mnkykungfu said:
^I'm on record as just not clicking with Malick movies, and I found this film also self-indulgent and interminable. I was also much younger then so....I'd be interested in rewatching if you did a cut down fanedit.
I was more impressed on this re-watch but I remembered TTRL as being the last Malick film that wasn't
completely"self-indulgent and interminable". His next one 'The Tree of Life' went off the deep end IMO. A lady at the cinema screening I went to stood up at the end, turned around and said "Did anybody else know what the hell that was about?!" to which everybody laughed.
Titanic (1997)
Director: James Cameron
Country: United States
Length: 195 minutes (3 1/4 hours)
Type: Historical, Romance, Drama
I remember the build up to 'Titanic's release in 1997, with talk of it being so expensive (the most expensive ever at the time) it could potentially bring down the studios involved, having gone over budget by a cool $100 million. It's the only film in the 'top-50 most expensive films ever' list to not be made in the last 16-years, plus only five Marvel and 'Pirates of the Caribbean' films have cost more when adjusted for nearly a quarter-century of inflation. There were news reports of James Cameron rebuilding a large portion of the ship at full scale, remaking the lavish interiors in the original materials, shooting on the real Titanic wreck, pushing the limits of 90s CGI and a runtime exceeding 3-hours. It felt like Cameron was sailing full steam towards his own iceberg, so the $2 billion box-office, 11 Oscars and worldwide No1 hit single must have come as a relief. I also vividly remember going to see it at the cinema and one specific moment: You see a wide shot of the Titanic's upturned stern, from which a tiny figure falls and it goes on and on, magnified by the height of a large cinema screen. It elicited an audible exclamation of shock from the audience. It was FX blockbuster film-making on a scale nobody had seen before.
Watching it again, it really holds up. It's more of an epic Romance film, than a disaster movie, although the practically real-time sinking at the end is still astonishing. The love affair between Rose and Jack is strong enough to hold up the film even the ship didn't sink. I thought the 20-minute present-day introduction was unnecessary at first but as the film progresses and concludes it adds a strong sense of the whole movie being the magnified recollections of a grand old lady's passionate youth. So Jack is unfeasibly dashing and everything is just a little brighter, bigger, more colourful, more romantic and more exciting than reality. The CGI FX broadly hold up very well but just don't look too hard at some of the little digital figures walking around the ship's deck, or at some of the water physics breaking round the hull. I was marvelling at some of the cross-fades between the dark, flooded and corroded Titanic wreck and the same angles of it pristine, lit up and filled with life. They're so perfectly executed that I couldn't quite work out how it was done. The fantastic first shot of Rose, with the camera panning down from a crane onto Kate Winslet's face revealed beneath the rim of a giant hat, as James Horner's magical score bursts into life, is one of the all-time introduction shots, leaving the viewer in no doubt that this is our main character and life-changing adventure awaits them.
Sadly, James Cameron has only made one film since 'Titanic' and is still working on those 'Avatar' sequels he's been promising for the last decade.
Oooh goosebumps 0.15 into this clip!:
Groundhog Day (1993)
Director: Harold Ramis
Country: United States
Length: 101 minutes
Type: Romantic-Comedy, Fantasy
The brilliant directing/writing of Harold Ramis and the range of Bill Murray's performance make this such a joyous and powerful Romantic-Comedy classic but this time I was so impressed by the editing. The careful way editor Pembroke J. Herring builds up the timeline and world of Phil's day in the first run through, then a highlights real for day two, then he knows he's got the viewer anchored and can drop in a mere line, or shot and trust we'll get the context and meaning. It's implied that Phil is stuck in his time-loop purgatory for years and has exhausted every avenue of experience but all this is conveyed in less than 2-hours. I wonder if anybody and everybody in the world when confronted with this situation would ultimately come to the same realisation that making everybody else happy is the only way to make ourselves truly happy. The concept has so much tantalising potential that you could turn it into a long running 'Quantum Leap' meets 'Twin Peaks' TV show, where a whole episode could be devoted to simply how he steals the bag of money, for example. Something that is presented to us with just Phil's solution, leaving us to imagine how much trial and error he went through before hand. I'm sure there are plenty of plot holes if you looked too closely but the only one that stood out to me was that the elderly security guard who lost the bag of money probably got fired and/or arrested in the weeks after Phil's magical day where he made everyone else's lives better. It's a just a shame that despite all the hard work of everyone involved to make you laugh, the funniest thing in the film is always the groundhog living in a real place called "Gobbler's Knob".
