Première magazine had a lot of editorial capital invested in Titanic. During its production the publication treated it to more than one story, including a very long on-set feature by John H. Richardson, one of the mag’s more stalwart and protean feature contributors at the time. Then there were multiple front-of-the-book updates, and our coverage culminated in a cover story featuring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. In that story much was made of the Jack and Rose romance and of course one had to ask (I forget who wrote this particular profile-cum-making-of-story) if any sparks flew between Leo and Kate and young Kate just laughed “he’ll always be farty, smelly Leo to me,” which pronouncement I parroted to her after a Q&A for Revolutionary Road, which also paired her and DiCaprio, and she laughed and said something implying (not unaffectionately, I must add) that their latest collaboration had given her little cause to revise her prior assessment.
In any event, in the runup to the movie actually opening, there was a lot of anticipatory schadenfreude about Cameron’s folly combined with the anticipation that once the end result was revealed, things would be EVEN WORSE for the filmmaker. I don’t recall if the screening a bunch of Première staffers attended was before or after Richard Corliss’ inaugural pan was published in Time, but there was much roiling, although of course said roiling can’t even begin to compare with the sort of thing that goes on nowadays with digitalsocmediagoddamnkids and all that sort of thing.
The colleagues I sat with were—as was I—all provisional Cameron believers who understood, or positioned themselves as understanding, the filmmaker as a contemporary manufacturer of DeMille-esque spectacle. We were gratified to see Michael Biehn turn up in the film’s opening minutes, a little let down when we realized that he was only doing a cameo, and positively mortified at the prospect of having Danny Nucci’s Fabrizio, who made Chico Marx look authentically native Italian by comparison, as Jack’s second banana for the remaining hours. On the other hand, he was the first character we looked forward to seeing drown.
For the remainder of the film, we took the good (great visuals, spectacularly deft narrative momentum) with the bad. There’s plenty bad, of course, from the phony class consciousness to the abominably on-the-nose dialogue, the know-somethingish name drops of Freud and company, the shameless “Bobby McGee” lift, and so much more. But again, as appalling as that stuff was, my crew and I accepted it with little overt showing of pain. Dialogue in a Cameron movie isn’t MEANT to be sparkling on any level; while I doubt that even with a gun to his head Cameron could concoct anything that approaches the level of wit of, God, David Lee Roth, never mind Whit Stillman, I don’t think that he ever actually wants to. Everything that’s said in a Cameron picture is either subordinate to, or merely meant to bolster or accent, the big thing that’s already in the frame. Like I said, spectacle.
Anyway, my colleagues and I kind of loved it. One of us allowed that it seemed to be EXACTLY the film Cameron had wanted to make, with the egregious exception of that dreadful Celine Dion song at the end, which was clearly his sole capitulation to a more venal manifestation of commercial consideration. We seemed to be alone in our enthusiasm. The other journalists in the relatively small Paramount screening room were kind of beside themselves in either embarassed silence or outright amused snarling. I remember particularly encountering the ever-egregious Jeff Giles in the men’s room, practically cackling over how the thing wasn’t going to make a DIME and that it would bankrupt Paramount AND Fox AND Cameron and blah blah blah blah. What a dink. So remember, kids: it’s not just in political punditry that you can be spectacularly wrong whenever it actually counts and still keep your job, as long as your job still exists.
I saw Titanic a second time at New York’s Leow’s Astor Plaza with my then-girlfriend, poor thing, and her almost 90-year-old grandmother, a dear woman with a spine of steel and, I suspect, a reactionary streak a mile wide. Although I never really got to test that suspicion, as the woman, a native of Naples, didn’t speak or really understand a single word of English despite having lived in Manhattan for some time. And it was really pretty amazing to watch it with her, as she was rapt for every second of the presentation, and an emotional wreck at the end. I attempted to comfort her, and when she was feeling better, I asked her, through her translator (my poor then-girlfriend, duh), if she had any valuable pieces of jewelry that she was hiding. Anyway. This experience kind of confirmed my feeling that, whatever else it may be, Titanic is, like Hitchcock’s Psycho, a verifiable, primal demonstration of the power of pure film language.
In a recent dripping-with-even-more-hateful-condescension-than-usual piece in Slate, reviewing the recent 3D re-release of the film, Dana “I Was Writing My Dissertation” Stevens admits to “dismissing” the picture on its initial release, but now sees the light, or a light, and describes Titanic as “a triumph of popular art—of folk art, really.” Really? I think her use of the term “folk art” is incorrect (and wonder what the fuck her dissertation was actually on, anyway), as there’s nothing particularly indigenous about Canadian citizen Cameron’s picture. I think Stevens really wanted to say “art that lots and lots and lots of stupid people like” but seized up just a little at coming right out with “stupid people.” Have to keep up liberal-piety appearances, after all. I, on the other hand, have no such qualms. And I think that the fact that stupid people the world over really, really love Titanic, and can love it without even understanding what the people on screen are saying (which is not to say that my then-girlfriend’s grandmother was a stupid person, mind you; no, not a chance, but that’s another story) is actually one of the things that make the thing an extremely noteworthy piece of cinematic, ahem, art.
’97 was around the time I started reading Première religiously (which in Mexico City was an expensive, hard-to-get, affair). I remember most of the Titanic coverage, as well as my disillusionment with the film.
It was an Oscar piece in the magazine, by the great William Goldman no less, in which he pointed out what the big problem with the film I thought was but as a kid I had trouble articulating: the love triangle doesn’t work because the Billy Zane character is a grade‑A douche.
I remember Goldman comparing it to Casablanca, a love triangle that works because Laszlo is a worthy guy, in many ways superior to Rick. The problem with Titanic was that Rose really didn’t had a choice. Jack was a straight way out from a miserable life, rendering the romance a little… boring.
Over time I’ve grown fonder of Titanic. But Goldman’s point stayed with me forever. It became the rule by which I judge romance in film.
Man, I really miss that magazine.
@ Rotch: You and me both!
Goldman’s points were well taken, and his Oscar pieces for us were always feisty and great reading. Of course Cameron IS, like DeMille, one of those creators who can make “Casablanca” look like a masterpiece of nuance. To call Zane’s character a pure silent-film-villain caricature isn’t even really fair to silent film villains. It is perhaps here that my “it is what it is” forgiveness of the film might frustrate some of its sensible detractors.
I never really thought of Rose/Jack/Cal as a love triangle. To me it was always an escape story, the tension coming from the fact that Rose would supposedly never recover from the shame her running off would bring down on her – you know, what with all them Edwardians being so uptight and all that.
Anyway, I’ve always loved Titanic. It’s one of those movies that’s so huge and ambitious that it’s really quite pointless to pick apart the bad bits when the bits that DO work – which is most of the film – are so fantastic.
I could go on about Titanic for hours but I haven’t got enough pens. All I can say is that everyone moans about how ‘they don’t make them like THAT anymore’, but when someone eventually comes along and ‘makes one like THAT’, everyone moans!
A very thoughtful defense of the film, Glenn. I’ve always been a detractor of Titanic, and not always a sensible one, Titanic precisely *because* of its emphasis on spectacle. But your argument about the strength and the integrity and, finally, the art of that spectacle, make me want to view the movie again, something I never thought I’d say about this film.
I saw a relatively early press screeneing at paramount. You cannot imagine the tsunami of bad press “Titanic’ was getting before it opened. Knives were being sharpened to haul out metaphors that hadn’t been utilized since “Howard the Duck” muhc less “Heaevn’s Gate.” yet it was clear to me right from the start Cameron knew precisely what he was doing, for the film begins not in the past but in the present. We’re in a diving apparatus going down to investigate the sunken wreck. Discoveries are made and the Fabulous Goria Stuart makes her grand entrance as Old Rose. This is one of the main reasosn why “Titanic” works so well. We know the ship sank – no suspense there. But the computer mock-up that the explorers show Old Rose sets the stage for what’s to come. For when we get to the climatic sinking we knoiw how it’s going to take the different parts ot the ship down even though the characters don’t.
The Jack and Rose romance is as corny as they come. But when you put a first-class girl and a steerage guy together you’ve granted yourself a prime opportunity to go all over the ship. Cameronknows we want to see what the most luxurious vessel of its kind was like and Jack and Rose are our means of exploring it. So there’s plenty going on before the sinking, and Cameron puts it across with everything he’s got.
“Titanic” isn’t a film of deep insight or subtle with. Its big, brash and scremaingly obvious. And frankly it wouldn’t have worked any otherway. Add to that a new generation of teenager grils who had never seen a tragic romance before. That your boyfriend would go so far as to die for you was transcendent.
Not it’s not “The Rules of the Game.” But as Pure Unadulerated Movie there are precious few super-spectacles than can match “Titanic.”
Seeing Titanic as a 15 year-old on opening night in 1997 remains one of the most extraordinary atmospheres I’ve experienced in a cinema; teenage girls sobbing and teenage boys whooping as the ship went down. Seeing it again for the first time since that night, I was delighted to find that it holds up extremely well – in fact, I wonder if there will be a more satisfying blockbuster released in 2012?
In the 15 years since Titanic came out I can’t think of many major films that have really delivered in the way this one does, and fewer still that have displayed the utter confidence and mastery that Cameron exhibits in the film’s second half. Avatar aside, I guess The Lord of the Rings is the only one that comes close to matching this for ambition, directorial vision and mass appeal, but I’m in no hurry to re-watch those pictures any time soon, whereas I’d gladly see Titanic on the big screen again. I love Glenn’s anecdote about the old woman who spoke no English being so moved by the film. For all the cynicism and snark Titanic has provoked over the years, a story like that gets to the heart of what makes this film special.
“Not it’s not ‘The Rules of the Game’…”
Yeah, but is even ‘The Rules of the Game’ ‘The Rules of the Game’? I mean, critics will tut-tut at Ozu’s oeuvre-spanning use of toilet humour but Renoir’s extended ursine antics always seem to get a free pass. But I digress…
When I saw TITANIC on opening day, the start time was delayed by about 10–15 minutes, and then when it finally started, it stopped after one or two minutes. A manager eventually had to come in and tell us we had to move to another theater, where we could (hopefully) watch the whole thing uninterrupted. I think it’s pretty safe to say the audience I was with was pretty pissed off, and were ready to trash the film. 3 hours and change later, I think most, if not all of us, were in a different mood entirely, being completely caught up in the movie. Didn’t stop us from accepting free passes from the theater ushers afterwards (back when they actually did things like that), but still.
I’ve seen the movie a couple of times since then, and yes, the dialogue isn’t great (though it’s better than what Cameron wrote for AVATAR), yes, Zane gives the weakest performance of the film (though I agree with Owain Wilson Jack represents an escape for Rose, not the third of a “love triangle”), and yes, I intensely dislike Celine Dion in general and that crap song in particular, but the images, the conviction of DiCaprio and Winslet, and the sheer narrative momentum is still captivating for me today. I remember explaining to my father (who culturally speaking didn’t like much made after 1960) and saying if David O. Selznick had been alive in December of 1997 (or come back to Earth then) and had seen TITANIC, he would have nodded in recognition.
I very much enjoyed Titanic on my initial viewing, with the obvious quibble of the whole Billy Zane subplot. You’d think dealing with escaping the Titanic would be enough drama, without the Billy Zane character trying to murder Leo as well. But to make a mass-market confection that both highbrows and lowbrows can equally love requires a compromise or two.
perfectly articulated Glenn. Titanic is A‑plus spectacle with bad celine dion anthem pasted on the end. Looking past some dialogue issues, I’ve always felt the film is apex of narrative film-making (and have taken endless rafts of shite from friends for expressing such) and to hear that non-native-nonagenarians concur fills me with bliss
Michael Biehn is in TITANIC?
“What a dink. So remember, kids: it’s not just in political punditry that you can be spectacularly wrong whenever it actually counts and still keep your job, as long as your job still exists.”
Amen to that, especially the last part.
Now, I haven’t seen TITANIC in a while. Someone please refresh my memory. When does Biehn appear?
BTW, one of the things I love about TITANIC are the actors Cameron used to fill out his ensemble: Suzy Amis, Kathy Bates, Frances Fisher, Victor Garber, Bernard Hill, Bill Paxton, Gloria Stuart, David Warner and Eric Braeden. For Pete’s sake, who bothers going out of their way to cast Eric Braeden anymore?
Clearly I am not the kind of moviegoer for whom this post was intended. I’m probably the only 13 year old who preferred GANDHI to ET, and although I’ve seen the former several times since then, I have never shown any desire to rewatch the latter. My idea of a great looked down upon movie spectacular is AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS, and I prefer THE ENGLISH PATIENT to TITANIC (Niven and Fiennes are both remarkable, DiCaprio and Winslet are not). I’d rather show more sympathy for the unsuccessful TORA TORA TORA than the ridiculously successful TITANIC. I didn’t like the movie when I first saw it. Perhaps I might want to rewatch the second half for the first time in a decade, but I’m reminded of Pauline Kael’s comment about THE TOWERING INFERNO, “Oh, there’s a juicy one” or words to that effect as 1500 people drown.
The way that Cameron’s movies use the latest technology, enormous wealth and corporate power in TERMINATOR 2, TITANIC and AVATAR to denounce techonology, wealth and power is as schizophrenic and simple-minded as Stalinism. To me ALIENS is the only movie of his that works, because it’s the only one where the core relationship is emotionally plausible. And the way TITANIC sneers at one millionaire as he is about to drown is a classic example of Clinton era liberalism: sneering at the rich and privileged 85 years ago, while squishing MOTHER AND SON into nonexistence or repealing Glass-Steagall in the present. That many people were deeply moved by it is one thing. I wish I knew more people who could be enraptured with me at A TASTE OF CHERRY, PRINCESS MONONOKE, or LOST HIGHWAY.
“The way that Cameron’s movies use the latest technology, enormous wealth and corporate power in TERMINATOR 2, TITANIC and AVATAR to denounce techonology, wealth and power is as schizophrenic and simple-minded as Stalinism.”
The funny thing to me is that the pitch-perfect Soviet Social Realism is a central part of the reason why Cameron’s pics make billions, why they make more than ANYONE else’s. And no one ever seems to talk about it.
Hell, I was hooked on Avatar the minute I realized he’d made the US Military the bad guys.
Partisan’s comment was much more alarming to me during the few confused moments when I thought s/he was CURRENTLY 13 years old, rather than 13 years old the year GANDHI and E.T. were released.
Maybe next time they release it cameron can CGI Mitt Romney and the Koch Brothers into the montage of drowning millioaires.
If the film has any major flaw, it’s that there aren’t ENOUGH scenes of David Warner playing an evil butler. And an evil butler named “Lovejoy,” no less!
Sorry to offend, but I don’t know of any other way to react to Partisan’s comment than to highlight my own astonishment that there is a film lover out there who likes GANDHI, AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS, THE ENGLISH PATIENT and TORA TORA TORA.
L.A. Confidential is still better.
“Sorry to offend, but I don’t know of any other way to react to Partisan’s comment than to highlight my own astonishment that there is a film lover out there who likes GANDHI, AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS, THE ENGLISH PATIENT and TORA TORA TORA.”
Well, I still like THE ENGLISH PATIENT, but agree about the other three.
Mr. Dayoub, astonished is the word.
I do not like TITANIC, I have never liked TITANIC, I do not like James Cameron, and I do not feel bad about it, nor do I feel like a snob for holding these opinions.
One thing that really bugged me about the whole TITANIC thing – and this isn’t a fault of the film – is that I remember, for instance, seeing Siskel & Ebert review it, and one of them praised the film for making it very clear what exactly caused the ship to sink. It wasn’t until I’d seen A NIGHT TO REMEMBER that I realized TITANIC was hardly the first film to lay out the technical aspects of the tragedy in an easy-to-understand manner.
But speaking of A NIGHT TO REMEMBER…I mean…there are shots in that movie that Cameron was, I guess, just really, very fond of.
No one seems to have explained the Michael Biehn cameo. I haven’t checked this out yet, but watching it again the other night I noticed an actor who I thought looked a lot like him, not for one second thinking it really was him until Glenn brought it up.
I guess he’s talking about the scene in the pub when Jack wins the tickets in the poker game. The guy who looks like, or actually IS Biehn, is the one who loses the game, stands up to hit Jack but punches his friend instead.
I think our esteemed host was confusing Michael Biehn with another Cameron favorite, Bill Paxton – I just saw the film again last weekend (in 2D!) and I don’t remember Biehn anywhere.
I didn’t remember Goldman writing about the weakness of the “triangle” (he was very good about the film’s structural strengths, though), but that reminds me that I’m always bugged by romantic comedies where the heroine has to choose between our hero and a total douchebag – where’s the victory in our protagonist being preferable to a sleazeball? (that early Barry Sonnenfeld film For Love or Money is a prime example of this).
I thought the film held up extremely well on recent re-viewing, though it was only that final reel or two of the sinking that was truly gripping this time. Though it felt like a long time to sit, I did appreciate the film’s deliberate pace. And I have to say, Kate has aged a lot better than Leo, though back in 97 (or 96, when probably most of it was shot), Leo was prettier than Kate. And his performance was more comfortable (though she gets a lot better over the course of the film).
I’m just sad that Cameron stopped making movies where the story mattered more than the spectacle. I’ve recently rewatched TERMINATOR, T2 and ALIENS and they are all great, especially ALIENS, which is probably still the best action movie I’ve ever seen. TITANIC? I’ll stick with my Blu-ray of THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE, which bothers to offer us some real characters to care about and some actual conflict along with all the spectacle.
The flipside to Glenn’s love letter:
http://jezebel.com/5898432/i‑re+watched-titanic-so-you-dont-have-to-youre-welcome
James Cameron is an interesting guy for me. Read an interview with him and it’s hard not to come away thinking he’s a pretty brilliant man. And yet his filmography doesn’t do much for me. I need to rewatch TERMINATOR.
I can just about get past the terrible dialogue but cannot believe in Rose and Jack as a couple. Besides diCaprio looking like a mere boy next to the splendiferous Winslet, his character is a terrible artist, no way a woman who just bought a bunch of Picassos would think his amateur drawings (by Cameron, right?) were any good.
So that sort of renders the spectacle a bit empty for me at the end.
Really? I find it hard not to come away thinking Cameron is a world-class tosser. And I say that as an unenthusiastic fan of many of his films which have all been fine but of-their-moment,failing to last too long beyond their shelf date. There are plenty of amazing set pieces but his stuff lacks poetry.
I’ve only seen Titanic maybe once or twice, and while I WANT to hate it, it’s very difficult. (Avatar, however, I have no problem hating with all my heart)
What I don’t get is, the last section of the film is so horrific, it’s hard to stomach, at least hard for me to stomach. I don’t think Cameron intended it to be pleasant (I don’t think he intended much of anything, really, but that’s another story), but I’d hear people going to see it multiple times, and I don’t care how romantic that film is, seeing all those dead, bloated corpses that minutes ago were human beings trying to scramble for something, anything to keep them afloat, that harshes my mellow.
I think what this piece is saying is that if something was unjustly underrated at some point, we should then accept its overratedness today.
My colleagues and I were sure, at the time, that Michael Biehn was the punching guy in the poker game. Sure looked like him. It’s looking as if that wasn’t the case. Another illusion shattered!
I’ve been mildly obsessed with the Titanic ever since I read A Night to Remember in my teen years, so to see its sinking depicted with such vividness (complete with frozen corpses) is one of the things that makes the film so effective for me, despite its flaws (mostly the writing of Billy Zane’s character, and anachronistic dialogue like “You are so annoying!”).
I apologize to our host for assuming that he’d simply confused Cameron regulars Paxton and Biehn – it never occurred to me that anyone thought Biehn was in that poker scene.
Caleb Deschanel shot the modern-day scenes (which were filmed first; I’m assuming he and Cameron ultimately didn’t get along, though in my day-job dealings with Deschanel he’s never seemed anything other than an exceptionally nice and decent person – as well as, of course, being a superb cinematographer). But in my latest viewing of the film, I was surprised at how good Russell Carpenter’s cinematography was as well, particularly in the first half of the film – some of the daytime ship scenes reminded me of Geoffrey Unsworth in his 70s prime.
[When I previewed this comment, I saw that I’d accidentally typed “to see tits sinking,” which is not the statement I’d meant to make]
Bettencourt, I totally agree with your comments on the last third of the film. It amazes me how little focus this section of the film gets from fans and critics alike. This is what the film is all about for me. It’s truly chilling to watch, and an incredible achievement by Cameron. It’s amazing no one died during the filming.
For the record, the most effective moment in the whole film for me is the high aerial shot of the sinking ship, totally alone in the ocean with a tiny, pathetic flare going up for no one to see.
Generally, I stay out of the Titanic discussion because I was never able to sit through the entire thing, but I am compelled to add to the discussion:
Hooray! I’m not the only one who confuses Michael Biehn with Bill Paxton!
I love ‘The English Patient’, ‘Princess Mononoke’, ‘The Rules of the Game’ AND ‘Terminator 2’.
I’m far from ‘Titanic’s biggest advocate, not even especially a fan, but I do feel that the more vituperative attacks it attracted (also the case with, say, ‘The Lion King’, of which I *am* a fan) are like Al Gore’s ostentatious exasperation during the first debate with Bush – such bad-tempered hyperbole just ends up undermining yourself more than the object of your ire.
I mean, remember Ewen McGregor denouncing ‘Titanic’ as embodying everything that was wrong with Hollywood? And which modestly-budgeted, wittily-scripted indie feature did McGregor sign up for not long after? Oh yeah – ‘The Phantom Menace’!
Wonderful post, Glenn. I am with Jaime; there’s a book in here somewhere. And perhaps the Nights You Don’t Remember could be incorporated in some sort of avant-garde way. 🙂
@Dan Coyle: I’m so glad you pointed out that this film is far from some action/adventure romance on the high seas, but contains a great deal of stark horror, more than any other Cameron movie for sure. In contrast to you, though, I’ve always thought Cameron’s refusal to pretty up what hypothermia is like, what people act like when they know they’re going to die, the fact that “women and children first” was reinforced at gunpoint, and the fact that of all those lifeboats, only one rowed back to take in more survivors, was one of the film’s great strengths.
@The Sire and Dan Coyle – See, that’s my thing with TITANIC. The only time the film really works for me is when it shifts its focus from our heroes, or pretty much any of the characters with major speaking roles, over to the mass tragedy. That stuff works, and Cameron’s “Nearer My God To Thee” sequence is probably the best thing he’s ever filmed. It’s the other 2 hours and 45 minutes I don’t care for.
“this film is far from some action/adventure romance on the high seas, but contains a great deal of stark horror, more than any other Cameron movie for sure.”
I think the reason Cameron connects all across the spectrum is his mastery of elevated stakes. (Well, that and the pitch-perfect Soviet Social Realism.) Even in The Abyss, a movie I wasn’t too crazy about overall, the scene where Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio faux-drowns provides enough stark horror to justify the ticket price just by itself.
I don’t understand the line of thinking that allows, “Yes, the dialog sucks, and Billy Zane’s character is a nightmare, and the long chase scene is ridiculous (and probably insulting to the dead), and the Italian BFF is horrible, and the class stuff is simplistic, and it’s ahistorical as all hell, and the CGI falls apart on a TV screen, but IT COMMUNICATES, by cracky–and so ipso ergo it must be good. It’s such a low bar, one met by so many movies…(And the Celine Dion song is the least of its problems. At least you can walk out without missing anything then.) Cameron’s had his triumphs but, barring that astonishing overhead shot someone mentioned above, “Titanic” was a real slog for me. Victor Garber is no Michael Goodliffe, and that difference runs like a canyon between it and “A Night to Remember”. Ditto the two ways we learn of the passenger/lifeboat ratio: a) from Goodliffe, soberly answering a question the captain asks upon hearing that the ship is going to sink (and followed by Goodliffe’s great line “I don’t think the Board of Regulations ever envisioned this situation…*Do you*?”); and b) helpfully chirruped by Kate, who along with her prescient taste in “Art” also understands the scale of what’s about to happen faster than anyone else on board the ship. Yeesh.
And just by the by, I met a survivor once, when I was a kid. I was totally enamored with the sinking and had already read Lord’s book and seen the Stanwyck-Webb disaster-in-its-own-right on TV, when someone at my grandparents’ 50th anniversary party pointed out a guy (he looked ancient to me) and told me he’d been on the ship. He was completely nice when I first walked up to him, and told me that he’d been an infant when he was passed into one of the boats and remembered not a thing about that night. That wasn’t good enough for me; I was positive he had to remember *something*, so I began bombarding him with every detailed question I could think of. I even asked him if he knew the Strouds. The poor guy finally literally turned his back on me and wouldn’t speak to me anymore, which is a hell of a thing to do to a seven year old kid. Of course, it *was* the “Titanic”…
Re Dayoub and Lipranzer: I should also add that my favorite Disney movie is ALICE IN WONDERLAND.
@TheSiren: Oh, don’t get me wrong- I think that’s magnificent filmmaking on Cameron’s part. But it’s so traumatizing it was mildly surprising to me that people would want to see that again and again.
@bill: James Cameron “borrowing” from a Night to Remember? Why, whatever do you mean? Actually, for more fun, google “Epic Comics” and “Timespirits”. You’ll see some rather… familiar looking creatures.
And finally –
http://fablog.ehrensteinland.com/2012/04/14/the-titanic-is-just-so-gay/
Thank you, Tom Block. Ridiculous how many apologists this film has. So now a film’s final third being executed well is enough to excuse most of what came before?
And it’s ironic that Oliver C mentions The Phantom Menace. I’ve asked this before but it bugs me that Titanic suffers from similar shortcomings yet is given a free pass. If one film can be applauded for its visuals, so can the other. And I think Lucas is a superior frame composer. Titanic has a more focused climax; I’ll give it that.
Personally, I preferred Avatar by a lot, finding it to be a significantly more monumental theatrical viewing experience. Stephen Lang > Billy Zane!
And back to another earlier comment, The English Patient has no business being compared here. Anthony Minghella was a wonderful writer, and created almost all the dialogue for that film in what may be the greatest work of adaptation I’ve ever seen. And the film has 10x more depth and poetry than anything Cameron has ever put to film. Of course, it’s never been cool to champion Miramax prestige projects, with many otherwise intelligent film critics disregarding them as middlebrow while embracing philistine-fodder works like Titanic.
Whatever.
What lazarus said. Particularly re: frame compositions of Lucas, Avatar being superior to Titanic (Cameron is a master sci-fi filmmaker, outside that box = not so much) and championing of The English Patient, which has more artistry in its title credit sequence than Cameron managed in three hours of Titanic.
I’m with Elaine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B57bOy2Dzjg
Ah, poor Billy Zane. As I think I’ve said on SCR before, he’s the only one of the three leads who’s in period. And I swear there are hints – in the breakfast scene, especially – that both he and Cameron took some cues from Welles’s performance as the young Charles Foster Kane. Anyway, I think Zane read the cartoon-expressionist nature of the movie better than either Kate or Leo did.
Thank you Lazarus: Fiennes saying “I can still taste you” is sexier than anything DiCaprio does.
‘Dana “I Was Writing My Dissertation” Stevens […] (and wonder what the fuck her dissertation was actually on, anyway)’
Not that it will change the pleasure or displeasure… HER… writing provides me, but after years of assuming she was a man, not in any self-concious way but merely on account of the mental voice I automatically assign to every writer solely based on his or her name, this comes as quite a shock, and surely, or sorely, I’m not the first one. And very possibly I won’t be the last in placing all blame of this particular exclusively on a certain Mr. Andrews.
Boy, she was pretty.
Nah, she was nothin’ special.
She was all right…but my favorite is Rita Hayworth.
I like Betty Grable.
I like Dana Andrews.
Are you kidding? Dana Andrews is a man.
She is?
Yeah. Didn’t you eversee “Crash Dive”?
With a name like Dana?
– Woody Allen, Radio Days
In re Bill’s comment about Cameron’s having seen “A Night to Remember” several times it’s also plain that he checked out the Nazi version, which has some thematic and visual similarities. (And I bet the makers of “A Night to Remember” also saw the German picture.)
I seem to remember that Cameron has come out and admitted he borrowed a lot from A Night to Remember (my single favorite shot in both movies is the image of a little girl beaming with innocent delight when the first distress rocket goes up, because to her it’s a fireworks show). And while I haven’t seen the Joseph Goebbels version, I recall seeing a claim on imbd or someplace that ANtR literally uses some footage from it in the sinking scenes – kind of fascinatingly, since the German Titanic was anti-British propaganda and A Night To Remember (all about the courage of the fearless crew, really) is a stiff-upper-lip British WW2 movie in disguise. Not that I don’t agree with the Siren and others about how good it is.
What’s most fascinating about the Nazi “Titanic”
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036443/fullcredits#directors
is that its director Herbert Selpin was overheard makign anti-Hitler remarks during production. The SS came right on the set took him away had executed him. Talk about “Creative Differences”!!!!
That “Titanic” starred Sybelle Schmidtz who was a rising star of the Nazi era. When it was over so was her career, leading to drug addiction and death. Fassinberder’s “Veronika Voss” is a film a clef about her.