Santa Cruz Sentinel from Santa Cruz, California • Page 44

I Sinking beauty Titanic' is an eye-popping epic it 11 By WALLACE BAINE Sentinel film writer WHATi TVanic' RATING: KM (MM pro-fsnity Mid widttVr sctMS of real furor) WHO: Loonordo DiCaprio, Koto Win slot BWy Zono WHERE: Santa Crui drama 1405 Pacific Avt. Santa Crui) Aatot Twtw, Randio Dal Mar Shoapina Cantor Aptoa RUNNING TIME: 1M nrtt-irtat INFORMATION: Ontma 4S7-35M) AptOi, MMM1 VERDICT: A- A HUNDRED YEARS ago, a group of curious souls gathered in a theater for a demonstration of a new gimmick called moving pictures. They were shown a short, crudely shot film of a steam locomotive coming straight at the camera. As the story goes, the audience was so convinced a train was coming at them, they ran for their lives. Watching James Cameron's "Titanic" is sort of like that.

As the massive ocean liner gradually took on water, I felt a distinct coldness run through me. If by some accident of theater plumbing, cold water were to have lapped around my ankles at the time, I would have beseeched my Maker right there in seat 14G. Sinking in the icy waters of the North Atlantic has just moved up on my list of Most Undesirable Ways to Die, right there between burning and beheading. With a budget befitting the movie's name and a famously maniacal director whose obsession with historical accuracy reached even to the style of buttons of the crew's uniforms, "Titanic" was expected to be impressive. It is, friends, much more than that.

It attains a state of humbling majesty, evoking with a sense of unashamed grandeur a terribly out-of-style but vital emotion, awe. on El Nino: DiCaprio and Winslet get wet in 'Titanic' James Cameron's movie lias jump-started interest in all things pertaining to the sinking of the Titanic see page 8 This one you can't blame Movies To pick two from a relentless stream of haunting images, we see at one point behind a life boat of hysterical survivors, the great ship's back section ominously rise from the water extinguishing with throat-clenching horror the final hope that the old girl might stay afloat. Another image is a fleeting shot of an elderly couple, anxiously lying on their bed as the water swirls around the bedpost, clutching each other in resignation, preparing to die. That first image shows off Cameron's command of special effects razzle dazzle, the filmmaker's "head," if you will. The second proves Cameron's heart, a simple but resonant moment of human suffering made vividly heartbreaking by a gesture of surrender.

"Titanic" is a serenely entertaining, even funny movie through its first half. As a framing device, we are treated to footage of the real Titanic forlornly lying on the bottom of the real Atlantic Ocean. A group of jewel hunters led by Bill Paxton and what looks like his "Twister" team finds a drawing in which a nude woman is wearing the rare blue diamond they are hunting for. By happenstance, the woman in the picture, now 101 years old, ends up on the search vessel to tell her story in magnificent flashback. Leonardo DiCaprio, who still looks like he's never met the business end of a razor, plays Jack Dawson, a Wisconsin-born drifter who wins in a card game a third-class ticket aboard the Titanic's maiden voyage from Britain to HSH3dw great FILM!" si.

cm sc.nm Sat, Sun (12:45) LA "Titanic" is a story on two parallel tracks. One is. of course, the sinking of the immense luxury liner on the night of April IS, 1912 with passing reference to the historical figures that were part of the sinking from John Jacob Astor to the "unsinkable" Molly Brown. The other is a fictional romance between a charming, impetuous hobo-in-training with a knack for sketching and a miserable society girl about to marry the wrong man. What makes "Titanic" feel so complete as a piece of moviemaking (other than its three-hours-plus running time) is that Cameron works both the love story and the disaster epic together into a seamless whole.

A certain Oscar' cender." A jewel." VI on Ang Lee Film Daiiv (4:40 1. 7:00, 9:20 plus fiHW St, Sun (12:00) 'n i vi fe9 vw America. On board he meets Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet), a lovely Philadelphia lady-in-waiting betrothed to an effete elitist boor (Billy Zane in a role Hugh Grant was born to play). The budding romance between Jack and Rose, stemming from Jack's faintly roguish charms in talking a distraught Rose out of jumping off the back of the ship, is portrayed in pure, corny earnestness (You want complexity? "The English Patient" is out on video I Given their youth, the tenor of their times and the fate that awaits them on that ship, this swooning, uncomplicated brand of lustlove makes sense. Cameron, who was never before known for his tenderness, stages the telling moments between Jack and Rose with palpable eroticism, most notably the scene in which Rose decides to pose nude for Jack.

The romance reaches the peak stage of desire on the same night of the Titanic's doom, giving the lovers one last moment to be heroic. The sunny exuberance of the first half quickly dives into doom and dread as the Titanic scrapes past an iceberg. At the beginning, by means of computer animation, Cameron finds a way to illustrate just exactly how the Titanic sank and when the moment finally comes, we know what's coming and when. The ship took more than an hour to sink and Cameron uses almost every minute of that time with scenes of flooding corridors and desperate moments on the lifeboats. The ship's final moments above water, with Rose and Jack riding the stern straight into the cold, ice-strewn ocean is a masterpiece of vicarious terror.

Yet Cameron goes from there to a more refined emotional crescendo, creating an aftertaste of sweet tragedy. If there's a minus to "Titanic," it's Cameron's tendency to somewhat ham-handed class consciousness. The working-class steerage passengers are all noble and frisky; the wealthy first-class passengers are all soulless snobs (except for Rose who desperately wants to escape her station). Even here, though, Cameron is able to transcend his own shortcomings. One scene juxtaposing the dark, fiery hold of the ship where sweaty workers feed the coal engines with a shot of the ship's captain stirring his tea.

That single sequence underlined the rift that existed on board the Titanic. More importantly, it was a clever reminder that both workers and captain are about to meet judgment Both are destined to die. 7ePtx7Kp NICKELODEON THEATRES Gift Certificates mmmmm "AIM INSPIRED ACHIEVEMENT, jjl ONE OF THE YEAR'S BEST!" 3fj Samuel L. Jackson LjlTim" Lynp Whitfield Eve'sBayoum Daily rfgffttOh Daily 7:20, 9:30 fcKSLODEo pi us extra snow aai, sun 4 Spotlight Sentinel Friday, Dec 19, 1997.