Inkheart - review

The latest attempt to turn kid-lit hits into box office gold, Inkheart occupies a comfortable middle ground onscreen. Based on the first in a trilogy of novels by Cornelia Funke, it is less epic than The Chronicles of Narnia, less sprawling than Harry Potter and has significantly fewer lovelorn vampires than Twilight. Still, what Inkheart’s middle-of-the-road sensibility lacks in marketability, it makes up in imagination.

Family action mainstay Brendan Fraser is Mo Folchart, a bookbinder who is also a “silvertongue,” gifted/cursed with the ability to bring objects and characters out of books when he reads them aloud. After disaster strikes while reading a book called (you guessed it) Inkheart, Fraser dedicates his life to finding another copy of the book and righting the wrongs he’s set in motion. Naturally, this will involve coming to terms with the mistakes of the past, thwarting a medieval rogue with delusions of grandeur and doing battle with a giant, evil demon-cloud.

Though the premise lends itself to a gleeful plundering of literary classics, Inkheart is actually fairly tactful when it comes to dredging up beloved characters. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen showed exactly how roundly Hollywood can ruin even the best reimaginings of literature’s greatest hits, so it’s reassuring when Inkheart limits itself mostly to animals — a ticking crocodile, some winged monkeys, Toto. Aside from residents of Inkheart’s book-within-a-film, the only human to be drawn out of the literary world is one of the thieves from 1,001 Arabian Nights (Rafri Gavron), who pops up when the evil Capricorn (Andy Serkis) tries to get rich quick with some buried treasure.

The film lives on the strength of its bit players. Jim Broadbent is great as Inkheart’s wide-eyed author, amazed to see even his most menacing characters come to life. Helen Mirren relishes the role of Fraser’s aunt, a charmingly bitter recluse who spends her time in a well-stocked library, though she naturally warms up by the film’s end. The Italian landscapes are practically a character in themselves, and are well-suited to the story’s fairy tale elements.

Though it’s entertaining throughout, Inkheart loses steam in its last act. As the story builds to its inevitable climax, plot elements get rushed and characters go through the motions to reach the obligatory happy ending. The script borrows elements from the second Inkheart book in order to wrap things up a little more tightly, and while it makes for a more complete film, it makes things overly convoluted. Given how well the rest of the film skirts the typical book adaptation pitfalls, it’s a shame to see it stumble at the finish line.

Inkheart interview (Brendan Fraser)

Making a movie about the power of books puts a filmmaker in a very peculiar place. Now, more than ever, technology allows writers and directors to realize any landscape, monster or spaceship that crosses their mind in vivid detail, even in modestly budgeted films. At the same time, some parents are concerned that the instant gratification these movies provide will make kids less inclined to invest their time in reading.

Inkheart, based on the first in a trilogy of young adult novels by German author Cornelia Funke, tries to strike a balance between the whiz-bang special effects that audiences crave and a real, genuine affection for classic stories. From focusing on a bookbinder as the main character, to portraying the destruction of a library as high tragedy, it seems like the kind of film that genuinely could inspire a new generation of bibliophiles.

“It doesn’t wag a finger at you,” says Inkheart star Brendan Fraser over the phone from a press junket in Toronto. “It doesn’t condescend to you, either. And I think that’s for the very simple reason that Cornelia understands, to the young mind, you can’t pull the wool over them.”

Fraser plays Mo Folchart, an antique bookbinder with a voice that brings stories to life. When he reads aloud, characters and objects leap from the pages and into our world. After reading a book called Inkheart, Mo accidentally summons a villain who puts his family, and maybe the entire world, in danger. Unlike in a lot of overly sanitized kids’ movies, Inkheart’s villains are actually intimidating, and a monster introduced late in the film is dark enough to give nightmares to some wee ones. According to Fraser, though, there’s nothing wrong with giving kids the occasional scare.

“That’s the reason why we have always had the so-called fairy tale,” Fraser says. “It teaches you without knowing you’re being taught something, that there’s good, there’s evil, there’s up and down. It lets children know, rather than just being cautionary tales or life lessons per se, about what to do and not to do. It lets them know that there is a place for imagination.”

Still, Fraser admits that the darker side of the movie might turn off some viewers. To him, it was more important to keep the story in line with the classic fairy tales and novels it draws from than to make something completely safe.

“This is not a picture that’s made to be mass-consumed, or a confection, like it’s easily digestable,” he says. “At the same time, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be popular. It appeals [because] it doesn’t talk over the heads of its audience. It includes them. It challenges them.”

Challenging audiences can lead to a quick trip to the bottom of the box office, and for a film based on the first episode in a trilogy, this can be particularly threatening. Though it’s technically only an adaptation of the first book, Inkheart’s ending draws from the book’s sequel to make a tidier conclusion. Fans of the book might question the decision, but Fraser says the reasoning is simple.

“The very short and honest answer to that is, the bottom dollar in this economy,” he says. “I hate to say it, but it’s the truth. If the audience wants, the audience gets. If they see this and they go to it, and there’s an appetite for more, we’ll do [the sequels]. I do promise you that, given that it’s a trilogy, in my view, the real, interesting story happens in the second book.”

Flicker - review

In 1959, painter and poet Brion Gysin and scientist Ian Sommerville invented what they called the dreamachine — a rotating cylinder with slits on the sides and a light bulb in the middle. It looks like a novelty decoration, like a disco ball or lava lamp, but to its creators, it is something far more significant. The revolving slits make a pattern of light that flickers at the same frequency as the brain waves that control dreams — when you close your eyes and stare into the light, you hallucinate. A drugless high. They hoped it would catch on with the general public, replace television and expand the world’s consciousness. It didn’t.

The dreamachine should be an ideal subject for a documentary, and director Nik Sheehan does get started on the right foot in FLicKeR. He recruits an array of cult figures to comment on the device, from Marianne Faithful to Iggy Pop to filmmaker and occultist Kenneth Anger. He brings in scientists and art critics to talk about its value, and the importance of Gysin’s work in general. An accomplished (though never particularly popular) visual artist, Gysin is also the man behind cut-up poetry, a technique often falsely credited to William S. Burroughs (through no fault of Burroughs, who called Gysin “the only man I ever respected”). Unfortunately, the film can’t do its subjects justice.

The cult figures are a large part of the problem. While it’s fun to see counterculture figures like Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo try the machine out, the responses can be boiled down to “ooh, neat.” Watching these artists and musicians is like listening to someone talk about a dream they had — kind of interesting, but not particularly captivating.

FLicKeR does better when it focuses more on Gysin than his invention (Sommerville isn’t given much time in the documentary). Scenes in which his friends and acquaintances reminisce about Burroughs’s infamous Beat Hotel or describe a journey to Morocco to visit the Master Musicians of Jajouka provide glimpses at an extraordinary time for the counterculture. They’re just that, though — glimpses. At barely an hour and a quarter, the film simply doesn’t have enough time to fully explore any of its subjects. Still, it wouldn’t be surprising if it inspires a few folks to build dreamachines of their own, and that alone could be worth the price of admission.

Clue To Kalo- Lily Perdida (Mush)

Forty years ago, you needed a top-of-the-line recording studio, a brigade of session players and a few healthy doses of LSD to make a psychedelic opus. These days, you just need a laptop. And maybe some LSD. First there was Caribou’s 2007 masterpiece Andorra. Now, there’s Clue to Kalo’s Lily Perdida, a similarly lush slab of Zombies-style psych-pop, coincidentally created by another electronic artist-cum-bandleader.

Clue to Kalo’s Mark Mitchell clearly planned Lily Perdida meticulously. Each song examines the fictional title character from the perspective of someone who knew her, although the lyrics are roundabout enough that it’s difficult to piece together much of the story. Fortunately, the music behind the concept is universally strong. “It’s Here the Story’s Straight by the Peers” is an obvious standout, an instantly accessible blend of boy-girl vocals and bouncing instrumentation, and the Nuggets-style keyboard that opens “The Infinite Orphan by the Familiars” is darn near irresistible, but there’s not a weak track in the bunch. Welcome to the era of the bedroom genius.

Calgary boosterism

There’s no way around it — 2008 has been a banner year for Calgary’s music scene. Major events like Sled Island and Juno Fest attuned at least a few outside ears to local music, while Virgin Fest introduced acts like The Summerlad and The Firm Handshake to Calgarians more inclined to seek out Stone Temple Pilots. More than the attention, though, what makes 2008 stand out is the absurd amount of world-calibre music that came out this year.

The list that accompanies this article may represent the cream of the crop, but it still only represents a fraction of Calgary’s output this year. Some bands chose to confine themselves to the more concise format of EPs, the Neighbourhood Council (newly rechristened BRAIDS) and The Ex Boyfriends being two prime examples. Others simply haven’t gotten around to recording — see the newly formed Sharp Ends and singer-songwriter Kris Ellestad, whose melodically rich folk pop is one of Calgary’s best-kept secrets.

The variety of the music released this year is also impressive. This year’s most-buzzed bands includes Women, whose self-titled debut is an alternately jangling and droning slab of lo-fi indie pop; Azeda Booth, whose In Flesh Tones is a remarkable blend of the organic and the electronic; and Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir, who stomp through Ten Thousand like the vintage bluesmen of tomorrow. Digital label Neferiu Records had the hip hop side of things covered, with a particularly strong release from Mantrakid in Palmflower Black. There were the psychedelic mindfucks from The Tetraktys, Tetrix and the Azymuth, Gunther’s punch-to-the-gut instrumental rock, the orchestral pop of Woodpigeon’s Treasury Library Canada and unclassifiable albums like Beija Flor’s The American.

Singer-songwriters were in particularly fine form this year. The Cape May’s Clinton St. John and The Neckers’ Bill Hetherington both released fine solo albums this year, while Aaron Booth added to his collection of folk pop gems with Back Stories. The always impressive Chad VanGaalen finally sat down to produce an album of all-new material rather than an assemblage of bedroom demos, and the result is Soft Airplane, his most consistent and straight-up album to date. Meanwhile, Ghostkeeper and Jay Crocker used several of the same musicians (Crocker and bass player Scott Munro are on both albums) to craft two vastly disparate albums. The former’s Children of the Great Northern Muskeg ignores the boundaries between back-porch boogies and artful indie-rock, while the latter’s Below the Ocean Over sprawls across rock, funk and jazz landscapes to create something entirely unique.

For all the talk in these pages of the world’s eyes turning to Calgary, all that really matters is that the city keeps supporting its musicians, and the musicians keep doing what they do best. By all indications, that’s exactly what’s happening.

SIDEBAR: 2008’s BEST LOCAL RELEASES

1. Chad VanGaalen — Soft Airplane (Flemish Eye)

2. Azeda Booth — In Flesh Tones (Absolutely Kosher)

3. Jay Crocker — Below the Ocean Over (Artunit Recording Company)

4. Women — Women (Flemish Eye)

5. Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir — Ten Thousand (S.A.P. Recordings)

6. Clinton St. John — Black Forest Levitation (Independent)

7. Aaron Booth — Back Stories (Independent)

8. Ghostkeeper — Children of the Great Northern Muskeg (Saved by Radio)

9. Bill Hetherington and the Asian Tigers — Bill Hetherington and the Asian Tigers (Independent)

10. Jane Vain and the Dark Matter — Love is Where the Smoke Is (Rectangle Records)