He should totally put that in on the Blu-ray release.
That'd be cool.
He should totally put that in on the Blu-ray release.
CGI render of the Titanic sinking from the NGC special last night here.
Did they add this to the film or was it just an exercise to show what happened?
CGI render of the Titanic sinking from the NGC special last night here.
We need Arnold and Biehn in Avatar 2.
Update video of sinking to be realistic, but forget that ice doesn't sink....
James Camerons Titanic is one of the most successful movies of all time, and I have no problem saying that its also one of the most beloved movies ever made. (Were now in the era when success doesnt 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 (Hes 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 Ive always found to be as ponderous as it is majestic.
Whats 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 youd 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, Camerons 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 didnt 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 movies 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 Ive 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 ships 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 Tiffanys, 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 couldnt stomach My Heart Will Go On, the final nail in the coffin of Titanic may well have been James Camerons Im 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 Id 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 Zanes 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 dAvignon; 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. Its courtly yet very alive. Besides, the real achievement of the script is its ingeniously organic structure the way that DiCaprios Jack, for instance, describes what its like to dive into the icy Atlantic water (he says its 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 Winslets 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 theyre going to die. (The gentility of the musicians is so touching its wrenching; the dastardliness of Zanes gilded douchebag is so monstrous its 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: Its Jack being welcomed to the upper-class quarters that he would never, by himself, have had access to; its the whole up-and-coming American middle class being ushered into the world of material indulgence; its Cameron inviting us aboard his movie; and its the movie, at the climax of that miraculous gliding shot near the end, when the rusty wreck of the Titanic morphs into the ships 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, cant 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 Camerons 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 wasnt 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 theres 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 cant abide the feminine spirit entering into the machine. And thats 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 didnt want to see a movie in which the heart but not the ship goes on.
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.
Titanic has an intermission at real IMAX theatres.
That's interesting. How long is the intermission and which scene is it?
That's interesting. How long is the intermission and which scene is it?
That's interesting. How long is the intermission and which scene is it?
"Well, I believe you may get your headlines, Mr. Ismay."
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 Id 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 Zanes 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 dAvignon; 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. Its courtly yet very alive. Besides, the real achievement of the script is its ingeniously organic structure the way that DiCaprios Jack, for instance, describes what its like to dive into the icy Atlantic water (he says its 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 Winslets 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 theyre going to die. (The gentility of the musicians is so touching its wrenching; the dastardliness of Zanes gilded douchebag is so monstrous its 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: Its Jack being welcomed to the upper-class quarters that he would never, by himself, have had access to; its the whole up-and-coming American middle class being ushered into the world of material indulgence; its Cameron inviting us aboard his movie; and its the movie, at the climax of that miraculous gliding shot near the end, when the rusty wreck of the Titanic morphs into the ships 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.
Looks like Titanic may end up getting to the $2 Billion mark$11.6 million opening day in China: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=3416&p=.htm
Looks like Titanic may end up getting to the $2 Billion mark
Yup. Only $75m away now, it should be close to if not over it after this weekend.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.
Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees.
IMAX right next to my house is going to show Titanic on the IMAX screen starting Friday. THIS IS IT.
Yeah, looks like mine is splitting it. half of the times are Titanic, other half Wrath of the Titans...
Something is better than nothing.
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).
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
A light projection of the Titanic on a 500-meter-long iceberg in the Northern Polar sea of Greenland, during the night of 13 April 2012.
The Blu-Ray is up for preorder at walmart.com:
http://www.walmart.com/cp/1093265
Release date is 9/14/12.
Amazon put it up too: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000NQRE1E/?tag=neogaf0e-20
Still waiting to see if they do a special edition version though.
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!
Hit 100 followers on the Titaniciceberg twitter I set up. Tomorrow should be fun.
I'm bummed you haven't caught on more, but 100 is decent. I retweet you to my whopping 150 followers often. Your tweets are hilarious.