• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

James Cameron's TITANIC |OT| Collide With Destiny

Status
Not open for further replies.

Ashhong

Member
Question, can someone really quickly go over the differences between digital and 70mm IMAX? I think I read before that digital has worse sound and a smaller screen, is that true? I remember seeing Thor in a digital IMAX and it did look smaller than a 70mm, but can't remember the sound.

I'm sad to see that pretty much no 70mm IMAX is playing Titanic, is there a reason for this?
 

strafer

member
James Cameron’s Titanic is one of the most successful movies of all time, and I have no problem saying that it’s also one of the most beloved movies ever made. (We’re now in the era when success doesn’t always hinge on deep fan love; witness The Phantom Menace, the Transformers films, or Khloe Kardashian.) Where Titanic may well be unique in the history of cinema is that it is also, arguably, the most hated beloved movie ever made. Any number of celebrated films, of course, have provoked backlashes. Just think of the strain of carping snootiness that has always gathered, like a pesky mosquito army, around the work of Steven Spielberg (“He’s too sappy! And manipulative!”), or the routine bashing of famous Oscar crowd-pleasers like Marty or Ordinary People or Shakespeare in Love, or my own persistent impatience with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a wandering-through-the-woods saga that I’ve always found to be as ponderous as it is majestic.

What’s special about Titanic is that the backlash happened so quickly, and became so widespread, and grew nearly as mythological as the movie itself. The film was released in December 1997, and a few weeks later, when it started to play around the country to surging, off-the-charts crowds, the voices of dissent had already begun to coalesce. For everyone who adored Titanic, and even (like me) thought that it was a heart-swelling masterpiece of old-fashioned Hollywood audacity, it seemed as if there was someone else who thought it was overrated and overblown. And you’d better believe that they were going to make sure that ship sank! According to the counter-myth, the movie was a cliché love story on steroids, brimming in every scene with terrible and even embarrassing dialogue. No one denied that the ocean-liner-split-in-two, deluge-in-the-corridors, crowds-falling-like-rats special effects were amazing, but in a funny way, Cameron’s indisputable virtuosity as a creator of doomy technological spectacle became the anvil of criticism used to drag down his skills as a storyteller. A lot of what the naysayers thought boiled down to this: Who does James Cameron, the man-machine auteur of the Terminator films and Aliens and The Abyss, think he is trying to pretend that he can write a real script…with dialogue out of some period costume drama…as if he were now trying to be the Merchant-Ivory of historical disaster films?

Then, of course, there was the teeny-bop factor. Titanic was a record-breaking smash because it drew from every demographic there was (do you know anyone who didn’t see it?). But its most feverishly publicized demo were the swarms of girls in their teens and early twenties who went to the movie to swoon, and weep, and gawk at Leo, who instantly became the biggest star on the planet, in the galaxy, in the universe. I had the privilege of meeting Leonardo DiCaprio at a party in New York a couple of months after the movie’s release (he was very smart and very nice — a playful dude free of bad energy), and I can testify that of all the occasions, in the years that I’ve done this job, that I have ever gotten to chat with a celebrity, this was the one time when I almost felt like I was meeting one of the Beatles in 1964. That was how electric the aura was that surrounded Leo.

For the critics of Titanic, however, that Leo-as-pinup element rendered the film a kind of Oscar-bait version of Twilight. The movie, in their eyes, was something cheesy and all too marketably romantic, a teen-idol bedroom poster in movie form (its most famous image — Leo embracing Kate, arms outstretched, on the ship’s bow — was that poster), something for the kids to swoon over. And so to take it at all seriously, to say that you actually got drawn into the love story, to say that it achieved the universality that great love stories do, would be the height of un-coolness. It would have seemed, at least to some, like saying that the Backstreet Boys were the equal of Nirvana. The Celine Dion theme song, as haunting a pop epiphany, in its way, as “Moon River” in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, was, of course, deemed so officially un-cool that it was recently dissed by no less than Kate Winslet (who said that it made her want to throw up). And for those who couldn’t stomach “My Heart Will Go On,” the final nail in the coffin of Titanic may well have been James Cameron’s “I’m the king of the world!” Oscar speech, a moment so nakedly nerdy that it really did deserve to be mocked. For the crucify-Titanic crowd, though, it was more proof that the movie was a sentimental sham built on a false bottom of ego.

Never, for a moment, did I buy that Titanic had a bad script. To me, it was the rare movie that achieved an old-fashioned quality that was classical and wholehearted, rather than starchy and square. But when I went back last week to see Titanic in 3-D, it was the first time I’d seen the movie since its original release, and this time I had my trash-dialogue geiger counter turned up on high. I really wanted to know: Did the Titanic bashers have a point? Was the movie a garishly written youth soap opera? I counted a handful of goofy lines, like Billy Zane’s idiot-jerk dismissal of Picasso (though actually, the real cheeseball element in that scene is the fact that the Picasso painting Rose has purchased is obviously supposed to be Les Demoiselles d’Avignon; are we supposed to think that that painting went down with the ship, throwing art history for a loop in the process?).

There are other lines you can pick at, but most of the dialogue in Titanic has a sharply colloquial old-meets-new flow. It’s courtly yet very alive. Besides, the real achievement of the script is its ingeniously organic structure — the way that DiCaprio’s Jack, for instance, describes what it’s like to dive into the icy Atlantic water (he says it’s like little knives going through you), thereby setting up the disaster that will happen several hours later and, most chillingly, foreshadowing his own death. Or the way that Winslet’s Rose is shown to be trapped by her status as insidiously as a Jane Austen heroine (if she spits in the face of her fiancé, it will mean that her family fortune will collapse like the house of cards it is). Or the way that Cameron, once the ship hits that iceberg, uses the final hour of the movie to sketch in a hundred little portraits of how people might really act when they know they’re going to die. (The gentility of the musicians is so touching it’s wrenching; the dastardliness of Zane’s gilded douchebag is so monstrous it’s totally authentic.) Or the way that that iconic shot of the Titanic dining-suite door opening up, with the head waiter beckoning us in, works on about four levels at once: It’s Jack being welcomed to the upper-class quarters that he would never, by himself, have had access to; it’s the whole up-and-coming American middle class being ushered into the world of material indulgence; it’s Cameron inviting us aboard his movie; and it’s the movie, at the climax of that miraculous gliding shot near the end, when the rusty wreck of the Titanic morphs into the ship’s creamy former glory, letting us know that the Titanic is now not just part of history but part of Heaven.

In other words: Man, did that script suck, or what? I now believe that the movie the Titanic bashers were talking about — the junky embarrassing one, the one with cringe-worthy dialogue, the one that only a teenager could love — is a figment of their imaginations. Yet the hostility directed toward Titanic, the venom that you will read by commenters on almost any article about the movie, including this one, can’t merely be dismissed. It has to be recognized for what it was, and still is: One of the founding manifestos of hater culture. Titanic came out just as the Internet was starting to rise up and merge into the ocean of our lives, and though, at that point, most of the hate directed at the movie was conversational and anecdotal, in spirit it was computer-viral. It was about fragments of resentment banding together and organizing themselves into a cult, a movement, an anti-fan club. It was Occupy James Cameron’s Unspeakable Dialogue.

What gave the movement its motivating force? What made the fragments band together like angry iron filings? If Titanic was one of the original lightning rods for hater culture, part of the reason that the film made such a perfect target is that what the haters were really attacking wasn’t “bad dialogue” so much as a huge, powerful, ambitious movie, by a geek-god filmmaker, that actually dared to be innocent about love. For if there’s one thing that Internet culture, with its immersion in hipness, control, technology, and a certain masculine mystique that binds all those things together, cannot abide, it is romantic innocence. It can’t abide the feminine spirit entering into the machine. And that’s the essence of what Titanic was. It was a movie that found love in the machine, even as the machine was destroyed. No wonder the haters hated it. Their real identification was with the machine. They didn’t want to see a movie in which the heart — but not the ship — goes on.

http://insidemovies.ew.com/2012/04/09/titanic-and-the-rise-of-hater-culture/
 

zoom29

Neo Member
Question, can someone really quickly go over the differences between digital and 70mm IMAX? I think I read before that digital has worse sound and a smaller screen, is that true? I remember seeing Thor in a digital IMAX and it did look smaller than a 70mm, but can't remember the sound.

I'm sad to see that pretty much no 70mm IMAX is playing Titanic, is there a reason for this?

I learned from Avatar that IMAX film's maximum length is about 2h45min, limited by the physical size of the roll.
That's why the re-released extended version was digital only.

However, I was surprised to see a local 70mm IMAX theatre was showing Titanic last week. I'm not sure if they remodelled it to digital or somehow the physical limitation was solved.
 
I learned from Avatar that IMAX film's maximum length is about 2h45min, limited by the physical size of the roll.
That's why the re-released extended version was digital only.

However, I was surprised to see a local 70mm IMAX theatre was showing Titanic last week. I'm not sure if they remodelled it to digital or somehow the physical limitation was solved.

Titanic has an intermission at real IMAX theatres.
 

GhaleonEB

Member

Good article, I found myself agreeing with nearly every point. In particular, this:

Never, for a moment, did I buy that Titanic had a bad script. To me, it was the rare movie that achieved an old-fashioned quality that was classical and wholehearted, rather than starchy and square. But when I went back last week to see Titanic in 3-D, it was the first time I’d seen the movie since its original release, and this time I had my trash-dialogue geiger counter turned up on high. I really wanted to know: Did the Titanic bashers have a point? Was the movie a garishly written youth soap opera? I counted a handful of goofy lines, like Billy Zane’s idiot-jerk dismissal of Picasso (though actually, the real cheeseball element in that scene is the fact that the Picasso painting Rose has purchased is obviously supposed to be Les Demoiselles d’Avignon; are we supposed to think that that painting went down with the ship, throwing art history for a loop in the process?).

There are other lines you can pick at, but most of the dialogue in Titanic has a sharply colloquial old-meets-new flow. It’s courtly yet very alive. Besides, the real achievement of the script is its ingeniously organic structure — the way that DiCaprio’s Jack, for instance, describes what it’s like to dive into the icy Atlantic water (he says it’s like little knives going through you), thereby setting up the disaster that will happen several hours later and, most chillingly, foreshadowing his own death. Or the way that Winslet’s Rose is shown to be trapped by her status as insidiously as a Jane Austen heroine (if she spits in the face of her fiancé, it will mean that her family fortune will collapse like the house of cards it is). Or the way that Cameron, once the ship hits that iceberg, uses the final hour of the movie to sketch in a hundred little portraits of how people might really act when they know they’re going to die. (The gentility of the musicians is so touching it’s wrenching; the dastardliness of Zane’s gilded douchebag is so monstrous it’s totally authentic.) Or the way that that iconic shot of the Titanic dining-suite door opening up, with the head waiter beckoning us in, works on about four levels at once: It’s Jack being welcomed to the upper-class quarters that he would never, by himself, have had access to; it’s the whole up-and-coming American middle class being ushered into the world of material indulgence; it’s Cameron inviting us aboard his movie; and it’s the movie, at the climax of that miraculous gliding shot near the end, when the rusty wreck of the Titanic morphs into the ship’s creamy former glory, letting us know that the Titanic is now not just part of history but part of Heaven.

In other words: Man, did that script suck, or what? I now believe that the movie the Titanic bashers were talking about — the junky embarrassing one, the one with cringe-worthy dialogue, the one that only a teenager could love — is a figment of their imaginations.

There are lines that clunk. There are a couple of scenes that clunk. But the dialogue is otherwise fine, and often quite wonderful. I guess this is why I reacted to Dax's post earlier the way I did: I've never understood the critique that the script is poor. Structurally it's quite brilliant, and I find I'm able to forgive the occasional poor line or brief scene (of which there are a couple). When I watched it with my kids I was intentionally making note of all the moments that don't work, and they are few and far between. And the peaks the film goes through are numerous and lengthy. Serious drama is handled pitch-perfect (such as the "I believe you may get your headlines, Mr. Ismay," scene), most of the romance is handled very well, ("He does landscapes,") and scores of minor characters are well established (Molly, Tommy, Ismay, Smith, Andrews, Ruth, and so on).

Titanic's script has some chinks in it, but it's one of the film's strengths, not detriments.
 
Wow, watched last Sunday the movie (tv series) about the Titanic on tv in my country. The first time I heard of this series was in this thread, so im going to talk about it here.
Why do i call it a movie? because in Spain, Germany and other european countries decided to ditch the series concept (seems to be 4 episodes all done till the sinking with different stories from what ive read) and make it a cronological movie instead. Ive read somewhere how the movie was edited made the series much better, let me tell you, if that made the movie better, the series has to be horrific, because the movie was boring, historically incorrect and shitty as fuck.

I love Downton Abbey, so this "movie" being done by the creator of that series, made me have hope, even if the commercials looked bad. I also read somewhere that the person who made this series hated James Cameron movie....
Lets start:
-The invented charcaters are atrocious. Boring and unlikable, all of them (you could save maybe the 2nd class maid that I found cute). The rich family? horrible, stretching, you could save the father, that seem the only one to think a little. The 2nd class irish family? the man is a cry baby and the woman and idiot (BTW the woman is one of the villians in the second season of Downton Abbey). The 3rd class family and the guy who wants to fuck the woman, because, hey, why not? Worst part of all. The only part where it seems the writer had a hang of it was with the maids and the staff with the rich families, at least you didnt hate those, although the butler breaking the book of the maid he loves is silly.

-But if you thought the invented ones were bad, o hoy! Just wait for the historic ones. Fast summary: Lightoller is the only that seemed like good guy from the crew. All the rest? in a range from fucking pricks to real assholes. Inacurrate assholes.
Captain Smith is portrayed as a racist, an idiot that seems more like the captain of the Costa Concordia than the Titanic, and worst of all... he is used as the villian. If you thought James Cameron fucked up Murdoch in the movie (and I didnt think it was as bad, an some info said he infact did shoot, although I still think he did wrong by making him nearly a corrupt) just wait to see what they did to Captain Smith.
The scene were he is in the wheel house with Murdoch, some snarky officers and Ismay has to one of the most face palm inducing of the whole movie, because its wrong in so many levels.
In this scene the writers are portraying Ismay as the good guy ("Dont go too fast, the Titanic is a luxury boat, not a record speed..." WRONG, lol at Bruce Ismay's character), Smith as the villian and the two snarky officers as some kind of lackeys (he lies to Ismay, then when Ismay goes, tell to his lackeys while laughing to fuck Ismay and put the ship at full throttel LOL), and Murdoch not as a saviour, but as a crybaby (Smith goes also after making this "joke", puts the two lackeys in command, Murdoch insults Captain Smith, BTW does this during all the movie, and the lackeys tell him to shut up if he doesnt want to be locked.) Its amazing how many things wrong can be seen in this scene.
Molly Brown's character is butchered (although they call her margaret if IIRC). Lightoller was not as good as its painted in this series (he lied during the trials only to save the name of the White Star Line in real life, this is in fact, also a problem in A Night to Remember, although there it was understandable, because anyone knew he lied at that time), Thomas Andrews was good when he talked with Ismay in the construction scenes, but then inside the ship turns intoa fucking idiot that only plays cards with the rich men (and a woman LOL) until the ship sinks, Jacob Astor doesnt look like him (I only knew it was him when he talk about her wife being pregant), and lots more inconsistencies.

-Logically its only a series for television, but the sets being wrong (dancing hall and smoking room the same with men and women at the same time its only an example), and that the ship seemed to only have like 50 people on board, felt TOO cheap.

BTW I never saw the whole movie (3 hours something) because just when the ship starts to sink (I saw 2 hours and a half of it), it was starting a special program of Cuarto Milenio (a famous spanish program about real misteries and things like that, although they also usually talk about historical events), where they were doing a 2 hours special about the Titanic. Thank god I changed channel becuase it was really interesting (although when they touched the spiritual or conspiratory subjects, like the 3rd ship theory saying that could be a german ship towing the iceberg, it was somewhat facepalming). Apart from that, the science, phsycology parts and historic facts were amazing.

I know that this is the OT for the Cameron movie, but being a big historic Titanic fan (not as much as Kagari though, I would love to have all the books, and the model, of the photo she posted here), I just lost a bit of respect for the creator of Downton Abbey, if its real he said that the Cameron movie is shit, after watching the awful work he did with his series. We all know that the Cameron movie have some historic inconsistencies, and that maybe the dialog in the first part is not as good, but what he did is horrible in all levels (acting, boring characters, historic facts...) so its not good if he is going to badmouth other people's work wich are actually much better than the shit he did.

If people are waiting for the next two episodes to air in the rest of the world, do not wait for something good, because is really a shipwreck (pun intended)
 

GhaleonEB

Member
Looks like Titanic may end up getting to the $2 Billion mark :)

Since opening on Wednesday, Titanic 3D has already made at least $53 million overseas, and that doesn't even count any of its other markets on Tuesday. That brings the re-release's worldwide gross to over $80 million, and it brings Titanic's total gross across all releases to $1.924 billion.
Yup. Only $75m away now, it should be close to if not over it after this weekend.

But the reissue bombed, guys.
 

Kagari

Crystal Bearer
Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees.

IMAX right next to my house is going to show Titanic on the IMAX screen starting Friday. THIS IS IT.
 

strafer

member
Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees.

IMAX right next to my house is going to show Titanic on the IMAX screen starting Friday. THIS IS IT.

46746733-thumb-up-.gif
 

Kagari

Crystal Bearer
Seriously, first week they chose Wrath of the Titans which is making less money than Titanic domestically... about time they came around. Might end up going with my mom.
 

Ashhong

Member
Oooooh theaters are changing to Titanic??? Time to check!

edit: still Wrath of the Titans at all of the 70mm IMAXs around me :(
 

Kagari

Crystal Bearer
Yeah, looks like mine is splitting it. half of the times are Titanic, other half Wrath of the Titans...
 
Saw the movie again today

Less people meant little to no distractions thankfully. And this movie really did a number on my eyes too after it ended. I think I've Titanic enough times to be completely satisfied
 
I didn't know there was an |OT| for this. I saw it last Saturday, and as always had me bawling by the end of the movie. The scene with the old couple, just thinking about it has me tearing up at work right now. It is an absolutely wonderful movie, and I think the acting is top notch as is the directing and the special effects. There are a lot of small things that really make the movie stand out.

GhaleonEB said:
There are lines that clunk. There are a couple of scenes that clunk. But the dialogue is otherwise fine, and often quite wonderful. I guess this is why I reacted to Dax's post earlier the way I did: I've never understood the critique that the script is poor. Structurally it's quite brilliant, and I find I'm able to forgive the occasional poor line or brief scene (of which there are a couple). When I watched it with my kids I was intentionally making note of all the moments that don't work, and they are few and far between. And the peaks the film goes through are numerous and lengthy. Serious drama is handled pitch-perfect (such as the "I believe you may get your headlines, Mr. Ismay," scene), most of the romance is handled very well, ("He does landscapes,") and scores of minor characters are well established (Molly, Tommy, Ismay, Smith, Andrews, Ruth, and so on).

I think you nail my opinions on the script Ghaleon. There are some really bad dialogue scenes, but overall the script is strong and the flow of the movie is excellent. Just a few cringeworthy dialogue moments. It certainly doesn't take away from the film at all.
 

Christopher

Member
For anyone who saw it how was the film transfer? I'm glad these movies are being converted to 3D because that means they get amazing restorations for Blu Ray releases :cool:
 

Kagari

Crystal Bearer
What is the best book to read not only about Titanic, but also about political and social climate at that time?

A Night to Remember
The Night Lives On
The Band that Played On
Sinking of the Titanic: Eyewitness Accounts
Titanic: An Illustrated History
 

Kagari

Crystal Bearer
Wow wtf did they use to project that? Are there any reports of how long the iceberg the Titanic hit 100 years ago?

And wtf is an Ultraviolet Digital copy...i don't want that shit. Take it out and lower the price!

It was pretty tall at least. The berg went all the way up to the height of the bridge... which you can see in the movie.

From the International Ice Patrol:

A. The exact size of the iceberg will probably never be known but, according to early newspaper reports the height and length of the iceberg was approximated at 50 to 100 feet high and 200 to 400 feet long.

In comparison, Titanic herself was 882 1/2 feet long.
 
Anyone following @TitanicRealTime? I'm a bit confused with the timing of their tweets. When they tweet about the ones where they've set the clocks back, they've been tweeting them at GMT time, not the ship's time. Makes me think they'll tweet "Hit an iceberg lol" at 23:40GMT when in actual fact, that will only be 20:40 for the Titanic :/

And I love the real time iceberg Twitter, so hilarious :p
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom