Inkheart (Blu-ray)

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In its favor, the movie has some amiable characters in it, including the comical villains, and its Italian settings are gorgeous. To its detriment, though, it plays as if the author made up the narrative as it went along. Worse, the story has little real excitement or wit in it; in fact, it's rather somber most of the time, with director Iain Softley ("Hackers," "The Wings of the Dove," "The Skeleton Key") taking everything quite literally. As a result, "Inkheart" lacks much life or sparkle to draw one in. It just sort of sits there, hoping you've read the book and can fill in the details for yourself.

The movie alternates between gritty reality and semi-humorous whimsy, without much regard for the viewer's perception of the two moods. Plus, the episodic nature of the adventures tends to move the plot along in clumsy stops and starts, which doesn't exactly help its coherence or continuity.

You'd think "Inkheart" would be the perfect movie for book lovers, but, unfortunately, it's too inconsistent and illogical even in its own make-believe universe to be entirely satisfying.

Video:
The picture quality on this Blu-ray disc is a mixed bag. On the one hand, the VC-1 encode does a good job reproducing the film's original aspect ratio, 2.40:1, and replicating the colors in all their deep richness. On the other hand, the single-layer BD25 transfer isn't as good with overall definition, which can range from fairly soft to downright veiled. The video looks best in broad daylight scenes, which are radiant, but they are few and far between. Nevertheless, the cinematographer caught the Italian landscape well, and longer scenic shots come off with a good deal of detail.

Audio:
The disc offers the choice of regular Dolby Digital 5.1 and lossless Dolby TrueHD 5.1, with Dolby Digital the default. Remember to switch to TrueHD if your audio system can decode it. There, you find a firm, taut mid-bass, a pleasantly neutral midrange, some occasionally glistening highs, and a reasonably wide and strong dynamic range and impact. The standout, however, is the surround activity, which is quite enveloping. A rain of gold coins is particularly effective, as is a tornado that whips up a good bit energy all around.

Extras:
Certainly, Warner/New Line cover all the bases here. The two-disc set includes separate Blu-ray and DVD copies of the movie, plus a digital copy compatible with iTunes and Windows Media devices. (The digital copy comes paired with the DVD edition on the second disc.)

In addition, we get several conventional bonuses, all of them in high def, the most important of which is a series of featurettes. First up is a six-minute affair called "A Story from the Cast and Crew," where author Cornelia Funke starts a story with a single line and asks each of the movie's stars to continue it. I remember I used to do this in writing with high school students every year for almost forty years, and they loved the exercise. But it usually always ended up with the students writing stories that went off on a lot of different tangents, just as this movie sometimes does. Next up is "From Imagination to Page: How Writers Write," a ten-minute featurette with the author and filmmakers, followed by "Eliza Reads to Us," a four-minute segment wherein the young actress reads a passage from the book that is not in the movie. The regular bonuses conclude with nine deleted scenes, totaling about thirteen minutes.

Finally, we get some BD-Live features; twenty-five scene selections; English and German spoken languages; Spanish and German subtitles; English captions for the hearing impaired; and a handsomely embossed slipcover to tie everything together.

Parting Shots:
Earlier, I commended "The Lord of the Rings" and the "Harry Potter" fantasies, and from where I stand the only other recent films I can mention in the same breath with them are "Stardust," "Enchanted," and "The Chronicles of Narnia," movies that adults and young adults can enjoy equally for their magic, adventure, and humor. It's true that I had high hopes for "The Golden Compass" as well, but that film didn't quite pan out as I hoped it would. That brings us to "Inkheart," which, like "The Golden Compass," goes for a dark, somber, yet still largely juvenile tone. As such, it works perfectly well; just don't expect it to capture everybody's imagination.

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