Titanic Raised

Maybe I was too harsh back in 1997, teed off at James Cameron's ferocious ego and the success of the picture. Maybe the new 3D -- and IMAX, in which I saw it -- has added a layer of depth that's actually psychological in nature. Maybe it's just that no one has spent that kind of money successfully making a huge epic Hollywood movie that isn't a science fiction or superhero movie since then.

No matter what it is, I found Titanic to be a revelation in re-release when viewing it yesterday.

It's long and towards the end it may seem to drag a little, but the movie is the full meal, something so rare these days. It has touches of David Lean in scale, John Ford in Irish spirit and Stanley Kubrick in technical audacity. It not only holds up very, very well, but it puts current movies to shame. When you look at Academy Award Best Picture winners of the past several years -- The Artist, The King's Speech, The Hurt Locker -- good as they may be, none is in the same category of majesty. Cameron may have made the last great Hollywood epic the way they used to make 'em. Except bigger.

Here's the joys:

• The Actors: Not only are Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio completely believable together in the movie, but both have used their fame wisely since, moving on to artistically significant careers. DiCaprio has become Martin Scorsese's first new muse since Robert De Niro, and Kate Winslet has won an Oscar and an Emmy, notably for her fine turn as Mildred Pierce.
  
  
• The Historical Detail: Cameron did a fine job of weaving history and fiction, from the knowing touches regarding John Jacob Astor to a simple scene with a young boy playing with an old-fashioned wooden top on the deck. Like the best historical fiction, fidelity to these real-like details make the made-up story palatable, and Cameron was no slouch, particularly with regard to how each of the two men responsible for building the ship made different choices when their masterpiece was going down.
  
  
• The Shooting Style: My greatest pet peeve is the over-cut movie (i.e. Michael Bay), made more egregious when combined with handheld camerawork (from what I have heard, The Hunger Games). Both are generally for the lazy director who can't visualize in advance, just wants endless "choices" in the cutting room and hence shoots coverage rather than masterful shots, or tries to create energy from shaking the camera like an episode of NYPD Blue. Sometimes this is justified as "documentary style." But if I want to see a documentary, I'll see one; when I go to see a big budget feature, I expect artfulness.
  
  
• The Present-Day Wraparound Story: By this is should say, The Sense of Time's Passage. While the teenage girls who enjoyed repeat viewings may have pined most for Rose and Jack in the past, it's the moment when the aged Rose, played so well by Gloria Stuart, sees the drawing of herself on television and ignites the plot that choked me up. Maybe it's being a decade and a half older than when I first saw the picture, but it is rather glorious in how it captures the painful shades of history as we each live it, the massive tragic scope of human existence, defined for every one of us by birth and death, and for those of us who live long enough to experience it, those lost times gone by. And how about that footage of the real-life decayed Titanic itself? Amazing.
  
  
• The Class Consciousness: Like the best novels and, yes, movies, Titanic, shows all walks of life, from First Class to Steerage, and is clearly conscious in depicting the caging of the lower class by those working for the upper class as the lower decks fill with water and the lifeboats fill with the wealthy. The sense of class is felt in the engine rooms as well, where strong men toil in the furnace-like heat -- and are the first to drown after the iceberg is hit.
  
  
• The Sinking: It's spectacular. I can't think of another movie that has done such a great job devoting such massive resources to recreating a true-life, real-time disaster. In a sense, the sinking of the Titanic was made for the cinema. With the brilliant juxtaposition of the tender lover story comes the almost unbearably ominous and terrifying sinking of the luxury liner. I had forgotten how intense it is -- my nine-year-old had to leave the theater for a few minutes. What freaked him out the most was when Jack was handcuffed to the pipe as the lower deck around him vacated and the water rose. My favorite shots are when the stern goes perpendicular to the ocean and people start to fall, but what's so striking now after 9/11 is watching some passengers choose to jump from the insane heights, so many dropping to their deaths, one we see hitting the water and not coming up.
  
  
• The 3D: I've seen less than half-a-dozen movies in 3D that were at all memorable for that reason, including Kiss Me Kate, Avatar and, best to date, Hugo. Creating 3D effects after a movie is shot with 2D cameras is a much maligned process, by Cameron himself, usually creating a "cut-out" effect that doesn't happen when you shoot with 3D cameras. Well, Cameron must have supervised every frame, because this 3D transformation is gorgeous. It's not overdone but draws you it, less clearly important in the action scenes than in the dramatic ones, and (in our screening) without any obvious loss of luminosity. The worst thing about 3D is how it darkens the image, but this one seemed just as bright and vibrant as you'd want from a movie. Maybe the IMAX projection helps. It just feels very justified, and gives a good reason to return to the theater to see the movie.

Ultimately, it's a successful marrying of scale and human story, for all the reasons listed above. The spectacle never overwhelms the actors. In fact, like the best old Hollywood movies, each of the two leads gets a brilliant reveal for their entrance -- Winslet under her grand chapeau, DiCaprio from the back in his fateful poker game, both with the camera moving just so to give them power within the frame. And when they look into each others eyes, when they talk to each other, unlike so many failed big-budget pairings, they seem to actually be listening and reacting to each other.

I'm sure in a more picky mood I'd find the flaws. But to me the scene that will always endear me to the movie is when DiCaprio, having saved Winslet's life when they met, is invited to dine with her party in First Class, handles the dinner with aplomb. As I always tell me kids, learn your manners and you can dine with kings and queens. My favorite line maybe sums up how I feel about life at it's best: "Just the other night I was sleeping under a bridge and now here I am on the grandest ship in the world having champagne with you fine people."

Consider Titanic raised by this 3D release and, for some of us, rehabilitated.

How Big is Africa?

Plenty big.



Bigger than you thought?

Scale and Fluidity

It seems churlish to criticize James Cameron's Avatar, but to get it out of the way, yes, the story becomes increasingly predictable as it goes along and, yes, the characters are skin -- or maybe texture map -- deep. The two standout performances are the vets. The level of gratitude felt when Sigourney Weaver first shows up is palpable, back for her second run with Cameron after he upped her Ridley character in Aliens. She not only provides pleasure in human form, but she also takes to her Na'vi avatar with complete commitment and is the most recognizable transformation of all the characters, kitten-like as native. And Stephen Lang, now in a late-career movie renaissance, is the best possible fit as military villain for this particular movie, a 3D Sgt. Rock-type figure bursting out from the screen more than any of the others, gorgeous claw-mark scars on the side of is head and one of the most memorable moments when he steps out in to the poisonous Pandora atmosphere to try to shoot down a heli-gizmo himself -- only once an aide comes out with an oxygen mask do we realize he's been holding his breath.

While I wouldn't be surprised if Cameron is once again passed over for a Best Screenplay nomination, the story does succeed in all it's pastiche in being moving at points and rousing at others, an obvious adaptation of the tragic genocide of the Native American peoples and culture, crossed with a little Iraq War resource grab. The politics are pleasing, and one can see potential sequels that could take the paradigms even further.

It's this emotional bigness that will secure Avatar the Best Picture/Most Picture award, and why not. The movie has something of a textbook quality, in the sense that future filmmakers will take lessons from it's use of both 3D and performance capture, and I'm betting some of them may think they're making further advances, only to go back to the source and find Cameron's already explored the particular possibility they have in mind.

Due to some past work in videogame production, I've been through the motion capture process, but the advances over the past decade have been huge, to the point where Cameron has solved two of the biggest problems. One is immediate feedback -- evidently he was able to do real-time compositing into rough versions of the 3D environments, effectively allowing him to edit in production and when the actors went home each night. No need to shoot coverage or even shoot shots in the traditional sense, just very advanced data capture and manipulation, a new form of shooting and editing, or at least on a scale never attempted before. (The Lord of the Rings series, particularly Gollum, is the most obvious and closest antecedent.) The other is facial capture, which Robert Zemeckis has tried perfecting on his recent 3D movies, always falling short on the eyes in particular, which is to say the most critical aspect of a film actor's performance. And this is where Cameron hits it out of the park.

Evidently the performance capture suits used by Cameron have a novel device, a camera on a headpiece pointing right back at the actor's face, no doubt with a wide angle lens married to some sort of software that maps with high accuracy to the character model faces. There's not a glimmer of disbelief that we're watching Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, CCH Pounder, Wes Studi, Sigourney et al giving the performance, and if there's an animator's hand further shaping or honing the facial tics and eye darts, it's not evident.

Then there's the 3D, which is used more to pull the viewer in than project out as has been overdone in the past. There's a brilliant early shot inside a huge space transport as Worthington and other cybernauts come out of cryogenic sleep that took my breath away, deep focus and deep 3D that would have made cinematographer Gregg Toland Citizen Kane jealous, a solid sci-fi image that made me want to delve deeper into that world, a fine way to get us started.

I saw it in IMAX which is the most Most Movie available, quite a treat, and essential to get the full impact of the more vertiginous scenes on the planet, high in the trees, above waterfalls, climbing floating mountains for which Yes album artist Roger Dean should earn a royalty. I pretty easily forgot that the entire planet -- as far as I know -- was an artificial construct, probably helped along by the life and death, avatar vs. lethal Pandoran nature early scenes. I certainly wasn't thinking about it during the big huge climactic battle, a new benchmark in mass destruction, impressive even by previous Cameron standards.

So is this The Jazz Singer of 2009, the movie game-changer? In terms of 3D, it's a big advance, but a lot of it was on the way -- Up stands out from this past year as a movie that used 3D successfully for scale and expansiveness, Coraline in a different way for atmosphere. In terms of performance capture, y-e-s.

It's all about scale and fluidity. Congrats to Cameron for making the ten-foot tall Na'vis convincing, and their size in some of their scenes with humans pries open the imagination as well. And for an art form that has historical striven for seamlessness, as the development of sound with pictures led to a more mimetic and immersive experience, the seamless integration of performance captures is a major achievement.

One has to wonder...what's next, Jim?

Just Like I Pictured It

NYC awesome, with a thanks to Phase.