I can imagine the pitch meeting where someone thought this was a good idea. And though I later learned it came from a book – I have not read it, obviously – it doesn’t make me think that pitch meeting was any more reasonable. Ideas like this always sound good, but it takes a lot imagination to make them work on the page. And, aside from the obvious problems of having characters whose very acts of reading aloud create – what happens if they read philosophy? math? etc – the filmmakers failed to be imaginative enough. Everything feels like second rate fantasy, looks like second rate fantasy. (Maybe third rate…) The source material evokes certain existing books and stories, but the author at the centre of the story isn’t real and so his books aren’t either. If you’re going to go that route you have to be creative (think Williams Goldman) and it’s not clear to me that the author was. If she was, well then something got lost in translating it to the screen.

Though I admittedly missed the opening scenes of the film, I spent a hell of a lot of time trying to wrap my head around the film’s internal logic – this is a family film, that shouldn’t be hard – and struggling to really understand the motivations of the literary characters in particular. Sigh.

4/10

• Directed by Iain Softley
• Produced by Cornelia Funke, Ileen Maisel, Dylan Cuva, Sarah Wang, Iain Softley, Ute Leonhardt, Toby Emmerich, Mark Ordesky, Andrew Licht
• Screenplay by David Lindsay-Abaire, Story by David Lindsay-Abaire, Gary David Goldberg, Based on Inkheart by Cornelia Funke
• Starring:
  • Brendan Fraser as Mo ‘Silvertongue’ Folchart/Mortimer ‘Mo’ Folchart
  • Eliza Bennett as Meggie Folchart
  • Paul Bettany as Dustfinger
  • Helen Mirren as Elinor Loredan
  • Andy Serkis as Capricorn
  • Jim Broadbent as Fenoglio
  • Rafi Gavron as Farid
  • Sienna Guillory as Teresa “Resa” Folchart
  • Lesley Sharp as Mortola
  • Jamie Foreman as Basta
  • Matt King as Cockerell
  • John Thomson as Darius
  • Jennifer Connelly as Roxane
  • Marnix Van Den Broeke as The Shadow
  • Steve Speirs as Flatnose
  • Jessie Cave as Nymph
  • Adam Bond as Prince Charming
  • Tereza Srbova as Rapunzel
  • Emily Eby as Guinevere
  • Roger Allam as Narrator
  • Paul Kasey as Minotaur
• Music by Javier Navarrete
• Cinematography by Roger Pratt
• Edited by Martin Walsh
• Production companies: New Line Cinema, Internationale Filmproduktion Blackbird Erste
• Distributed by New Line Cinema
• Release date: December 11, 2008
• Running time: 106 minutes
• Countries: Germany, United Kingdom, United States, Italy
  Language: English
• Budget: $60 million
• Box office: $62,450,361