By Aaron 8/9/2008

Did you know Brendan Fraser released two movies in the span of three weeks? Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor were little more than novelties. Journey offered little more than being a showcase for 3D (and failing miserably) while The Mummy was an exercise in withstanding torture.

What is so amazing is that these movies are so similar and yet both Fraser vehicles were released so close together and both being movies that are action-adventures with young audiences. It would seem that both were potentially big money making kids flicks that had to end up competing with each other.

Journey is the better of the two, sporting a character foreign to most young audiences (being based on a book popular way before their time) and a mildly original plot. The movie itself is much simpler: Fraser’s Professor Anderson character longs for answers to his brother’s death as well as resolution to his lifelong scientific research and sets out to find them along with his nephew Sean (John Hutcheon) and Hannah Asgeirsson (Anita Briem). Ridiculous spectacles abound (mostly attempts to exploit 3D technology), as do flimsy barriers to their safety and return from the center of the Earth.

Mummy is far weaker, plagued by painfully written and executed dialogue that begs for you to hit the mute button (difficult in a theatre setting). The movie picks up where the pitiful second movie left us, Rick and Evelyn (this time played by Maria Bello instead of Rachel Weisz) are settling into retirement while their son, the troublemaker from the second movie is supposedly at school. But *gasp* their son Alex (Luke Ford) is really following in his parents’ footsteps by excavating tombs! The movie quickly slides into familiar predictability after the mummy (Jet Li) rises from the dead. Usual outrageous mummy powers accompany the return, destroying villages and people in the mummy’s wake.

The disappointment starts with Journey, which despite being a 3D novelty does not have very cool 3D effects. Even for a kids movie the action scenes are unusually tame and the movie seems to be chock-full of pointless musings on family, loss, and science that seem out of place in a kids’ film that you can’t take seriously. Despite that previous complaint, the movie safely remains thin on dialogue. For a 3D flick – and a kids’ flick – the movie left much to be desired – even for typical Fraser fare.

If Journey was disappointing, Mummy is downright heartbreaking. A movie hailed by Ebert as a return to the series’ original flavor with 1999’s The Mummy lacked any of the original’s comedic timing or fresh feeling action. To the contrary the dialogue is cheesy, corny, stupid, and any other insulting thing you can think – often being merely a dictation of what is already happening. Fraser and Bello don’t help out either, acting down to the script instead of rising above, leaving a bad taste in your mouth that gets worse as the film goes on. As if the dialogue could not make things worse, the mystical powers of the good guys and the bad guys are not only unbelievable (even for this genre movie) but also look terrible.

This continues the trend of both flicks looking very very bad despite huge budgets. From dinosaurs to yeti, neither film can hammer down even semi-realistic monsters. “Monsters” in suits form the sixties looked about as good and the movie’s backdrops look like fifties era fakes instead of twenty-first century blue screen miracles.

While Journey’s childish plot devices can be forgiven (because of it’s audience), the Mummy’s recycling of other action-adventure plots cannot. While I bemoaned Crystal Skull’s copying of National Treasure, Mummy stole from both The Last Crusade and the lesser-known Librarian TV movies for almost the entire flick. A key problem of one of the only tense moments of Mummy is predictably resolved in Last Crusade fashion.

Even the good parts of The Mummy franchise are missing: namely Rachel Weisz’s Evelyn, the one bright spot in The Mummy’s first sequel. Here, Maria Bello who seems to have forgotten how to act – or just decided to play the character as corny as possible plays Eveleyn. To make her portrayal even worse, Bello doesn’t look good – at all.

In the end, neither film leaves much to be excited about. Journey deserves about 4/10 SaltyStix while Mummy barely earns 3/10 SaltyStix.

Could “Avatar” Win Best Picture?

By Brett Hogan

 

Last week, the trailer for James Cameron’s sci-fi experiment “Avatar” debuted. While initially unimpressed with the teaser, I began to wonder: Could this film win best picture? 

 

Buzz has been generating for this movie for years. Years. The technology to make this movie didn’t exist when Cameron conceived it, so he invented it. When is the last time you heard of a director spearheading the invention of anything? The casting started in 2005. Most movies these days, even epics, are done in half that time. I could go on. 

 

The most important thing to take away from all of this is that people are saying this will be the future of movies. Now, I don’t agree with the idea that CGI will become more prevalent than it already is. But I do believe that this will set the bar miles higher for sci-fi. I mean, that is what Titanic did. And that won some awards if memory serves.

 

I’ll bet you’re asking yourself, how can you even suggest that a film like this will win Best Picture when the initial trailer was nothing better than visual stimulation? Well, there are a couple of reasons. First, the Academy has expanded Best Picture to ten films. This doesn’t guarantee anything other than improved chances for most films on the cusp.

 

Second, after last year’s Oscars debacle, which saw the best film of the year, “The Dark Knight,” not only get shafted in awards but nominations as well, the Academy is pulling out all the stops to appease those with the loudest voices in the film industry, the fanboys. Now, the Academy probably didn’t lose anything because of that other than some viewers of the award show. Perhaps if people are again outraged with the winners or nominees, the heads of the Academy would lose their jobs. So this is all about the Academy protecting itself, which is not so outrageous.  

 

 

Third, there is an economic motive here. I’ve heard this film will cost $190 million, not counting the R&D costs associated with Cameron’s inventions or the cost of getting 3-D cameras into every theater in the country. The Academy will do everything in its power to get people into the seats and make this the next “Titanic” or “The Dark Knight.” But the Academy doesn’t have much power, besides nominating and awarding, so they will slap the “Nominated for Best Picture” moniker onto every commercial and print ad to get the people who didn’t believe the critics to relent and see this movie.

 

Of course, all of this is pure conjecture, and no revolutionary film (Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, etc.) has ever won the Best Picture category because it changed the game. Except maybe Titanic. But still, could this movie actually win? My answer is no but a nomination is certain and who knows what could happen from there. We’ll know more come February 2010.