Last night’s invitational screening of Titanic 3D in Burbank was an entirely pleasant surprise. I went in expecting a not-bright-enough diminishment, maybe, or a filtered dimensional thing that might be okay but not great. I can’t say that what I saw looked “great”, but it looked awfully good for a 2D to 3D conversion. In fact, I tweeted that it was “the best damn 3D conversion I’ve ever seen.”

The brightness and sharpness levels could have been a bit better, I suppose (and it may be that I’ll experience a more vivid presentation when I see a Panavision 3D version at the Ultrastar Gardenwalk this morning at 11 am) , but I was especially impressed by the subtle degrees of 3D enhancement that director Jim Cameron and his crew have applied. The film never feels tricked up or jiggered to deliver artificial 3D jizz. As much as technology has allowed Titanic 3D feels elegant and unforced. The $15 or $18 million that went into this conversion was well spent.

The moment when Kate Winslet is threatening suicide and holding onto the stern railing and the camera looks down at the sea some 60 feet below…you can really sense that it’s a long way down, and that the water is colder than shit. This moment alone makes Titanic 3D worth catching.

It may be that Roger Ebert and David Poland saw problematic projections of Titanic 3D when they saw it last month in Chicago and Burbank, respectively, resulting in those negative reviews. I only know that the presentation I saw last night was more than satisfactory — nothing felt filtered or shadowy or compromised, and it’s certainly a high-water accomplishment by the standards of other 3D conversions.

After the first hour or so you start to forget that you’re watching a 3D film. The look of it stops feeling new or re-fashioned and begins to seem like the natural way of things. This may not sound like a compliment but it is.

A guy wrote me last night and said, “If I’ve already seen regular Titanic three times and liked it but didn’t love it, is Titanic 3D worth my 15 bucks?” My first thought was, “He didn’t love it but he saw it three times?” Considered answer: This is as good as 3D conversion gets, so if you care about seeing a really good job of enhancing a 2D film and adding a bit here and there, it’s definitely worth paying to see.

All this aside, I presume they’ll be releasing a Bluray of the old 2D Titanic sometime in the summer, and I’m looking forward to owning that. I’ll never watch 3D in my home.

Safari Motel on Olive Ave. in Burbank, taken on the way back home.

Aura — Tuesday, 4.3, 4:10 pm.

You know what really carries Titanic 3D? What makes it an essential revisiting? Young Leonardo DiCaprio, who was 21 or 22 when Titanic was shot in mid the late ’96. For me, his performance as Jack Dawson is a time-capsule high. For me he was the whole thing– the one element I couldn’t take my eyes off last night.

The movie still works, still shatters…although James Cameron‘s cornball dialogue hurts more now than it used to. Some of the CG shots (sailboats and those doll-like passengers and crew in the wide shots) look even more primitive — naturally, inescapably — than they did in ’97. (I was asking myself why Cameron didn’t do a George Lucas and refine them a bit.) Kate Winslet looks softer, of course, and slightly chubbier that I remember, and Billy Zane…well, he’s pretty close to great in every scene. (Seriously — he makes so many hammy lines feel right, or at least a lot less painful.)

But DiCaprio is altogether heartbreaking, and that Dawson aura — that occasional giggly kid vibe and courage and dopey naivete, and that intensity and passion and the survive-at-all-costs attitude — feels like drugs.

As sappy as this sounds, I felt myself choking up a couple of times. Maybe it’s because I’m older now and I value youth all the more, but the prospect of this really young guy dying from hypothermia at the end of the film brought tears to my eyes. The moment when his corpse sinks into the blackest blue at the end hits that much harder.

We’ve all gotten older and have moved on and packed on a few pounds, but I hadn’t seen or felt this particular incarnation of DiCaprio on a big screen — Leo at his prettiest, liveliest and most vibrant with that beanpole body and movie-tanned skin and those luminous strands of straw-blonde hair — in 15 years, and I just couldn’t get over the irrepressible beauty of the guy. The absolute magnificence of being young and robust and beautiful and super-thin and spiritually aflame like a thousand candles kept hitting me over and over.

The Leo of The Quick and The Dead, Basketball Dairies, Total Eclipse, Marvin’s Room, Romeo + Juliet and Titanic (i.e., 94 to ’97) was a very special current at a special moment in time. Right after Titanic exploded DiCaprio retreated and became a kind of me-and-my-homies party hound, and except for The Man in the Iron Mask didn’t return until The Beach, and by then he’d turned a bit cynical (unavoidable) and been doing a lot of boozing. His face was rounder and his hair was shorter. He’d become a different guy and that whole mid ’90s thing was dead and gone.

Of all the tourist attractions to begin his trailer for To Rome With Love with, Woody Allen chose “the monstrosity” — the Monument of Victor Emmanuel. And then, of course, for the sake of Joe and Jane Schmoe, the Colosseum. That said, the greens and the magic-hour ambers are beautiful — cheers to dp Darius Khondji.

When I saw Whit Stillman‘s Damels in Distress (Sony Classics, 4.6) in Toronto last September I felt it was too arch by half. Stillman’s films (Metropolitan, Barcelona, Last Days of Disco) are always about people with money and social connections who live in their own rigorously neurotic world. Barcelona is Stillman’s best because it allows the real world into this realm. Damsels, sorry to say, feels entangled in a system of forced whimsy, like it was shot on the grounds of an insane asylum for hipsters.

“By the time Damsels in Distress winds its way toward its closing musical number — a singing, dancing outdoor ensemble rendering of George and Ira Gershwin‘s ‘Things Are Looking Up’ — its romantic charms, meager to begin with, have worn thin, like a tweed jacket gone threadbare at the elbows. The thing has the feel of a vanity project, lacking urgency — like the work of a gentleman filmmaker who doesn’t have to work.” — from Stephanie Zacharek‘s Movieline review.

The combination of Lou Lumenick‘s N.Y. Post review of Titanic 3D and Mekado Murphy‘s N.Y. Times dissection of the enhancement of James Cameron‘s 1997 film has me looking forward to the finest 3D conversion of my moviegoing life …maybe. And if it doesn’t live up to this, watch out.

I’ll be seeing Titanic 3D twice within the next 27 hours — at 6:30 pm tonight at a Burbank AMC plex via the not-highly-respected RealD and accompanying Sony 3D projection system, and at 11 tomorrow morning at the UltraLuxe Anaheim 14 in Anaheim, where I’ll see a Panavision 3D version.

Will someone tell me why Paramount has decided to have its all-media screening at a plex run by the notorious AMC chain (which is referred to in certain high-end projection circles as “All Movies Compromised”)? Will it be shown in the same theatre that MCN’s David Poland caught Titanic 3D in on 2.14? I’m asking because what Poland saw resulted in the following reaction: “I found myself wanting to take the glasses off repeatedly [because] it’s like watching the movie through a filter. Call it darkness, call it clarity, call it what you like…the movie takes such painstaking efforts to get every detail right…I want to see the imperfections…and with those glasses on, I could not.”

Paramount showed the Titanic 3D preview footage at its big swanky theatre on the lot last fall. Why are they subjecting media invitees to a long arduous shlep out to Burbank, and during rush hour yet? Just so they can pack the screening with Titanic fans? This tells me Paramount doesn’t truly respect the full technical potential of Titanic 3D. It tells me they just want the money.

It’s only a trailer, but I’m getting a very glossy, gay Vegas vibe from this thing (Warner Bros./New Line, 6.15). Obviously lampooning and worshipping the excessive ’80s rock scene, reducing everyone — stars, fans, roadies, musicans, hangers-on, up-and-comers, managers, rock journalists — to cliche. Director Adam Shankman has never been a purveyor of depth. An intensely shallow Almost Famous, or so it would seem.

Deadline‘s Mike Fleming has seen it and said Tom Cruise kicks it…fine. But the essence of what this film will be is obvious.

Here’s the wrong-aspect-ratio trailer that Deadline posted this morning:

As explained this morning by Slashfilm’s Russ Fischer, a guy named Jeff Desom “built a sort of 3D digital model of the apartment courtyard from Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rear Window, and then composited all the events seen from the window of Jimmy Stewart‘s apartment during the film into a single shot.” But that horrible music Desom chose makes it painful to sit through.

Yesterday morning Sasha Stone, Phil Contrino and I kicked around last weekend’s box-office, Titanic 3D, The Hunger Games, next weekend’s openers, etc. Sasha actually believes that the enormous success of The Hunger Games, an unrelievedly mediocre film, might result in a Best Picture nomination, and that excluding it from consideration will be an affirmation of 62 year-old Academy white-guy values. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.

Male immaturity = guys going through the superficial motions of adulthood but essentially acting like they’re 16 or 17. Par for the course. But a guy holding onto a teddy bear? Wahlberg makes a great film like The Fighter and it’s exhilarating, and then he shows up in his recent paycheck films (The Other Guys, Contraband, Ted) and it’s like “this is the best you could do?”

I’ll be attending Cinemacon 2012 for four days and nights. Arrive Monday, 4.23 and check out on Friday morning, 4.27. Big-studio splash, early screenings, product reels, personal appearances, etc. Got a good four-night deal at the Hard Rock for only $278. Southwest RT is only $160. $440 so far…maybe another $250 for food, cabs & knick-knacks. No gambling, drinking or comfort of strangers.

“What if you just used the found footage gimmick during the scary parts?,” Badass Digest‘s Devin Faraci wrote on 3.20. “That’s what Eduardo Sanchez, co-director of The Blair Witch Project, does with Lovely Molly. The main character (Gretchen Lodge) is haunted by (or thinks she is haunted by) a malevolent spirit. Whenever the spirit approaches she picks up the camera and we go from a standard narrative to a first-person-camera POV. It’s effective.

“Lovely Molly is a decent film, but what really intrigued me was the way the found footage aesthetic — including night vision — was integrated into a traditional narrative feature. In some ways this only highlights the gimmick nature of first person POV, but so what? This aesthetic is a gimmick — sometimes an effective one, but one nonetheless.

“The film is structured in a way that makes you guess whether Molly really is haunted or whether she’s relapsing into drugs and a paranoid state. It all hinges on Lodge’s performance, and I found her magnetic and intriguing, so it worked for me.”

Here are several SXSW reviews of Sanchez’s film.