MARK TWAIN'S AMERICA IN 3-D (1998)

MARK TWAIN'S AMERICA IN 3-D (Sony Pictures Classics, G) Swimming really close to the huge paddle of a steam-driven riverboat and sitting eye to eye with an extremely large jumping frog are fine, educational, Hall of Wonder-type experiences. But this new IMAX effort suffers from the same dispiriting squareness that has plagued most of the format's other 3-D movies: Subtract the novelty of donning ungainly, futuristic goggles to experience objects leaping off the screen and you're left with a constipated classroom lecture -- the efforts of a professor awed by the difficulty of running a movie projector. Here, the history lesson concerns the great American writer, who, invention buff that he was, would probably be enchanted with 3-D filmmaking, even if much of the process is wasted on photographs of him looking like a cardboard cutout posed against a museum diorama. With your eyes closed, this unimpeachably virtuous production assumes the form it might just as well have had all along: radio documentary on NPR. C

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