chase up and down the hills of San Francisco. Are you going to say, "Hey this is just like "The Rock"!" because it is the more recent movie? No, you are going to go with "Bullitt" because it was the first and better movie.

Of course, this all stems from one interview that was done with one of the people rescued off the ship, who immediately said the crash was like experiencing "Titanic" for real. Now, if this woman was a little younger I would have forgiven her for going right to "Titanic", because no one saw the "Poseidon Adventure" remake that came out a few years ago (nor should they have). But, this particular woman was old enough that she had to be aware of the original. Her poorly-chosen movie reference slip of the tongue sent the media into a "Titanic"-theme frenzy and they attempted to make parallels between the two incidents, even going so far as to say that survivors had to jump into "frigid" waters to swim to safety. (For now we'll let it go that the very fact the ship was 100 yards from shore disqualifies it from being like "Titanic". And if you can't swim 100 yards I have to question why you took a cruise to begin with.) Honestly, you could almost feel some of these segment producers fighting with the urge to call James Cameron to get his thoughts on the crash.

I know that you want to keep going with the theme, but you can't disregard facts for the sake of a predetermined narrative (unless you work in 24-hour cable news, where that practice is actually encouraged). I did four seconds of research and discovered that the average temperature of the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Italy this time of year is about 55 degrees. You'll be lucky if the waters off Massachusetts get that warm by June. Clearly, this was not the same level of peril. But I think what drove me the craziest was that I never heard a single person say, "Hey, doesn't this look a lot more like "Poseidon Adventure" than "Titanic"?" I mean, have any of the people who work in news seen a movie that came out before 1990? (Especially ironic considering these same people act as though music stopped being made around 1995.) Look, I get that in this age where people have so many places to get information news programs need to make everything seem more dramatic to get people to watch the news and that movies are always going to be more dramatic than real life thanks to special effects and a powerful score. But if you're going to distort reality, I'm begging you to distort it around the correct film. Or, at least one with a less-annoying theme song - I've had Celine Dion in my head for two days.