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Journey to the Center of the Earth

Brendan Fraser, Josh Hutcherson, Anita Briem

This is a family newspaper. So, this story has to be told as carefully as a leper climbing into a hot tub. Over the course of my life, I have found new and exciting ways of ending relationships, sometimes before they have even begun. I have a deaf, white Boxer puppy named Layla. Why she has to have a name in the first place is beyond me. She is deaf after all, but everyone in my life says she has to have one. So, Layla, named after the Eric Clapton song, it is. The only two problems I seem to have with her is that she is a little relaxed at times about potty training and, while not really a chewer, she is a dragger. She loves to drag or carry objects from one location to another. So for example, household plants have been drug across the floor to the other side of the room and I have found two belts, a sock, a spoon, and various other articles in my backyard. On the positive side, women seem to melt like snow on a spring day around her because she is so cute and loving. Well, I had struck up a friendship with possibilities with a young woman at my gym. Needless to say, Layla stole her heart and invited both of us over to her house. Now, Layla is an extremely social dog and will soon discover any nook and cranny of any house she is in. A little vino, a little Deano, a nice breeze coming through the open back sliding door, and my attention was fixed on the young woman on the couch with me. Out of the corner of my eye, I spied my beloved puppy shooting through the living room with something that looked like a hard white plastic bone or stick in her mouth heading to the back yard.

Now I know you are wondering what this object was, but at the time I could have cared less. It was not until the next day that I learned what my dog deposited among the flowers in her backyard when a red-faced woman called me. Guy, a word of advice, when a woman you are romantically interested in calls you all upset, don’t giggle like a little school girl and repeatedly say, “I think I am going to potty myself.” There among the roses and other colorful creations of God, her Mexican gardener had discovered the object my pooch had exited the house with. I have now learned that nothing is more embarrassing for a woman than to wake up to her Hispanic, portly, middle-aged gardener rapping on her back door with one of her most personal items with tiny teeth marks all over it in his other hand, an item that 52 percent of all American women own, an item that in order to protect women from themselves the states of Georgia, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Indiana, Virginia, and Louisiana have made illegal for women to buy unless for medical purposes. (I am guessing there is a rash of lonely Southern women who for some unknown reason are plagued by chronic sore backs and necks. Other great laws on the books to protect you ladies include a Willowdale, Oregon law which prohibits a man from cursing during the romantic act, because God knows, women need to keep one part of their body virginal, even if it is only their ears. In Connorsville, Wisconsin, it is illegal for a man to shoot a gun while his female partner is having a sexual orgasm because nothing is sexier to a woman than a naked man with just his black socks and a gun belt on. On a side note, none of my former girlfriends needs to comment on my Facebook or MySpace pages, that under that law, I will never have to worry about serving a night in jail in Connorsville, even if I decide to play “Lone Ranger and Indian squawk,” wearing a black mask and pistols to bed.) So, I now know the Spanish word for…

Why am I telling this story? Because I want to think about, write, or do anything, anything other than think about the embarrassment I felt for Brendan Fraser as I watched Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D. The movie sucks. Next to Matthew McConaughey, Brendan Fraser might be the laziest actor in Hollywood. Both can do outstanding work when motivated but more often than not, mail in their performances. Fraser has made a career out of goofy children’s films for big paychecks (Dudley Do-Right, Monkeybone, George Of The Jungle), but even this movie will have your crumb cruncher wondering why you are trying to insult their intelligence by making them sit through this thing just before they eat paste. It stinks, just stinks. Frasier is the leading candidate for the Razzy Worst Actor Award for the 2008.

Except for the golden age of 3-D filmmaking (1952-1955), over the course of the 111 year history of stereoscopic filmmaking, when someone sees, 3-D, in a title of a film, it usually means that if you are stupid enough to purchase a ticket to this film you might as well pretend that the theater owners and studios are wearing a mask and carrying a gun, because you are about to get robbed. 3-D is a gimmick to get audiences to go to films that they would not normally go to. It is the bastion of craptastic B-grade, no D-grade, films like Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, Parasite, and The Bubble and franchises that were wearing out their welcome like Jaws 3-D, Amityville 3-D, and Friday the 13^th Part 3. (Trivia question: What is the most financially successful 3-D film in the history of cinema? Answer: The soft core porn film The Stewardesses (1969). A remake of this movie is in the planning stages and producers promise that audiences will truly enjoy “real triple D” filmmaking. God bless America, land of taste and culture and cinematic mommy parts that look like they are about to poke you in the eye.)

Why the film was even made in the first place is beyond me. While a sci-fi classic, Jules Verne’s story has aged badly and can be only understood in the context that it was written. In 1864, it seemed to many, because of the work of astronomer Edmund Halley and late John Symmes, that the earth was hollow and there were entrances to his underground world found at the poles, because both put forward that the aurora borealis, the northern lights, were caused by luminous gases escaping through the thin crust at the poles. Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Verne picked up this notion as a way to tell popular adventure stories. As late as the 1940s, this was still a popular theory with some and even sparked an urban legend that Adolph Hitler and some of his henchmen escaped into the center of the earth. Today, science has put an end to that foolishness. Even if taken as a flight of fantasy, it is badly written and awful fantasy, and this Brendan Frasier movie stays closer to the source material than it should.

To recount for those of you who have not read the Verne yarn, Frasier and Hutchinson are uncle and nephew. God, I already want to put the revolver in my mouth. Of course, hunky Frasier is thought to be a dork by his nephew whose father has vanished and Frasier is trying to discover what happened to him by going over his research. Is it hot in here or is it me. Okay, okay, back to the synopsis, about the three hour mark, okay, the forty-five minute mark, it just seemed like three hours, Frasier has figured out his brother has gone to the center of the earth. It is a wacky world inhabited by badly done CGI creatures, carnivorous fish, and T-Rexes, but is someone following them? God help me, I cannot do this anymore. Earlier this year, I watched a documentary of Ricki Lake pop out a kid. His world you never want to see, but Journey to the Center of the Earth… just put Ricki on a loop and give me a stick to jab my eyes out with. I am so embarrassed by this column, but not as embarrassed as you should be for purchasing a ticket to this film.

Verdict: Awful