I don’t remember anyone, anyone at all, pining for more James Cameron in their lives, smacking us in the face with his rampant ego-club and splooging tech jam all over our inner screens. But here we are. We thought, or hoped, after the year of Avatar 14 years ago, that he was a spent entertainment demagogue. But now, alongside the newest of what will be umpteen Avatar sequels and its moola-salute Best Picture Oscar nom, we get the splashy silver anniversary re-release of Titanic in theaters. Suddenly Cameron is in our grill all over again, everyone’s least favorite Hollywood alpha challenging the hegemony of Lucas/Spielberg Inc. and the Marvel/DC industrial complex, and demanding again, it seems, to be taken seriously in the process.
Why does every Cameron movie feel like I’ve just been shoulder-shoved in a crowded bar? Let’s remember first that this is not Titanic’s first re-release, but second or third, so the milking of the disaster-movie mega-cow is nothing new, although for most of us, any memory of the thing has been reduced to the overplay lifespan of “that song.” In the process, the simple ballad of Bad Luck Jack & Rose has been re-technified with 3D (in 2012), and now remastered with a 4K HDR high frame rate treatment and Dolby Atmos sound. The pandering mediocrity of the film is now louder, clearer and more twitch-inspiring than ever before.
Who is this for? Cameron seems to think we live in CameronWorld, but for most of us, he’s as relevant as Sylvester Stallone. This release – which hopes to add a few 100 mil to the film’s standing B.O. tally of $2.2 billion – is clearly a generational effort, aimed at the Z-ers who’ve never seen it before, rather than older viewers who wouldn’t want to re-watch it anymore than they’d want to re-see other Oscar-kings like Argo or The King’s Speech or Green Book, or even the first Avatar film.
We would be wise to consider how in our current blockbuster hippodrome, the idea of a ten-figure…
Read the full article here
