Cinemassholes #4: The Old Lady In Titanic

Like Edwin Starr said before he died: Old people, what are they good for? Absolutely nothing. I don't need to tell you that they all smell of stale biscuits and that they pretend to be deaf, at least until someone asks them to set the table. All they do is serve as a constant reminder that your hair is going to fall out, your dress sense is going to get worse and you're going to find David Dickinson television programmes interesting. The sole thing that elderly people excel at is telling stories, most of which last several weeks and conclude with an ending from a different story to the one they started. Take the old lady from Titanic, for example. She starts off by promising to tell underwater explorer Bill Paxton all about the valuable Heart of the Ocean necklace but somehow ends up telling some three hour tale encompassing her rich asshole boyfriend, her fop-haired lover, her relationship with her mother, the struggle of the class divide, blah blah blah. And some boat crash. Yawn.

Yeah yeah, I read all the books about the Titanic and I know what happened. Some snooty British guy built a huge boat and called it unsinkable, but forgot to actually check that it was. What a dumbass. If you ask me, I think it deserved to sink, purely to teach the guy a lesson - he won't be building any more ships any time soon. But what I don't need to hear is how some old lady copped off with an American-Irish gypsy in the back of someone's car, or how she learned to love, or how she realised that her upper-class family was suffocating her, - Jesus Christ lady, get to the point! The fucking diamond! Do you have it or not? These are busy people - believe it or not, they didn't spend millions of dollars on this deep-sea diving equipment just to leave it floating on the surface while they hunker down for the evening and listen to your fucking life story.

The boat sank, we get it. I'm sure it was terrible. It's like when you're forced to make small talk with some veteran in an old people's home and you just know he's going to bring up the Second World War, and you know it was horrible and people died and everything, but Big Brother is on in five minutes and Germany haven't even got around to invading Poland yet. So fair enough, feel free to talk about the cool bits, like when people bounced off the funnels and the massive propeller landed on everyone, but leave out the bits about you and that lower class steerage monkey, would you? It's all very nice and everything, but you've been telling the story for about half a day now. Look at Bill Paxton - he's been sat there as patient as you could wish, but really he's all like, 'look lady, I haven't done or said anything for an hour and half now, can you skip to the end?' but she won't quit it. You could raise the fucking Titanic in the time it takes to tell her story.

Finally, once she's finished telling the crew the intricate details of her entire life up to this point (including what she had for breakfast), she decides that it's best that she doesn't tell the crew the fact that she had the multi-million-billion dollar necklace the whole damn time, and has in fact just wasted everyone's time. So what does she do with it? Keep it and cherish the memories of her lost love and that fateful night in 1912? Put it up for auction and raise money for charities of survivors of other boat disasters? Sell it to the highest bidder and buy a full-size pool table and a wide screen plasma TV for the old folk's home? Nope. Try THROWING IT INTO THE FUCKING OCEAN. You daft, batty, spiteful old whore. You could have saved a hundred lives with that sparkly piece of shit but instead you decided that it'd be better off rusting at the bottom of the ocean. Next time try throwing yourself off the side instead and do us all a favour.

Of course, the upside is, she's probably dead by now. Ali