68th Venice Film Festival
ROMAN POLANSKI – CARNAGE
France, Germany, Spain, Poland, 79′
Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, John C. Reilly
http://www.labiennale.org/en/cinema/line….e¤tpage=2
****
By Matthew Floratis | July 27, 2011Here, far, wherever you are: Titanic remains the most successful disaster film to blur the line between a character-driven narrative and all-out action and mayhem.James Cameron took an unlikely approach to Titanic. It’s an archetypal disaster story: a large, luxurious ship, marketed as “unsinkable,” is inexplicably felled on its maiden voyage by an iceberg in the night. A simple way of communicating the tale might have been to focus on the disaster proper, to give an analysis of how the boat went down, perhaps choosing two or three characters along the way to be followed by the camera. Instead, Cameron packages the story of Titanic in a relationship and changes the way the audience looks at the sinking of the great ship.
Titanic, then, constitutes perhaps the best illustration of a disaster film that successfully focuses heavily on character rather than on the disaster itself. While we see the ship go down in graphic, well realized terms, there’s never any doubt that this is a love story, a film that’s part disaster epic and part sappy romance. Whereas the likes of Armageddon tell the story of the characters using the disaster, Titanic tells the story of the disaster using the characters. It represents a fleshing out of the characterization that we saw born in The Towering Inferno.
One of the strengths of the film is that it is, of course, based on a very true story – the sinking of the ocean liner. Most of the characters in the plot are wholesale fiction, but the ship existed and died in the manner depicted. While time is dedicated to the ship’s somewhat glorious death, the camera lingers most around Jack and Rose, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, and their unlikely relationship. Jack is a lower class kid who wanders from country to country; Rose comes from a wealthy aristocratic family and is betrothed to the son of a steel tycoon. Rose is unhappy in her relationship and in Jack she finds a brash and forbidden alternative that is all too attractive.
Disaster films were conceived as crowd pleasers. At a time when there were plenty of domestic dramas, disaster films provided spectacle, documenting things that did or could happen. Titanic takes that, and makes both the disaster and the relationship between the two leads appealing. As a romance picture it’s tailored toward women, but much has been made of the fact that men too can enjoy Titanic. It’s not too far a stretch: Jack is young and headstrong and smooth; he’s the underdog and he snags the most beautiful woman on the ship. He’s the James Bond or Jack Bauer of romance – he’s what every man wants to be, transported away from the action genre and into a setting where there are pianos playing softy in the background and there is dim lighting and flowers and feelings and kissing and sex. Similarly, equally as much has been made of the fact that Titanic is a film that “makes men cry.” (Though it provoked no such response from this male.)
It’s interesting that the disaster occurs so late in the narrative, unusual for a picture pegged as a disaster film. In most genre pictures the disaster strikes within the first half hour. This is hardly detrimental to the film – in part because, in a way, we see another disaster unfurling before us. It’s very obvious that Rose is heading towards doom with her family and her relationship. She doesn’t want to marry her betrothed from the outset, but as the film goes on the interaction between the characters becomes more awkward, bordering on difficult to watch. It culminates in a scene where Rose is struck by her fiancé several times, something that we expected to see in the early stages but that was delicately delayed by some measure.
Jack and Rose eventually spirit each other away to the ship’s holds where they make love in the back of a car, surrounded by steamy windows. Their relationship is ultimately unshackled by the disaster proper, and they’re only comfortable showing their full affection once the ship begins to sink. Titanic’s most bizarre and unsettling scene finds Cal, Rose’s fiancé, attempting to reconcile things with her as she is in a lifeboat, being lowered to the surface. Beside Cal stands Jack; but she never looks at the man she hates, and only looks at the man she loves.
Despite the focus being on the relationship, the sinking of the ship is well captured. Water floods rooms and the two lovers are trapped in the ship’s lower decks while the water level quickly rises. The film has a well imagined representation of the ship’s final moments. In this version of the tale, as it nears its final moments the ship splits messily down the middle. Then the tail section rises up to where it is perpendicular with the ocean, at which point it dips under the water. All this is shown; indeed, Jack and Rose cling to the back of the ship and are amongst the last to drop into the freezing Atlantic.
Today Titanic is most remembered for its tremendous (and perhaps slightly unexpected) success. It ran up a budget of $200 million; at the end of its domestic run it had struck out some $600 million in sales. That figure would be doubled for its international gross, running well over a billion dollars, not including eventual (and still continuing) home video sales and rentals. The film will receive a re-release in cinemas next year after being converted to 3D. One expects that will trigger a release onto the Blu-Ray format, which will see another wave of sales. For twelve years Titanic was the highest grossing film in history, only recently surpassed by Cameron himself with Avatar.
In Titanic we find not only the appeal romance stories have, but more generally the appeal disaster films have. Titanic is proof of the results one might expect when both genres are combined and a positive result is produced. Subsequent disaster films would attempt a focus on characterization over spectacle, but few would succeed, and none would ever perform as well commercially.
http://www.screened.com/news/disaster-titanic/2086/
Read more: http://katewinsletrev.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=recent#ixzz1TPB4cOhS
5. Wasting no time with the nonsense!
I hate when a fantasy film takes awhile to justify a supernatural plot. We don’t care. I don’t want to watch you pace around the library for a half hour in The Pagemaster, Macaulay. I just want the books to start talking like Whoopi Goldberg. A Kid in King Arthur’s Court takes — I’m not lying — four minutes to send Thomas Ian down the mystical crevasse. His baseball game isn’t even over yet. We didn’t even get to meet his parents, who are undoubtedly played by downtrodden character actors. Nope, it’s just King Arthur, his Monty Python and the Holy Grail set pieces, and Toys ‘R Us kid charm. Thanks, movie.
Click to 5:00 to watch the Earth crack open and experience (what sounds like) gastrointestinal hell.
4. Playskool Camelot is home to that six-time Oscar nominee you like.
![[image]](https://i0.wp.com/www-movieline-com.vimg.net/images/winsletBMWLarthur630.jpg "[image]")
Princess Sarah may seem like a typical monarch canted glamorously over a joust at Medieval Times, but she’s much more. In fact, she’s Kate Winslet. In fact, that is astounding. Winslet had already starred in Heavenly Creatures by this point, earning herself a BAFTA Award and the promise of an august career. Here, she stares incredulously at Calvin and declares him “our honored visitor from Reseda!” Oh, Kate. Your Academy Award for The Reader is still so far away in ‘95. And so is your look here, which bears more than a passing resemblance to Adele. I think we can all agree this is her best period piece. Ha ha, joke. She wasn’t in any others!
3. Joss Ackland accidentally turns in a very good performance.
Memo to Mr. Ackland, who plays King Arthur: You were not supposed to bring thespian prowess to this picture. You don’t see Kate Winslet wearing her award-baiting Revolutionary Road scowl, do you? Please. You’re supposed to make eye-rolly jokes about Reseda and fade into nothing. Don the royal robe, cash the scale paycheck. Fin. Instead, you defied this movie’s goofiness and made the stale Arthur character a delightful comrade with avuncular charm.
2. Daniel Craig
Hard to believe Daniel Craig ever looked differently than he does now, which is to say the fearsome lovechild of Edie Falco and Dhalsim, but he was once a bowl-cut aficionado during the Lillehammer Olympics era of ‘94-‘95. Alarming! Now he’s all grown up, starring in ghost stories and dueling with aliens — but he’s most adorable in this movie. If teaching the art of the lance to a child in baseball garments isn’t “paying your dues,” I don’t want to know what is. Wait, nevermind. There’s Kate Winslet in a green velour dress.
1. Thomas Ian Nicholas is rookie of the century!
While he’d move on to cinematic milestones like receiving oral sex from Tara Reid in American Pie and idolizing Kip Pardue in The Rules of Attraction, Thomas Ian Nicholas displays a canny, old-school child star affability that is sorely lacking in today’s talent. Elle Fanning? She is too smart and blue-eyed. Justin Bieber? He is nominated for Grammys because he does silly things with a comb and belongs in the Pokédex. Thomas Ian takes the wide-eyed fun of his Rookie of the Year character and unabashedly embraces the adventure in this tale. When he teaches roller-blading to the fair Princess Katey, he beams with cartoonish pride. Kind of like when Aladdin thinks he’s teaching Jasmine how to pole-vault across rooftops, but she’s already good at it for some reason.
http://www.movieline.com/2011/07/bad-mov….thurs-court.php
Read more: http://katewinsletrev.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=recent#ixzz1TPB7ECvz
Sew Kate Winslet 