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Rating: 2.5 stars
There was much breathless buzz about Journey to the Center of the Earth being the bestest 3-D movie ever! Indeed, the 3-D effects are pretty eye-popping: Yo-yos spring off the screen at you, dinosaurs slime on you, Brendan Fraser spits on you, etc. It’s all quite vivid. But I’m still not convinced. Generously speaking, the film utilizes true 3-D effects for about 30 of its 90-minute running time. That means you spend a useless hour in those clunky glasses that slightly distort the normal image and give you a headache. (Hey, at least I remembered to wear my contact lenses this time). It just ain’t worth it.
So how’s the rest of the film? It’s pretty standard adventure movie stuff—yet another riff on the Jules Verne classic novel about scientists who fall into a portal into the earth’s core where they discover an alternate universe filled with dinosaurs and luminescent birds and molten hot waterfalls.
In this case, the adventurers are hunky scientist Brendan Fraser (still his own charming brand of macho goofball), his nephew Sean (Josh Hutcherson, a...
3:44 pm
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The experience of watching Hard Times at Douglass High is akin to that of walking into a very dark room that has a few slivers of sunlight peaking in. The documentary, filmed by Susan and Alan Raymond over the course of one school year in Baltimore and airing this month on HBO, doesn’t really tell you anything you don’t already know about inner city schools or the pressures of No Child Left Behind—it just manages to bring it into sharper focus. So we see students falling asleep in classes or not going to class at all (oddly, they come to school, but loiter in the hallway), being rude to teachers and administrators, fighting with each other in the hall (in one horrific scene, a muscle-bound boy starts beating on five girls who were flirtingly teasing him), and struggling with the most basic of assignments. We see teachers, mostly hard-working and committed, who don’t have text books, who beg their students to show up “just two days in a row,” who bemoan the fact that, on parent/teacher night, so few parents actually arrive. We see administrators forced to make grueling choices—pass kids who really...
