Inkheart Attack
Feb. 12th, 2009 03:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vovatAs you can probably guess from the title, I watched the Inkheart movie today. It's been forever since I last saw a movie in the theater. Okay, I think it might have been October, which is hardly forever, but still kind of a long time. As usual, most of the previews were pretty annoying. Hey, there's a movie about some guy becoming young again! What an original concept! And a live-action Dragon Ball movie? It's not like I care that much, since I never liked the show [1] (my brother used to watch it, and it seemed pretty dumb), but the general cartoon-to-live-action thing has been done to death, and pretty much always badly. There wasn't a preview for the latest generically-titled spoof movie, Dance Flick, but I did see a poster for it. As someone who takes parody seriously, I have a particular distaste for the recent spoof films where even the titles scream out, "We didn't put any effort whatsoever into this! But we reference stuff, so that's funny, right?" I'm sure the producers who green-light these things will be first against the wall when the revolution comes. It WAS cool to get a glimpse at the next Harry Potter movie, though. [2]
And now for our feature presentation. Like the book, it wasn't one of my absolute favorites among recent fantasies, but it was definitely engaging and well-crafted. It's interesting that they started right in with the stuff about reading things out of books, when the original story took a while to build up to it. That makes sense, though, as the book had a lot of starting and stopping that wouldn't have really worked on the screen. I'm not really sure why Fenoglio's family was omitted, but I get the impression that this, like most of the changes at the end, were due to the fact that the book was leaving room for a sequel (which I still need to read, but I have several things on my list ahead of it). And these days, I get the impression that it's generally easier to get a book-sequel published than a movie-sequel produced, especially when it comes to fantasy. [3] Not surprisingly, I did enjoy the multiple references to The Wizard of Oz (and most of them were to the book, not the movie), which weren't in Cornelia Funke's book. I don't know whether Oz features in either of the sequels, but I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't, as the books are even more obscure in Europe than in the States. Also, the appearance of the ticking crocodile led me to check Peter Pan out from the library. It's never been one of my favorite stories, but it's referenced so much in other places that I feel kind of obligated to actually read it.
[1] I do, however, like Akira Toriyama's work on Dragon Quest and Chrono Trigger, as I'm sure you could have gathered.
[2] SPOILER: Michael Gambon kills Dumbledore! No, wait, that already happened a few movies ago.
[3] Hey, Hollywood! Where's The Subtle Knife, huh?
And now for our feature presentation. Like the book, it wasn't one of my absolute favorites among recent fantasies, but it was definitely engaging and well-crafted. It's interesting that they started right in with the stuff about reading things out of books, when the original story took a while to build up to it. That makes sense, though, as the book had a lot of starting and stopping that wouldn't have really worked on the screen. I'm not really sure why Fenoglio's family was omitted, but I get the impression that this, like most of the changes at the end, were due to the fact that the book was leaving room for a sequel (which I still need to read, but I have several things on my list ahead of it). And these days, I get the impression that it's generally easier to get a book-sequel published than a movie-sequel produced, especially when it comes to fantasy. [3] Not surprisingly, I did enjoy the multiple references to The Wizard of Oz (and most of them were to the book, not the movie), which weren't in Cornelia Funke's book. I don't know whether Oz features in either of the sequels, but I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't, as the books are even more obscure in Europe than in the States. Also, the appearance of the ticking crocodile led me to check Peter Pan out from the library. It's never been one of my favorite stories, but it's referenced so much in other places that I feel kind of obligated to actually read it.
[1] I do, however, like Akira Toriyama's work on Dragon Quest and Chrono Trigger, as I'm sure you could have gathered.
[2] SPOILER: Michael Gambon kills Dumbledore! No, wait, that already happened a few movies ago.
[3] Hey, Hollywood! Where's The Subtle Knife, huh?
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no subject
Date: 2009-02-12 10:04 pm (UTC)My thoughts exactly.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-12 10:25 pm (UTC)I don't know whether Oz features in either of the sequels, but I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't, as the books are even more obscure in Europe than in the States.
The other two books contain much less direct literary references than the first because they actually take place IN the book, so definitely not. But I do think Inkspell was the best of the three, incidentally.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-12 11:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-13 01:37 am (UTC)