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Netflix.com slash Slate. I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest, the

Unsincable Gab Fest edition. It's Wednesday, April 11th, 2012. On today's program, the 3D

re-release of James Cameron's Titanic, the death of Thomas Kincaid, the so-called painter of light. And finally, the wonderful Sam Anderson of the New York Times joins us to talk about his article about stupid games. Joining me today is Slate's deputy editor, Julia Turner. Hey, Julia. Hi, Steve. And of course, Dana Steven Slate's film critic. Hey, Dana. Hey, Dana.

The most sensible place to start with the re-release of Titanic, of course, is you.

And I want to ask you about your wonderful essay.

I'm using the word wonderful a lot.

But it's sincere.

You're a quite provocative and heartfelt essay about your reappraisal of the movie.

But first, let's just say a couple things about the film. Obviously, it came out in 1997, won a slew of Academy Awards and made a whole ton of money. It was the highest grossing film in Hollywood history until James Cameron, the director, himself supplanted it with Avatar a couple years ago. A tremendously successful, inexorably successful movie. It was everywhere. But you managed to, more or less, avoid it and disdain it as a graduate student. And what you wrote was a kind of rethink of that stance. Tell us about that.

Yeah, I guess, I mean, the very fact that the re-release of Titanic seems sort of like such a why right now, I mean, I guess it's not a complete why because we are at the centenary of the actual sinking of the ship. April 15th, 1912 was when the ship sank. So that was part of the excuse for bringing the movie back out again. But really, obviously, it was to some extent just a sort of way to rake in some more bucks and capitalize on the 3D fad and everything is being re-released

now in 3D. So why not Titanic? And so the very why-notness of the re-release had me sort of curious to go and see it. It's not like the re-release has been a huge success and people are flocking back. And I don't think that Titanic is necessarily being rediscovered by a new generation right now. But I was just kind of curious to rediscover it or really

discover it for the first time for myself. I didn't see it in 1997 when it came out out of some

sort of reflexive snobbery and sort of it was so so irritatingly omnipresent that I sort of felt

there was no need to see it somehow. In the years intervening, I saw it once sort of half-heartedly

on TV and didn't really get the point of it, while sort of admiring its construction. I do think, as with Avatar and as with the First Terminator, James Cameron is sort of an incredible craftsman of Hollywood pop artifacts. But seeing it in 3D in the theater for the first time just last week, I was actually a little bit ashamed of myself for having

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