I was out of town when this movie first came to the theater so I ended up missing it. I am a big fan of Cornelia Funke all the way around so I was absolutely thrilled that the DVD came out the other day and immediately sat down to watch it with my little brother.

I loved the idea of Brendan Fraser as Mortimer Folchart because he did a fantastic reading of Inkspell, the second book in the series, for audiobook. I also thought that Paul Bettany looked perfect and had the perfect attitude to be Dustfinger (though when i first read Inkheart i actually had Bettany pictured as Capricorn...guess it was that whole Davinci code albino thing..anyway) I also loved the idea of Helen Mirren as Elinor and have been a huge fan of Jim Broadbent since Moulin Rouge. And to be fair i thought it was a cute, fun family-oriented film. But that was also the drawback to the movie. Where Funke usually took the mature route with the themes in her novels, the movie played down and "Disneyfied" it i guess you could say.

Even so, I could look past the fact that Capricorn turned out to be more of a comic relief character than the frightening person he was in the book with his declarations about duct tape and fumbling over Excaliber in the stone. And i could look past Fenoglio joyfully declaring "Look it's Basta!" hehe. Bettany's Dustfinger was also more playful that the moody character we come to know and love in the Inkseries. What really bothered me though was that in the end, where they should have ended it with Meggie reuniting with her family the screenwriter had to go and screw up the story by giving Resa her voice back almost immediately and sending Dustfinger back to the Inkworld and to his wife Roxanne without any regard to how the story really played out for future books. It was a lovely reunion and everything, and i'm sure Bettany and his wife Jennifer Connelly, who played Roxanne, enjoyed it immensely, but come on!

I wanted to smack Mo silly when I saw him running back to Dustfinger with that damn book. And anyone who has read the books would know that Roxanne would bitchslap Dustfinger after he was gone from her for ten years, not just run into his arms! Oh and Farid just leaving him behind? Yeah right haha. That boy clung to him like flies to..well, you get the point.

I think, if i completely push the books from my mind it could have been an enjoyable movie, but it saddened me that they had to fuck with those details, taking away any possibility of Inkspell and Inkdeath, two very awesome books tying off the series, ever coming to film. It would have been perfect if they stuck true to the book, like the filmmakers for Harry Potter did. Unfortunately i think it went more the route of Eragon.

Hmmm...Sienna Guillory was in that movie too... >.> <.< hehehe.

Anyway, there you have it from me. Did anyone else feel the same way?