There's this one character, see, with a private library of rare and precious books, see, including unique 12th-century Persian manuscripts, see, and then...some thugs wreck up the place, and make a book bonfire for no apparent reason.
General thuggery, don't you know. It disturbed the books' owner, and certainly cut me to the quick.
Why do you have to trash the library, dude? What did books ever do to you?
The movie's message, though, is reminiscent of the one in that Indiana Jones movie, where Dr. Jones rides a motorcycle into the reading room and tells an astonished student "if you want to be an archaeologist, you have to get out of the library!"
In this movie it's more like, "you can't actually live through books: you have to get out there and live for real!"
Which, hey, I got no beef with that. I concur that you can't get everything in life from books. Books = awesome, but life also = awesome. Have some from column A and some from column B!
So anyway, we saw a preview screening of this movie Inkheart tonight. It wasn't bad. We're not completely in its intended demographic, so kids might think it was really great, while I overheard another guy saying it was unbearably saccharine sweet.
It's about a girl, Meggie, whose father can bring things to life out of books by reading them aloud. He's brought out all sorts of mean, nasty, ugly-looking people, who are causing trouble, and much action over various handsome landscapes ensues. So Meggie and her father and some entertaining characters they fall in with get in and out of captivity and strive to save the day.
It has lively adventure, some reasonably fun and spunky characters, decent effects, grand ideas about the power of the written/read word, and lots of happy endings. Plus, Helen Mirren.
One could do worse.
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