The Lovely Bones (2009)
Country: US/NZ/GB
Technical: col/2.39:1 135m
Director: Peter Jackson
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Rachel Weisz, Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Susan Sarandon
Synopsis:
A teenage girl murdered by a serial killer refuses to accept the arbitrary nature of her death and reaches out to family and friends from beyond the grave.
Review:
A surprising concept for an original screenplay, with roots going back to Heavenly Creatures, Jackson's tear-jerker ghost story has a number of things wrong with it, not least the child's view of heaven employed to keep horror at bay. It's overlong, is horribly sanitised in its view of domestic American family life (like so many films), and rides on the audience's acceptance of a central implausibility: that a man might build an underground den in the middle of a harvested cornfield without attracting attention. (I mean, did they stop and think about how much earth that would displace?) Tucci himself, blue-eyed contact lenses and all, is an odd choice for a murderer, and the device of the sink hole leads nowhere except a peculiarly graded climax that supposedly provides closure. Meanwhile, we are in the early 70s, another factor which might have been explained by literary origins but which seems to exist merely for the cartridges of exposed film that lead to Wahlberg getting his head kicked in. On the credit side, Ronan owns the screen in an early role and the whole thing is at least a quirkily different metaphor for the stages of grief.
Country: US/NZ/GB
Technical: col/2.39:1 135m
Director: Peter Jackson
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Rachel Weisz, Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Susan Sarandon
Synopsis:
A teenage girl murdered by a serial killer refuses to accept the arbitrary nature of her death and reaches out to family and friends from beyond the grave.
Review:
A surprising concept for an original screenplay, with roots going back to Heavenly Creatures, Jackson's tear-jerker ghost story has a number of things wrong with it, not least the child's view of heaven employed to keep horror at bay. It's overlong, is horribly sanitised in its view of domestic American family life (like so many films), and rides on the audience's acceptance of a central implausibility: that a man might build an underground den in the middle of a harvested cornfield without attracting attention. (I mean, did they stop and think about how much earth that would displace?) Tucci himself, blue-eyed contact lenses and all, is an odd choice for a murderer, and the device of the sink hole leads nowhere except a peculiarly graded climax that supposedly provides closure. Meanwhile, we are in the early 70s, another factor which might have been explained by literary origins but which seems to exist merely for the cartridges of exposed film that lead to Wahlberg getting his head kicked in. On the credit side, Ronan owns the screen in an early role and the whole thing is at least a quirkily different metaphor for the stages of grief.
Country: US/NZ/GB
Technical: col/2.39:1 135m
Director: Peter Jackson
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Rachel Weisz, Mark Wahlberg, Stanley Tucci, Susan Sarandon
Synopsis:
A teenage girl murdered by a serial killer refuses to accept the arbitrary nature of her death and reaches out to family and friends from beyond the grave.
Review:
A surprising concept for an original screenplay, with roots going back to Heavenly Creatures, Jackson's tear-jerker ghost story has a number of things wrong with it, not least the child's view of heaven employed to keep horror at bay. It's overlong, is horribly sanitised in its view of domestic American family life (like so many films), and rides on the audience's acceptance of a central implausibility: that a man might build an underground den in the middle of a harvested cornfield without attracting attention. (I mean, did they stop and think about how much earth that would displace?) Tucci himself, blue-eyed contact lenses and all, is an odd choice for a murderer, and the device of the sink hole leads nowhere except a peculiarly graded climax that supposedly provides closure. Meanwhile, we are in the early 70s, another factor which might have been explained by literary origins but which seems to exist merely for the cartridges of exposed film that lead to Wahlberg getting his head kicked in. On the credit side, Ronan owns the screen in an early role and the whole thing is at least a quirkily different metaphor for the stages of grief.