Inkheart

The next morning after going to the Angelika, I said goodbye to my cousin, thanking her for a marvelous stay in New York. I caught the B line heading towards downtown, catching a nice glimpse of the musicians playing the Broadway station before getting off at Grand Street in Chinatown.

As I schlepped my bags up the narrow sidewalk across from Sara Roosevelt Park, a Chinese woman waved at me from across the street, to a Lucky Star bus that was just about to leave. Being a long-time Fung Wah patron, I was reluctant to change companies. But the Lucky Star bus was leaving right that minute, so I paid fifteen bucks and got on. It's a cut-throat business, those buses (I actually started the Wikipedia article about the Chinatown bus lines, and uploaded photos that are still there).

Within minutes we were crossing the Manhattan Bridge, and an hour later we were up in Connecticut again. When I got to Boston, I went straight to Massachusetts General on the red line, where my sister and her husband were tending to their son, who had been intubated for respiratory problems, which were thankfully not serious. He's had these kind of problems every winter since he was born.

After dinner at the hospital cafe, I caught a ride with my sister back to their place in the country. I was hoping to take the next day off entirely, but it was Thursday---the last day of the movie-schedule week, and Inkheart was about to leave the theaters. It had barely been out two weeks, and it was being flushed from the marquee, a sign of a real turkey.

My only real option was to go down to the Regal Cinemas at the Solomon Pond Mall. Fortunately there's a Borders Books nearby, and I killed time in the coffee shop there by reading a book on the JFK assassination, one that I eventually bought.

Inkheart, as it turned out, was an absolute disaster. It is my early candidate for Worst Movie of 2009. It has set the standard for suckdom that bad movies will have to surpass for the next eleven months.

I'd been the seeing the trailer to this since last summer in the discount cinema in Fort Collins. I think the release date was pushed back a couple times. In any case, a movie based on the idea that special people can read books and make the characters literally "come to life" seemed particularly mistimed, coming out right after Bedtime Stories, which turned out to be a pretty good movie.

But whereas Bedtime Stories stays within the realm of the naturalistic, Inkheart is pure fantasy---lots of fantasy, bending the rules of reality willy-nilly as it pleases.

My criterion for these movies is that if you are going to create a "world of whimsy," you must stake out the rules very clearly, and early on. Inkheart seemed to just make stuff up as it went along. It's as if the screenwriter didn't really know what the fantasy rules were, and the characters never really discovered them.

Why do people from our world disappear into the book world too? Not explained. No one knows. What process governs this transference? No clue. How can characters actually "die" in the book world? Wouldn't reading the book again make the characters come out again? How can you really change the text of the book? How can characters in world even go there? Does the text of the book change?

Please, please, make it stop and go away. If this sloppy fantasy-world problems were the only issues with the movie, it might have a chance, but that's only for starters. The narrative itself just stinks. The story couldn't decide who the protagonist was. Was it the father (Brendan Fraser), or his daughter, or Dustfinger, the fire-eating thief who looks like the guy in the "Safety Dance" video? I couldn't really tell.

Casting Fraser is always a bad sign for a movie. On the other hand, the movie wastes a performance by Helen Mirren. But my god, what the hell is Jennifer Connelly doing in this movie in a stupid cameo, not even listed in the main credits? She's an Oscar winner for god's sake. Does she owe money to the mob?

What a train wreck of a movie. It's fashionable to diss the tastes of the mass audiences, but they voted with their feet on this turkey, and they were right. This is yet another proof that story makes the movie. This one didn't tell a coherent story, despite lots of money spent on special effects.

One more thing about this movie that was highly disappointing, although not suprising. It completely upheld two principles I've noticed about movies that have come out over the last few years: the Law of Book Destruction and the Law of Library Destruction. Sometime I'll have to write about them in detail, but basically the first one states that if a book appears in a book as a significant part of the story, it must destroyed, either completely or partially, at some point in the movie. The second one states that if a library, public or private, appears in a movie, it too must be desecrated, rampaged, or destroyed during the movie.

I personally believe these laws speak to the barbarism, anti-intellectual denialism, and thuggish blindness of contemporary American culture in the Bush and Post-Bush era. Not surprisingly a stupid, ridiculous, clumsy film like Inkheart, a movie so wretchedly constructed that insults one's intelligence to watch it, upholds these laws to a very high degree.