James Cameron

If Titanic was James Cameron's meditation on the limits of technology, his new 3-D conversion underscores the point, to a fault. The conversion was expensive - at $18 million, it cost more to make than this year's Oscar winner ( The Artist , $15 million). And it was ambitious and exacting in the Cameron tradition - he sent bids out all over the world for the best technology, and asked companies to "audition" for the job by converting the same piece of footage. The winning firm spent a reported 60 weeks working round the clock to bring the new 3-D Titanic to theaters ahead of the 100th anniversary of its sinking, April 15. The result?

Sanctum begins with the nowadays ubiquitous "inspired by a true story" prefatory note. The true story here, however - harrowing, but with a happy ending - has been transformed by the filmmakers into an elimination-round spelunking nightmare. Set in a huge and largely unexplored cave system in Papua New Guinea ("the mother of all caves," we're told - cut to an aerial shot of her vulvic maw, ringed by rain forest green), Sanctum follows a team of underwater cavers who become trapped when a flash flood blocks their escape route.

THE EUROVISION Song Contest has been won by the likes of Lulu , ABBA , Celine Dion and many performers no one in the U.S. has ever heard of. This year, Russia's entry will be the Buranovo Grannies , eight women from Russia's Udmurtia Republic who blend modern pop sounds - at least what passses for modern in Udmurtia - with their own traditional choral singing style. Their big song? "Party for Everybody," which is part in English and part in Udmart, a distant relation of Finnish.

If you're tired of paying $7 to see "Titanic" - and Leo - for the sixth, seventh, eighth time, be of good cheer. James Cameron's ubiquitous love story will dock in video stores and retail outlets Sept. 1 with the consumer-friendly price of $19.95. The movie, which is nearing the $600 million mark at the box office, will be available initially only on VHS cassette in both pan-and-scan and wide-screen formats. A Spanish-subtitled version of the film will also be sold. No plans have been made for a DVD release.

'What day is it? What year?" asks the deeply disoriented dude who seems to have emerged from the primal ooze into a post-apocalyptic nightmare. Well, they don't say what day it is, but the year is 2018. In Terminator Salvation - fourth in the cyborgian series launched by James Cameron in 1984 - the man with the questions is Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), and the weird thing is that at the beginning of the movie, he's strapped to a table in a California correctional facility being put to death for murder.

Hollywood has shown this summer that while its special effects keep getting better, its movies do not. The industry has outdone itself creating spectacular illusions for "Backdraft" and "The Rocketeer," but it hasn't fooled anyone into thinking they're blockbuster material. Next in line is "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," and the result is the same: Great to look at, nothing under the hood. The first cost $6.7 million and wound up a sci-fi classic. The sequel may have cost as much as $110 million (estimates vary)

In one of the flashily mounted chases in True Lies, Arnold Schwarzenegger dangles from a helicopter pursuing an out-of-control stretch limousine. In truth, it's a fitting image of ostentatious waste for a picture whose length so far exceeds its content. With a staggering investment in excess of $100 million, it should perhaps not come as a surprise that James Cameron should entice the customers by offering two movies for the price of one. His much anticipated reunion with Schwarzenegger after the triumph of Terminator 2 has a curiously split personality.

Close followers of James Cameron, the writer-director of Terminator 2: Judgment Day - and that includes all real fans of screen science fiction - will soon realize that he's tried out one of his monsters before. And we don't mean Arnold. The sequel hinges on a clever twist in which two cyborgs from the future come to do battle in the present and thereby influence the course of human history in a post-nuclear world ruled by machines. One of them is a kinder, gentler Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is much changed from the robotic lethal weapon of the splendid Terminator (1984)

James Cameron confronted a monstrous problem in more ways than one in making Aliens. And those members of the audience not hiding under the seats during this powerhouse sequel can only admire the solution. Cameron had the nerve to attempt an encore to one of the truly frightening films of the '70s, a landmark in the revival of screen science fiction in the last decade, Ridley Scott's Alien (1979). Before bringing his celebrated visual prowess to the story of the ill-fated journey of the space freighter Nostromo, Scott clearly absorbed the structure and technique of another masterpiece in terror tactics - Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975)

For his third science-fiction film, James Cameron, director of The Terminator and Aliens, takes us on a journey to a world of implacable hostility where fragile man survives only through the ingenuity of technology and where the slightest mistake means death. This is no galaxy far, far away. Made at prodigious expense and considerable risk to life and limb, Cameron's film explores the most mysterious and inaccessible part of the Earth. In the farthest reaches of the ocean, The Abyss unfolds as a riveting action-adventure that raises timely issues.

If Titanic was James Cameron's meditation on the limits of technology, his new 3-D conversion underscores the point, to a fault. The conversion was expensive - at $18 million, it cost more to make than this year's Oscar winner ( The Artist , $15 million). And it was ambitious and exacting in the Cameron tradition - he sent bids out all over the world for the best technology, and asked companies to "audition" for the job by converting the same piece of footage. The winning firm spent a reported 60 weeks working round the clock to bring the new 3-D Titanic to theaters ahead of the 100th anniversary of its sinking, April 15. The result?

THE EUROVISION Song Contest has been won by the likes of Lulu , ABBA , Celine Dion and many performers no one in the U.S. has ever heard of. This year, Russia's entry will be the Buranovo Grannies , eight women from Russia's Udmurtia Republic who blend modern pop sounds - at least what passses for modern in Udmurtia - with their own traditional choral singing style. Their big song? "Party for Everybody," which is part in English and part in Udmart, a distant relation of Finnish.

Sanctum begins with the nowadays ubiquitous "inspired by a true story" prefatory note. The true story here, however - harrowing, but with a happy ending - has been transformed by the filmmakers into an elimination-round spelunking nightmare. Set in a huge and largely unexplored cave system in Papua New Guinea ("the mother of all caves," we're told - cut to an aerial shot of her vulvic maw, ringed by rain forest green), Sanctum follows a team of underwater cavers who become trapped when a flash flood blocks their escape route.

'What day is it? What year?" asks the deeply disoriented dude who seems to have emerged from the primal ooze into a post-apocalyptic nightmare. Well, they don't say what day it is, but the year is 2018. In Terminator Salvation - fourth in the cyborgian series launched by James Cameron in 1984 - the man with the questions is Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), and the weird thing is that at the beginning of the movie, he's strapped to a table in a California correctional facility being put to death for murder.

The mania never ceases. After nearly a century in extremely deep water, a half-dozen movie portrayals, touring exhibits of broken artifacts, and serenades by Celine Dion, RMS Titanic fascinates the public almost as if it sank yesterday, the latest manifestation being a multimedia concert mounted by the cutting-edge Peregrine Arts. Tonight and tomorrow night, The Sinking of the Titanic, a once avant-garde work by British composer Gavin Bryars, will be performed in conjunction with a newly created video element by Bill Morrison utilizing poetically decaying archival footage.

It's been 12 years since John Connor, the teenage savior of the human race, helped thwart the apocalypse aided by a relentless metal dude from the future who looked and talked like Arnold Schwarzenegger. In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Connor and his cyborg father-figure are back again, a decade older and, in Connor's case, not looking a whole lot like Edward Furlong. That's because our reluctant hero is now played by Nick Stahl, who's scruffier, tougher and more brooding, as befits a guy who's been living "off the grid.

Linda Hamilton has gone a long way down the fame list from the early '90s, when she saved her son and the world, again, in Terminator 2 and the MTV audience voted her "most attractive female" in the movies. And, though the drop in fame may cut into the celeb-a-ration treatment of her identical twin, a Mount Laurel nurse, it's just terrific with Linda. "It's completely OK," Hamilton said on the phone from her hotel room in New York, where she was prepping yesterday for appearances on Live with Regis and Kelly and The View to plug her delightful little Sunday TV movie, Bailey's Mistake, on The Wonderful World of Disney at 7 p.m. "People are constantly looking at me and saying: 'Whatever happened to you?

Often, the people who make big-budget, big-screen movies shy away from the small screen, but in the case of "Titanic" director James Cameron, who made the biggest-budget, biggest-screen movie of all time, TV is providing a bit of freedom. Cameron, used to telling stories in two or more hours, will have at least 13 hour-long episodes in which to examine characters in the Fox drama "Dark Angel," airing this fall. "As a screenwriter, you're forced to create the illusion of depth, you sort of seduce the audience into knowing who the character is," Cameron said.

If you're tired of paying $7 to see "Titanic" - and Leo - for the sixth, seventh, eighth time, be of good cheer. James Cameron's ubiquitous love story will dock in video stores and retail outlets Sept. 1 with the consumer-friendly price of $19.95. The movie, which is nearing the $600 million mark at the box office, will be available initially only on VHS cassette in both pan-and-scan and wide-screen formats. A Spanish-subtitled version of the film will also be sold. No plans have been made for a DVD release.

The 11 Academy Awards showered on "Titanic" yesterday were Hollywood's way of reminding us that sometimes, it accidentally does something right. Sometimes, a studio spends a hundred million dollars or more on some mad director's crazy, profligate idea, and instead of "Congo," it comes up with a movie that people truly love, like "Titanic. " There are pre-sold blockbusters that buy their way to success, and there are movies like "Titanic" that earn it - more than $1 billion worth - by becoming that rare movie that means something to people.