It's not. Cameron is ready for the settle-down factor, and he starts throwing in extra flavorings and humor and little extras and whatever else he can think of. And he pretty much pulls it off. You leave the huge IMAX theatre going, "Yeah...pretty good...not bad."

Cameron got lucky with his decision to use a couple of newly-designed "bots" -- cute little R2D2-like underwater probe droids with cameras, nicknamed Jake and Elwood -- to capture some extra-special footage of stuff no one's ever seen. Lucky because Elwood's battery died and he got stuck inside the wreckage and had to be rescued by Jake, which makes for a nifty third-act suspense sequence.

To make the movie a little spooky and to justify the use of the word "ghosts" in the title, Cameron throws in a lot of digital overlays of shots of the Titanic when she was brand-new, and making them correspond to the rotted real-life vessel, along with digital overlays and flashbacks of various characters (not from TITANIC out-takes but newly shot material, with new actors) walking the decks in costume.

Paxton lends a fallible human touch to the expedition, "playing" (in a sense) a quietly terrified everyman as he goes on his first plunge. In fact, there's an amiable folksiness among all the crew members, including the bear-like Lewis Abernathy, a writer-director (HOUSE IV) who played Paxton's sidekick in TITANIC, and their various Russian hosts (including an extremely friendly chef who seems straight out of central casting).

And the film has a moment of odd historical resonance when one of Cameron's dives ends on the morning of September 11, 2001. This leads to some soul-searching and reflection about the same stuff we all went through that day, except it's happening in relative isolation.

The one thing that doesn't visually kick in is the sense of enormous size that Paxton and one other team-member (I forget who) got from seeing the Titanic for the first time. Cameron used a small-scale model of the wreckage for most of the footage he used in the opening underwater portion of TITANIC, and the real thing doesn't look that much different. And you can't tell if it's big, small, medium-sized, or massive.

What I'm about to mention now doesn't have anything to do with this film, but I've always wanted to bring this up about the Titanic disaster. Maybe some buff or historian out there will give me some answers, since I have two observations to make.

(1) If I were Cpt. Smith and I'd just been told the ship was doomed, I would have turned it around immediately, before she took on too much water, and headed back to the iceberg I'd just collided with. Then I would initiate some kind of makeshift lifeboat shuttle service between the ship and the iceberg and instruct those male passengers not likely to be permitted into the regular lifeboats to climb up onto the iceberg and wait for rescue. This might be cold and/or difficult, but it would be preferable to going into the water to drown or die of hypothermia.

(2) The Titanic was the most lavish and luxurious ship ever built during its time, and this meant there must have been dozens and dozens of large banquet tables and other bulky wooden objects that could have been thrown into the water and used as lifebuoys (like the large chest that Kate Winslet lies on at the end of the 1997 film). Why weren't these objects carried up to the decks by the crew and thrown into the drink in order to save lives?

Cinema Epicuria

I'll be doing jury duty today through Sunday at the Sonoma Valley Film Festival, which is being billed as one of those organic, people-sized affairs and a very cool thing to visit. FILM THREAT editor Chris Gore invited me and arranged for the perks, so I owe him a word of thanks. I've been asked to look at eight films, one of which will be selected as the first-prize winner (or some such distinction), and I'll say right now there's one that unimistakably stands out as the most vivid and provocative. My lips are sealed until the the announcement on Saturday.

The films are Bob Odenkirk's MELVIN GOES TO DINNER (w/ Michael Bleiden, Matt Price, Maura Tierney, Jack Black); Alan Jacobs' AMERICAN GUN (w/ James Coburn, Virginia Madsen, Barbara Bain); Kasia Adamik's BARK (w/ Lisa Kudrow, Hank Azaria, Vincent D'Onofrio); Mike Bencivenga's HAPPY HOUR (w/ Anthony LaPaglia, Caroleen Feeney); Peter Masterson's WEST OF HERE (w/ Josh Hamilton, Mary Stuart Masterson); Agnieska Holland's JULIE WALKING HOME (w/ Mirando Otto, Lothaire Bluteau, William Fichtner); Mark Munden's MIRANDA (w/ Christina Ricci, John Simms, John Hurt and Kyle MacLachlan); and Bob Taichner's SHUT YER DIRTY LITTLE MOUTH.

Lady of the Canyon

ANGER MANAGEMENT, the year's first big presumptive hit, arrives Friday. It's somewhere between funny and very funny, it has at least one classic scene (Nicholson and Sandler singing "I Feel Pretty" from WEST SIDE STORY), and it'll definitely make a pile.

An intriguing-sounding tip about a big wheel at Lucasfilm resigning over the sluggish or cavalier pace of development on EPISODE 3 has shriveled like a grape and is probably bogus. But it sure was fun to kick around in my head before a Lucasfilm publicist shot it down.

The most absurd-sounding rumor about a film director I've heard in several years (in the vein of that Michael Cimino story that popped up in '97 or thereabouts) has been making the rounds but I won't repeat it, even to make fun of it.

Ben and Jen (a.k.a., "B.Lo") have been taking hits in the press (in NEWSWEEK, most prominently) over advance reactions to Martin Brest's GIGLI...but not, despite what you think you may have read or heard, about their teaming in JERSEY GIRL, which I've heard is just fine. I've also been told that while GIGLI does fall apart at the end, the second act "kills...I mean KILLS," according to a guy who caught a preview.

And yet the only thing I really feel like writing about now (Monday going on 6 pm...is Saddam Hussein dead?) is a wonderful new Warner Home Video DVD of Francois Truffaut's DAY FOR NIGHT ('73), and its star Jacqueline Bisset, who still captivates with those emerald eyes, and has never stopped ripening as an actress. Her performance in Chris Munch's THE SLEEPY TIME GAL, which I only just saw, is ample proof of this. I found myself thinking after seeing it, if only she'd been cast as that aging-hippie music producer in Lisa Cholodenko's LAUREL CANYON. I'm not saying Bisset would have been necessarily better than Frances McDormand, but that swimming-pool scene would have been a tad more enticing.

My interest in Bisset has been fanned by having visited her Benedict Canyon home last week. The initial idea was to sit down and watch the DAY FOR NIGHT disc together and do one of those Rick Lyman-type encounters (i.e., an actor/filmmaker commenting on a film as he/she watches it with a journalist), especially since the NEW YORK TIMES stopped running those pieces last year. (I asked Lyman if I could rip it off, and he said fine.)

But when I got there Jackie said she wasn't in the mood to watch DAY FOR NIGHT, having seen it recently in a theatre. So she made me a chicken-and-lettuce sandwich on sourdough and we walked around her home, and she noted with quiet alarm how so many of the beaming actors and filmmakers in a cluster of photos along the wall near her kitchen had passed on. We then decided we'd at least watch some of the special features on the DAY FOR NIGHT DVD, so we retired to a combination DVD-watching and workout room in the rear of her home, and popped it in.

The first thing we saw, naturally, was "A Conversation with Jacqueline Bisset," which had been taped by Laurent Bouzereau, the producer of the disc's special features section.

Jackie was mystified at first because she didn't remember giving an interview to Bouzereau, but then the evidence appeared and she began to smile circumspectly and say things like, "Yes...well ...it was obviously shot here...it must have been done recently because that necklace I'm wearing [in the interview footage] I only bought a few months ago...I do so many of these things they all start to blend together," and so on.

"Is this disc going to get any promotion?" she asked. "Well, yeah ...as far as it goes," I replied.

DAY FOR NIGHT was Bisset's big breakthrough in terms of being seen as something more than the sum of her beautiful parts. She says on the DVD, "I had all these sort of girlfriend roles with big stars" -- a stand-out was BULLITT ('68) with Steve McQueen -- "and they were great. I was thrilled because I met wonderful people, but it wasn't really the cinema I was hoping to do...so when I got DAY FOR NIGHT I was very grateful and amazed."

Like any actress who's been up and down, Bisset probably wouldn't mind being grateful and amazed once again. And yet she works a lot, or seems to. She just saw a cut of a film she recently made called SWING, directed by Martin Guiguy, and has also acted in an upcomer called LATTER DAYS, directed by C.J. Cox. But she's also pining to be cast, she says, "in something really good and radiant, like THE HOURS."

An alarming number of younger journalists, she says, not only haven't seen DAY FOR NIGHT but have to be told about it. Truffaut's most popular and accessible film (winner of the New York Film Critics award for Best Picture) is mainly about his love of movies and especially the making of them, with all the uncertainties, unruliness and chaos that are always part of the game.

Filmed at Nice's Victorine Studios, it's about the shooting of a romantic melodrama called "Meet Pamela," which follows that basic bones of Louis Malle's DAMAGED. The main actors, behind and in front of the cameras (which in DAY FOR NIGHT amounts to the same thing), are Bisset, Jean Pierre Leaud, Jean Pierre Aumont and Valentina Cortese.

Truffaut himself is actually the lead character, playing the director of the film-within-the-film who becomes intimately involved with every tiny problem and personal drama that erupts during filming. Truffaut plays himself, of course, although his more intimate and impassioned feelings come out through Leaud's character.

Starting with THE 400 BLOWS and lasting over two decades, Leaud was in every sense Truffaut's stand-in and alter ego (autobiographical, emotional, philosophical). When Leaud says in DAY FOR NIGHT, for example, that he abhors the idea of going out for a romantic dinner and would much rather catch a film at a local cinema, that's Truffaut in spades.

Bisset believes that "movies were more important than life" for Truffaut, "and he put his life aside a lot for his work. His greatest happiness...perhaps his only real happiness...came from making a film."

We watched another of the DVD's featurettes, this one called "Truffaut in the U.S.A." The four talking heads are Truffaut biographer and Columbia film professor Annette Insdorf, VARIETY critic Todd McCarthy (who is lit more attractively than Bisset is in her sequence), director Brian dePalma and actor Bob Balaban, who played Truffaut's interpreter in Steven Spielberg's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND ('77).

McCarthy voices a quintessential thought about DAY FOR NIGHT on the DVD. "It continues to be tremendously inspirational and popular for moviegoers today," he says. "It's about the love of cinema, regardless of the complications and frustration and raging egos involved...it's about the unconditional love of cinema."

At one point or another Bisset and I forgot about the interview and just started talking. I told her I once visited Truffaut's grave in Montmartre (he died in '84, at only 54 or thereabouts) and had found it immensely sad. We turned to more life-affirming topics. I mentioned at one point that many of my journalist friends have the hots for her, and she didn't seem displeased. She said I resemble, somewhat, her first boyfriend, Michael Sarrazin, whom she says has recently left Los Angeles and "moved back to Montreal."

She still doesn't like the addictive effect that computers seem to have on her friends, she said, but said she's thinking about actually getting one and becoming another cyber junkie like the rest of us.

We'd discussed computers and other technologies the last time we spoke at length, during an interview session for THE SLEEPY TIME GAL at the '01 Sundance Film Festival. (She hadn't yet bought a DVD player back then.) The thrust of many of her Park City comments were that life offers far too many superficial distractions these days, and we should guard against them.

"I'm in my head," she said. "I live in my head."

But when I asked if I could snap her photo, she became totally focused on getting the image exactly right -- the emotional mood, the lighting ("I hate sunlight"), her hair. She knows exactly what works for her, and what doesn't. I asked again last week if I could do the same, and she turned to the mirror and fluffed her hair and said with a certain playfulness, "A photo? Now?...no ... no. Use the ones you took before."

"I'm Still Standin'!"

The GUARDIAN in London is reporting Saddam Hussein survived Monday's four-bomb attack on that restaurant in western Baghdad. "He was probably not in the building when it was bombed," a well-placed British intelligence source told the paper, adding that "it was believed [Hussein] had been in the building earlier." No information was offered on whether his sons Qusay and Uday had escaped also, but let's hope not.

I was slightly crestfallen when I read this story Tuesday night, but I started to chuckle a little bit also. For me, life is cinema and vice versa, and Hussein's last stand in Baghdad is starting to seem flamboyantly melodramatic in a way that resembles the death of Al Pacino's Tony Montana. The Baghdad situation right now is like those final minutes in Tony's Miami McMansion with all those South American gunmen swarming all over and killing his bodyguards, one after another. And perhaps somewhere an enraged, bloodied, adrenalized Saddam Hussein will be standing on a balcony as he looks out at American jets swarming overhead.... "Come and get me! Say hello to my leetle friend....that all you got? That all you got? Aaaayyyy!"

Or maybe he's already fallen forward from that balcony, shattered the railing, and landed face first in the pool below. When this inevitable thing happens for sure and there are no more doubters being anonymously quoted in the GUARDIAN, I want to hear Giorgio Moroder's SCARFACE music playing on the soundtrack, and I want the camera to pull back slowly.

Role Playing

Today's cast: Matt Dillon, John Turturro, Ileana Douglas, Bridget Fonda, Bruce Davison, Eric Stoltz, Partsy Kensit, Jennifer Leigh Warren, Chris Isaak.

What's That Line?

I flaked all last week on What's That Line? because it suddenly felt to me like some whiny little pain-in-the-ass kid in fifth grade... poking me, poking me...where's your homework?...you're late with it. So I told him to blow. Now he's back, poking me again. All right, I'll get through this and find my way back to enjoying the writing this portion of the column. And to kick things off I'll make it extra-easy this time. An older guy, peeved, has just risen to his feet in a hotel room. A younger guy is standing on the other side of the room.

Older Guy: "There was this kid I grew up with. He was younger than me, sorta looked up to me... you know. We did our first work together, worked our way out of the street. Things were good. We made the most of it. During Prohibition we ran molasses into Canada, made a fortune. Your father, too. As much as anyone, I loved him and trusted him. Later on he had an idea -- to build a city out of a desert stop-over for GI's on the way to the West Coast. That kid's name was [name] and the city he invented was [name]. This was a great man -- a man of vision and guts. And there isn't even a plaque, or a signpost, or a statue of him in that town! Someone....put a bullet through his eye. No one knows who gave the order. When I heard it, I wasn't angry; I knew [name] -- I knew he was headstrong, talking loud, saying stupid things. So when he turned up dead, I let it go. And I said to myself, this is the business we've chosen. I didn't ask who gave the order, because it had nothing to do with business!

Name the film, the year of release, the director, the screenwriter(s), and the actors in the scene.