Movie Reviews

'Titanic' Sinks Again (Spectacularly)
By KENNETH TURAN
L.A. TIMES FILM CRITIC

Friday December 19, 1997
To the question of the day--what does $200 million buy?--the 3-hour-and-14-minute "Titanic" unhesitatingly answers: not enough.
Note that despite the hopes of skeptics, aghast at the largest film budget of modern times, money enough to run a full-dress presidential campaign or put a serious dent in illiteracy, the answer is not nothing. When you are willing to build a 775-foot, 90% scale model of the doomed ship and sink it in a 17-million-gallon tank specially constructed for the purpose, you are going to get a heck of a lot of production value for your money. Especially if your name is James Cameron.
More than that, at "Titanic's" two-hour mark, when most films have sense enough to be winding down, this behemoth does stir to a kind of life. With writer-director Cameron, a virtuoso at large-scale action-adventure extravaganzas serving as ringmaster, the detailing of the ship's agonies (compressed here from a real-life two hours and 40 minutes to a bit more than an hour) compels our interest absolutely.
But Cameron, there can be no doubt, is after more than oohs and aahs. He's already made "The Terminator" and "Terminator 2"; with "Titanic" he has his eye on "Doctor Zhivago" / "Lawrence of Arabia" territory. But while his intentions are clear, Cameron lacks the skills necessary to pull off his coup. Just as the hubris of headstrong shipbuilders who insisted that the Titanic was unsinkable led to an unparalleled maritime disaster, so Cameron's overweening pride has come unnecessarily close to capsizing this project.
For seeing "Titanic" almost makes you weep in frustration. Not because of the excessive budget, not even because it recalls the unnecessary loss of life in the real 1912 catastrophe, which saw more than 1,500 of the 2,200-plus passengers dying when an iceberg sliced the ship open like a can opener. What really brings on the tears is Cameron's insistence that writing this kind of movie is within his abilities. Not only isn't it, it isn't even close.
Cameron has regularly come up with his own scripts in the past, but in a better world someone would have had the nerve to tell him or he would have realized himself that creating a moving and creditable love story is a different order of business from coming up with wisecracks for Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Instead, what audiences end up with word-wise is a hackneyed, completely derivative copy of old Hollywood romances, a movie that reeks of phoniness and lacks even minimal originality. Worse than that, many of the characters, especially the feckless tycoon Cal Hockley (played by Billy Zane) and Kathy Bates' impersonation of the Unsinkable Molly Brown, are cliches of such purity they ought to be exhibited in film schools as examples of how not to write for the screen.
It is easy to forget, as you wait for the iceberg to arrive and shake things up, how excellent an idea it was to revisit for modern audiences the sinking of what was the largest moving object ever built. Numerous films have been made on the subject, with even the Third Reich taking a shot with a version that concluded, not surprisingly, that the sinking was "an eternal accusation against England's greed." As Steven Biel wrote in "Down With the Old Canoe," a fascinating cultural history of public reaction to the event, "The Titanic disaster begs for resolution--and always resists it."
*
One reason this version is so long is a modern framing story involving nautical treasure hunter Brock Lovett (Cameron veteran Bill Paxton), who is scouring the Titanic's wreck (it was located in 1985) for a fabulously expensive blue diamond called "The Heart of the Ocean" that was lost on board.
What Lovett turns up instead is a drawing of a nude young woman wearing the jewel. News of that find prompts a phone call from 101-year-old Rose Dawson Calvert (Gloria Stuart), who says it's her in the drawing. Lovett flies Rose (whom Cameron modeled on artist Beatrice Wood) out to join his expedition. The bulk of "Titanic" is her recollection of what happened before, during and after that great ship went down.
Young Rose (now played by Kate Winslet) boarded the Titanic as a 17-year-old wearing a very large hat and metaphorical shackles. "To me it was a slave ship," she recalls, "taking me to America in chains." In plainer English she was being forced by her snooty mother Ruth DeWitt Bukater into a (gasp!) loveless marriage with Cal Hockley, an arrogant and wealthy snob for whom the phrase "perpetual sneer" was probably invented.
Rose may be a 17-year-old, but she knows a thing or two. She makes offhanded references to Freud, a wise gentleman no one else on board has heard of, and during an impromptu shopping spree she managed to buy works by Picasso, Degas and Monet despite Hockley's dismissive belief that they "won't amount to a thing." Clearly, this prodigy of taste and discernment deserves better than Mr. Perpetual Sneer, no matter how rich he is.
Enter Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a madcap artist and cherubic scamp who wins his steerage ticket in a dockside card game. Jack is staggered by a glimpse of Rose, and though a conveniently placed Irish lad advises him "you'd as like have angels flying out of your arse as get next to the likes of her," he's not the kind of young man to give up easily.
Sure enough, despite the presence of 2,200 other passengers and crew, it's only Jack who's around to save the day when a distraught Rose considers suicide in a flattering evening gown. Despite the best efforts of mother Ruth (Frances Fisher) and Hockley's snarling valet Spicer Lovejoy (David Warner), Jack and Rose are irresistibly drawn to each other. She improves his manners (not hard to do), he teaches her how to spit like a man, and they spend quality time in photogenic locations like the ship's towering prow.
*
Both Winslet and DiCaprio are capable actors (though his brash brat routine is wearing thin) but they are victimized, as is everyone else, by dialogue that has the self-parodying ring of Young Romance comics. "You could just call me a tumbleweed blowing in the wind," Jack says, adding later, "sooner or later the fire I love about you is going to burn out." Most weighted down by this kind of blather are the fatuous Hockley, who has to say things like "you filth" and Bates' Molly Brown, a character so relentlessly folksy she'd be at home on "The Beverly Hillbillies."
Finally, after so much time has passed you fear the iceberg has slept through its wake-up call, disaster strikes the ship at 11:50 on the night of April 14. Cameron is truly in his element here, and "Titanic's" closing hour is jammed with the most stirring and impressive sights, from towering walls of water flooding a grand dining room to the enormous ship itself defying belief and going vertical in the water.
These kinds of complex and demanding sequences are handled with so much aplomb it's understandable that the director, who probably considers the script to be the easiest part of his job, not only wants to do it all but also thinks he can. Yet as Cameron sails his lonely craft toward greatness, he should realize he needs to bring a passenger with him. Preferably someone who can write.
Jaw-dropping spectacle fills 'Titanic'
By JEFF MILLAR
Copyright 1997 Houston Chronicle
As promised in all the publicity, Titanic is gigantic. It is alleged to be the most expensive movie ever made -- $200 million is bandied about -- and it earns the right to that claim.
See it, and you will think of the days when the studios unquivered the exclamation points and let you know that a really big movie was really big!
Cast of thousands!
Replica of doomed superliner built at almost the same scale in Baja California!
Takes two distributors to distribute it!
More than three hours long!
Famously obsessive director of the Terminator movies had carpeting duplicated in same the pattern by the same company that made the carpet for the real Titanic!
Well.
When I thought, "OK, I'm ready for the ship to hit the iceberg now," I looked at my watch and we were only a little over an hour into the movie.
When the ship does hit the berg, at the one-hour-and-45-minute point, we are immediately compensated for the padding in writer-director James Cameron's basic narrative -- a shipboard romance.
From there on out, Titanic is one jaw-dropping spectacle effect after another.
Cameron had the excellent idea of putting contemporary framing around the Titanic saga. He begins aboard a salvage ship that sends submersibles in search of a safe in one of the sunken ship's staterooms.
In it, the salvagers are confident, is a jewel that will make the Hope Diamond look like a Cracker Jack prize.
TV coverage of the salvage operation attracts 101-year-old Ruth Calvert (Gloria Stuart), a Titanic survivor who knows things about the diamond that only a few people would know.
She and her granddaughter are choppered out to the salvage ship. Her telling of her story to the salvagers flashes us back to the Titanic's setting out to sea on its first and last voyage in 1912.
In the story from the past, young Rose (Kate Winslet) has been badgered by her mother (Frances Fisher) to marry immensely wealthy Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), as though Rose were a brood mare.
This young woman is of a sensibility ahead of her time -- she uses Cal's money to buy Monets and Picassos -- and is gathering the strength to throw herself overboard rather than live as Cal's wifey-poo when she is persuaded otherwise by handsome young Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio).
Dawson is an American rolling stone who studied painting in Paris and won third-class passage on the Titanic in a card game only minutes before the ship sailed.
So begins the love story, which Cameron has well-marbled with quite charmingly corny romantic grand strokes. But it's when the Titanic kisses the iceberg that the filmmaker really hitches up his pants and gets to work.
Cameron's integration of digital special effects and principal photography is virtually seamless and hugely effective. At the same time, this guy knows that the story is not about a boat sinking: It's about people staring death in its face and either accepting it or fighting each other for the ever-decreasing area of dry deck.
As history shows, a few acted nobly. Far more acted like people who wanted to live every second they could live.
Cameron also is effective at little scenes, such as the one where Jack is invited to dine at Cal's table as a reward for "saving" Rose from going over the rail. The Unsinkable Molly Brown (Kathy Bates) lends him her son's tux and quietly coaches him through the intricacies of a first-class-table meal.
The production design is luxurious and exhaustively detailed. I believe this movie did cost $200 million, because you can see it up there on the screen.
The best part is, Titanic will give you your money's worth.
The Missing Gun (2003)
Fans of non-Hong Kong Chinese cinema who are impatient from the long take, long shot style of Tian Zhuangzhuang (The Blue Kite), Jia Zhang Ke (Platform), and Hou Hsiao-Hsien (Flowers of Shanghai) should prepare themselves for The Missing Gun. It stars Jiang Wen, whose biggest role may be that in Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum, but he is also the director of the recent and much-acclaimed Devils on the Doorstep. The Missing Gun though is made by a brash, young newcomer, Lu Chuan, and for mainland Chinese movies, it’s a radical departure. No glum affair like Beijing Bicycle or exotica like Raise the Red Lantern is this, but rather a pumping, in-your-face style-fest. While Lu claims Francis Ford Coppola as a hero, his film is far closer to Trainspotting. The credit sequence has the camera careening down the streets of the provincial village setting in fast-motion accompanied by a head-banging music beat (by Felling Band). Different scenes sport jump cuts, a whirling camera, surreal imagery, and a playful use of space.
The story is similar to Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog. A cop, Ma Shan (Jiang), awakens after a night of drunken celebration to find his gun missing. His sister got married and he can’t remember what happened, how he got home or who took him. In China, where guns are extremely rare and gun ownership is strictly forbidden, the loss of a gun means possible dismissal and definite humiliation. Tracing his path backwards, he encounters stuttering Liu (Wei Xiaoping), a bricklayer turned noodle-seller, fellow war veteran Old Tree Ghost (Pan Yong), and old police friend Chen Ying (Ji Pei). They point him toward possible suspects, shady businessman Zhou Xiaogang (Shi Liang), who runs an illegal liquor factory, and Ma Shan’s old lover, Li Xiaomeng (Ning Jing, Red Firecracker, Green Firecracker), who has recently returned to town. The situation goes from bad to worse for Ma Shan when a murder victim turns up, shot with his gun.
A subplot involving Ma Shan’s troubled relationship to his wife Han Xiaoyun (Wu Yujuan) and son Ma Dong (Wang Xiaofan) provide the film with some needed poignancy. Han suspects Ma Shan of cheating on her with Li and accuses him of not being a father to Ma Dong. Yet the boy shows continued devotion to his father, saying he will find daddy’s gun in exchange for the promise of no more beatings.
Lu Chuan’s bravura style is assured for a first feature, if a bit too showy, but it is invigorating in the context of contemporary Chinese cinema. Lu milks much humor from Western influences – a ridiculous-sounding telephone ring, an Italian suit – and through the deadpan acting of Huang Fan and Li Haibin, who play Ma Shan’s sister and her new husband, respectively. For all the stylization, the heart of the film rests on the shoulders of Jiang Wen, who proves more than worthy of the task. His slow-burning intensity with moments of explosive emotion supplies an intriguing interior monologue with the character’s essential decency. If Jiang keeps this up, he’ll soon be as large a figure as Zhang Yimou on the Chinese cinematic landscape.
- George Wu

It Would Have Been Much Easier if He'd Just Misplaced His Keys
By ELVIS MITCHELL
Published: April 2, 2003, Wednesday
Lu Chuan's ''Missing Gun'' is a comic book noir, and its premise is more than workable: a police officer in a Chinese village can't find his gun, and in searching for it sifts through a slice of his recent past.
But the filmmaker's nervous technique mutes the story's impact. The movie, being shown tonight and tomorrow as part of the New Directors/New Films series, seems trapped in the netherworld between drama and comedy, getting by mostly on the performance of its lead and a few passable scenes. The action is unnecessarily heightened for a picture with such a modest setting, and the film suffers from an overload of distracting details and a lack of central logic.
Maybe the director wants us to experience what his anxious hero, Ma Shan (Jiang Wen), is going through. He's awakened from a sweaty sleep by his screaming wife; during his uneasy slumber he was flopping all over the bed. His body is bandaged in several spots, as if he had had to suppress a riot. We learn later that he got drunk at his sister's wedding, though the movie never goes back to explain all of the wounds he suffered.
Realizing that his gun is missing, Ma Shen immediately thinks his little boy has run off with it, a notion that infuriates his wife. The clamor in the house, and his dread over where his gun may have ended up, finally rouse him. His concentration is so scattered that it takes a couple of hours before it occurs to him to retrace his steps. And his memory is so erratic that what comes back to him most distinctly is his bad behavior rather than what might have happened to his pistol.
Eventually, he is afraid of the awful implications of his loss, since guns are hard to come by in his village. He is just as upset at the attendant loss of face, which seems almost as awful as the crimes that might be committed with his firearm. That is, until someone is murdered with it -- then embarrassment becomes secondary.
''The Missing Gun'' surfs much of Ma Shen's life as he tries to track down his lost weapon; it's compelling when we see how much of his existence is tied to this village, where both his personal and professional lives are bundled rather messily together. It's in these scenes, where the dividing lines are so sketchy that the cop has to get through his personal reactions before he can begin to make any procedural progress, that ''The Missing Gun'' takes on any weight. He's friendly with a man who proves to be a suspect, a man whose luscious girlfriend was once the love of the policeman's life.
Such scenes allow the picture's star to contour his performance to the film's demands. In the scenes with the wife, he's befuddled and cowed, though she bursts into tears like a girl out of some anime feature. And when the movie offers a brief glimpse of the differences in their child-rearing approaches, it offers telling bits of characterization; Ma Shen's wife goes ballistic over a poem their son wrote, which she finds almost pornographic, while he's amused by its sentiments.
But none of these moments surface during the investigation, which seems to drive everyone into a hysterical froth; Ma Shen's commander is as big a proud diva as the constable's wife. And there's so much melodramatic flailing and posturing from the actors that overstylization is redundant. The busy direction is often too much at odds with the film and is unwarranted with an actor like Jiang Wen. The story, though, is interesting enough that we shouldn't have to wait too long for an American remake.