I understand that Brendan Fraser used to have a beautiful boday, and
so we put him in the movies. But at this point, isn’t he just a
semiawkward actor with a regular boday and perma-terrible bangs? Must
his great big eyeballs be all up in my juvenile-fiction magical
business?

Well, THEY ARE. In Inkheart, Fraser is Mo, a humble
bookbinder and single dad with a maaaaaagical secret! When Mo reads out
loud, SHIT COMES OUT. Shit like the grave of Ebenezer Scrooge! And a
hilarious Arabian thief who looks like Demi Moore! And, unfortch, a
band of wicked ne’er-do-wells led by a madman named Capricorn.

Inkheart is just all right. The sets feel artificial and
cramped, but the screenplay, by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright
David Lindsay-Abaire, is more nuanced than you’d expect from a kids’
movie. Most of the casting is better than the film deserves: Jim
Broadbent, Helen Mirren, Paul Bettany. Sometimes Fraser—with his
bangs and his eyeballs—tries to emote, and things take a dark
turn. But then here comes Mirren, riding a unicorn and screaming a
mighty battle scream, and it’s all worth it. recommended

Lindy West was born an unremarkable female baby in Seattle, Washington. The former Stranger writer covered movies, movie stars, exclamation points, lady stuff, large frightening fish, and much, much more....

3 replies on “On Screen”

  2. funny you should mention the screenwriter and not the author of the book for putting in the nuance, but at least one can’t say you faked interest in the movie this time.

  3. What a horrid, horrid movie. A minute into it and I wanted to choke myself. The girl is helpless, no lesson is learned, the plot is surprisingly predictable, and most characters have the wit, foresight, and overall wisdom of a rather slow cinder block. The main villain is hardly scary (he’s bald and he wears black? How original! He likes to burn books? Spooooky), and neither are his henchmen, who are, predictably, the biggest bumbling idiot minions this side of an episode of Looney Toons, only Looney Toons was and continues to be hilarious. These were just sad, unfunny tertiary comic relief clowns who wielded guns which never went off and swords so fake, would make a child grimace with embarrassment if ever he were to use it in a Halloween outfit.

    Don’t expect much in terms of intelligence from any of the characters, since all of the lines are so forced that the CGI unicorn was more realistic than the script. Oh, didn’t I mention the unicorn? Right, well, it has about thirty seconds of screen time, along with a lot of badly-rendered CGI versions of all of your favorite storybook animals. Of course, they’re all the good guys, and all of the bad guys are spooky thugs with writing all over their faces. I could have- no, wait, I DID basically predict with scarily accurate detail the rest of the movie after nothing but a 30-second commercial and the first sentence of the movie.

    This movie is a piece of trash. Please, don’t let innocent fiction fans be influenced by this garbage fest of a movie.

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