Picture of the week:

Kate Winslet in a photo full of glamour and history and she looks oddly alone.

Titanic is such a modern day classic and I loved it so much when it was in theaters (still do) but I won’t go see it in 3D. I understand Cameron wanting to make it visually stunning, but if you’ve read my post about why I hate 3D then you know I find it emotionally distancing. Why would you want to take an incredibly emotional movie, where the core of it isn’t just about the romance between Jack and Rose but the stunning emotional connection to humanity throughout the whole film. I kind of think converting it to 3D is a minor travesty.

If you’re interested in history at all, The Big Picture has a stunning collection of photographs from 1912 and newer shots of the sunken ship here. Interior shots of the Titanic show how exacting Cameron was in his accuracy.

Interview of the week 1:

Collider and /Film released several interviews from a set visit to The Avengers last spring. Most of them are very similar since the respective journalists sat in on group interviews. But there are still a few particularly interesting parts here and there. Here are a handful of my favorite quotes:

Joss Whedon: How do you make stakes when they are all really strong and really tall and handsome? Ultimately the answer is always what’s at stake has to be more than their lives. It has to be something bigger externally and smaller internally like they have to be going through an internal struggle that matches what they are facing on the outside, so that even if they survive, they may be compromised to a point where they can’t recover and if you have that and you really push them towards that, you push them towards something that is frightening and unlikable and a real choice that they can’t necessarily deal with, then you have some stake, you have emotional stakes that go beyond the hitty and the punchy.
from /Film

Joss Whedon: The financial burden is not on me. As I have said many times, “The first weekend is your job, the second weekend is mine. If the story is compelling, if I got it right, if people want to come back to it, yay!” I can’t really concern myself with the numbers or I would just go “banoonoos.” … It’s always just a story. It’s like “Do you care? If so, we scored. If not, it doesn’t matter to me if it succeeds or not.” And I found in production in the first couple of weeks of production that it was more like making an internet musical than anything I’ve ever done. I was completely at the mercy of everybody’s schedules and you know we were constantly having to adjust what we were doing based on what we could get when and it was very bizarre. It was sort of both ends of the spectrum are exactly the same. There’s a ton of circumstance that you have to dance around and you just adapt.
from /Film

It’s entirely likely that I will be referencing both these quotes in some form or another in the future. Because he makes such insightful points about marketing and about storytelling. The man is a walking, talking, really goofy Master’s class. He’s also self-deprecating so he’d probably make a clever joke of that.

Interview of the week 2:

Tom Hiddleston also had the most interesting things to say out of all The Avengers interviews, mostly because the questions they asked him delved into story and character and not just production details or plot points.

Well, I think Joss loves Loki because he loves complexity and the great thing about Loki is that there is almost no ceiling to his complexity as a character. He is a shape shifter, he’s intelligent, and he has strategic gifts but he also has reservoirs of pain. I think when you’ve got so much color and heroism in a film like The Avengers it needs to be balanced by a degree of pain, I think. Joss and I sat down for a long time at the end of Thor and he said, “Tell me everything about living inside of this man for 6 months. Tell me what makes him tick, what keeps him up at night. What are the nightmares of his soul?” We just shared all of our ideas from Norse mythology, the comics, and things that I developed with Kenneth Branagh. He loved it and he loved all of those ideas. He loved all of Loki’s damage and that somewhere at the bottom of Loki’s credentials as a bad guy he is a searching spirit. He is a damaged soul searching for the answers to something. Why he exists, what is his role in this universe, that he isn’t just somebody who is evil for the sake of being evil. He has complicated reasons for that.
from Collider

How different is Loki in this film when compared to how he is in Thor? I think that he comes into his own power at the end of Thor. Is he just very angry and bitter in this film?
HIDDLESTON: Well, what can I say here? I swear to you that in that building over there, there are sniper rifles. [laughs] I think that what was interesting about the journey of Loki in Thor is that he went from second string and damaged prints to being the god of mischief and god of evil. I think somewhere between the end of Thor and the beginning of The Avengers, Loki has been to the Marvel equivalent of the 7th circle of hell. At the end of Thor you see him let go. He lets go of the spear, he lets go of Asgard, and he lets go of the need of his brother and father’s affection and approval. He has bigger plans now.

I think there is a degree of self-possession in Loki in The Avengers, which was missing in Thor. As in, the Loki of Thor is a confused and damaged prince and the Loki of The Avengers is somebody who understands his own power. He understands his own anger and is able to probably, I would say, suppress it. So you see that in a way he is more mischievous. Loki is the god of mischief and I think that the way Joss has written Loki in The Avengers is that he is a mischief. He is someone whose actions are very, very difficult for the seven of eight Avengers to pin down.
from Collider

Video of the week: via Kel. Seriously, one of these weeks I’ll publish one of these that has absolutely nothing to do with Avengers. Probably sometime in late May….
(yes, I know it opens May 4th but then there’s the box office reports and reviews and rewatching and press and interviews and…)