Last uploaded: Friday, December 12, 1997.
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This past Wednesday we posted a scoop from Steve Bringe on our Titanic page. According to Bringe, a tourist who visited the Titanic exhibit on-board the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California over the American Thanksgiving holiday, there is a section of the exhibit that claims recent damage occured to the real Titanic's grand staircase section. Bringe's original scoop writes that pieces of a light and parts of a propeller were found near the staircase remnants, and that the Queen Mary exhibit accused a film crew working on a new Titanic picture as the culprits to blame. Today we received another email from a source that wished to remain anonymous. The unnamed scooper had this to say about the Dec. 9 scoop: "What the poster said about the submarine incident is true. The Titanic movie film crew hired a Russian crew to take them to the site to get footage for the movie. Apparently they were trying to get places no one else had ever been, for more dramatic footage, when an accident occurred that damaged both the submarine AND the Titanic. There are a lot of people apparently trying to keep this hush-hush. When the R.M.S. Titanic Salvage crew arrived on scene (this was in 1996 and they had to wait for the film crew to leave even though they own the salvage rights), they found many submarine parts lying on the Titanic and were easily able to put two and two together. There are A LOT of people extrememly upset over this and the carelessness of the movie crew. This would make a great 'Dateline NBC' investigation." What's up? Did a submersible involved with the filming of James Cameron's Titanic collide inside the ship, possibly with the staircase? Perhaps a source on either end of this matter can help clear things up.
And still more "Titanic" reviews keep coming in... "...I did see the movie with a number of other people and we were VERY IMPRESSED. Outside of the love story, which drags the movie down with the way it is developed, we thought the film was exceptionally well done." -- 'Titanic' Thanks to our reader 'Houking', we've got our own Christmas list made up of all the reviews so far for Cameron's $200 school project. Judging by the scoring results (the Russian judge's score was disavowed), it looks like this year's The English Patient meets the intensity/computer graphics of Twister (bet you never expected to hear that as a hard-sell pitch, huh?) For the record, it's:
Siskel and Ebert -- Two thumbs up. 'The Gline' has this to say about Richard Corliss and his negative review: "I read the negative Corliss review in TIME and I can sum it up in two words: Unfair bias. "Make that RIDICULOUSLY unfair bias. "Corliss hates James Cameron *on principle*, and dismissively referred to the man's career as being 'mostly sequels and remakes'. Yeah, but when the sequels and remakes in question are ALIENS and T2, and not THREE NINJAS KICK BACK or somesuch, there's a certain extra clout added to the name, I should think? Corliss went on to slam the movie for having a pedestrian morality: all the lower-class people are saints (which, according to what plays out in the script, is NOT true), and all the upper-class people are, uh, rectal apertures. And so on and so on. Corliss also dissed T2 on vaguely similar grounds, and I'm absolutely preparing to *kvell* with joy when he eats his words over TITANIC. Gee, I wonder what kind of slimy comments he'll make about STAR WARS 1? That the cinematography and composition are cheesy?" Well, with all that favorable text promoting said film, some might think I'm getting bankrolled by Lightstorm and Co. Since I haven't scanned in pictures of my lovable, dependable automobile to sink that arguement, I'll present their side of matters now: "Is this site underwritten by Jim Cameron??? Pleeaze...They are doing everything under the sun possible to promote this re-hashed story with the looks and feel of a CGI demo reel. Selling tickets to screenings WEEKS in advance...selling 'official' props in the J. Peterman catalogue??? Isn't the 'actual one-of-a-kind used in the film' anchor on EVERYBODY's Christmas list? At $25,000 it might re-coup about a nanosecond of filming expenses...for me? I'll pass on the life-jacket for $95. Give my regards to Jim & Co.!" - Signed, "Muffy"
*sigh* And while it seems just about everyone has seen the picture except for you, the other half a million readers out there and myself ( But this week there's a wildcard being let loose: Miramax's Scream 2. You look around and you don't see many other films aimed squarely at that market/genre this holiday season. And now we know what I Know What You Did Last Summer did last autumn (kinda makes your head hurt, don't it?) at the box office, it seems the appetite for post-modernistic teenage slasher horror pics isn't sated just yet. I'll be posting many of the reviews I've received about the advance audiences (from Copenhagen to London) on the Titanic page starting next week. Until then, make more ice cubes.
See? Being terrified of every shadow DOES pay off eventually... While watching E!, 'The Bogeyman' reported that Jaime Lee Curtis will receive a $3 mil paycheck for reprising the role that catapulted her career in the upcoming sequel to the original Halloween. The budget is set at the whopping piece tag of $15 million...which when you think about how much the last few Halloweens cost, is huuuuge!
What does "Godzilla" look like anyway? About a week ago Dark Horizons (another really swell movie news site run by my Australian brother-in-film, Garth Franklin) ran illustrations that may or may not have been used by Patrick Tatopoulous' Godzilla design team. Controversy arose like some nuclear-spawned sea beast with a really bad temper. Now comes the next wave in the debate, but with a catch: how our scooper, 'Poster Child' reveals how they can be trusted... "Godzilla looks very brown, not the dark green as reported earlier. And he doesn't look like any lizard I have ever seen. looks more like the skexies in the movie The Dark Crystal. "And just to let you in on one of the poster designs that is comming up, so you know I am not making this up, it is a picture of Park Ave. with people running and screaming, and one building is squished, then in the sky you see on of Godzilla's Big eyes...Look for that poster to come in the next 2 or 3 months..." Sounds like 'Poster Child' is working on another advance poster, right? Right.
The trailer is now out there... Ryan Salmon's X-Files site now houses the movie trailer tagged with Alien Resurrection, while Fox, not to be outdone, also has it running up on their interactive site. Check out www.thex-files.com/video/xfmov70.mov or http://www.wsu.edu/~rsalmon/trailer.mov to see Scully and Mulder do the 70mm thing.
Ok, one last mini-review; this time it's for "Apt Pupil"... "Horrific and very entertaining. This is the kind of movie that stays in your head for days afterward. Ian McKellen gives an incredible performence as a Nazi that tells student Brad Renfro about atrocities that occured in the concentration camps. Bryan Singer's direction is superb and the music (not sure who did it) was extremely eerie. If I had to choose one word to describe this film , it would be: WOW! Go see Apt Pupil unless you are easily freaked out." -- 'Sick Boy' More updates this weekend after some much-needed X-Mas shopping errands. But I'm looking for help from all you out there to throw me info on the film adapation of Caleb Carr's The Alienist if you've got it...
Patrick Sauriol
The comic books are X-Wing: Rogue Squadron, ish #25; The Invisibles, ish #11; and the latest I-forget-the-number ish of Starman. Thumbs up for all.
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