The Lovely Bones (2009)
Directed by Peter Jackson
After being brutally murdered, 14-year-old Susie Salmon watches from heaven over her grief-stricken family -- and her killer. As she observes their daily lives, she must balance her thirst for revenge with her desire for her family to heal.
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(It also might serve as a good warm-up for his soon-to-be-released The Lovely Bones, which, the trailer suggests, returns to the style of Heavenly Creatures.)
Jackson once made a fine, unsettling fantasy-drama about teenage girls, “Heavenly Creatures,’’ but that was 16 years ago.
This is Peter Jackson’s 10th feature film, but only his second, after “Heavenly Creatures,” not to have fantasy or horror as its foundation.
And given his haunting Heavenly Creatures (1994), about teenagers and murder, he would seem the right filmmaker to adapt this book.
Writer-director Peter Jackson began his filmmaking career with strange, outrageous, mostly bloody little films like "Bad Taste," "Meet the Feebles," and "Braindead" before moving on to more mainstream but decidedly odd movies like "Heavenly Creatures" and "The Frighteners."
Writer-director Peter Jackson began his filmmaking career with strange, outrageous, mostly bloody little films like "Bad Taste," "Meet the Feebles," and "Braindead" before moving on to more mainstream but decidedly odd movies like "Heavenly Creatures" and "The Frighteners."
It�s not in the same class as the Lord of the Rings pictures or Heavenly Creatures, but it is better than The Frighteners, so at least you�ve got that.
One plus the other equals zero here, not to mention that he already delivered a revisionary ghost story, and now a minor classic of the genre, with “The Frighteners.”
It’s worked in so many of his genres including “Bad Taste,” “The Frighteners,” “Heavenly Creatures” and the various “The Lord of the Rings” films.
It is poorly adapted, badly miscast and Jackson had far more profound and intriguing notions about the afterlife and what it might contain in “The Frighteners” than he does here.
He thrives on alternate realities, and with a personal army of in-house effects wizards, his breakthrough films were lavish renditions, kept grounded by clever story and well-realised character; think how spectacularly the murderous teens of his Heavenly Creatures conspired against the world from their private universe; remember how convincing Michael J Fox was, as a conduit between this world and the next, in the kooky and spooky The Frighteners ?
As demonstrated in his ultra-gory early comedy-horror movies ("Bad Taste," "Dead Alive"), Jackson is a caricaturist and dark humorist; he favors distorting wide-angle lenses and broad gestures.
When that happened, the gifted, snot-nosed indie director of the brilliant gore comedy Braindead (Dead Alive to us Yanks) and the unnerving psychological thriller Heavenly Creatures all but instantly forgot every damned thing that he ever knew about fleet storytelling.
And as gory as it is, it's still nothing compared to Jackson's Dead Alive.
Writer-director Peter Jackson began his filmmaking career with strange, outrageous, mostly bloody little films like "Bad Taste," "Meet the Feebles," and "Braindead" before moving on to more mainstream but decidedly odd movies like "Heavenly Creatures" and "The Frighteners."
The director (visible in an amusing cameo examining a movie camera in a shopping mall) began his career with a fondness for splatter-type material with titles like "Bad Taste" and "Braindead."
It’s worked in so many of his genres including “Bad Taste,” “The Frighteners,” “Heavenly Creatures” and the various “The Lord of the Rings” films.
Made on a shoestring budget by Peter Jackson, Bad Taste certainly lives up to its moniker.
As you might guess, this was made before Jackson became all respectable and worked his way toward make butt-numbing “thrillers” like The Lovely Bones (2009).
Since “The Lord of the Rings’’ and “King Kong’’ have established the filmmaker as a reigning god of CGI, he visualizes Susie’s afterlife as a series of vast, endlessly morphing digitized landscapes - mountains swooping up, moons swirling down, tangerine trees, marmalade skies.
…film version from director Peter Jackson, renowned for The Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong…
Then came his epic "Lord of the Rings" and "King Kong," and he assured himself a place in cinematic history.
Director Peter Jackson (“King Kong,” “The Lord of the Rings”) is wrangling with this potentially divisive subject matter and the prospect of adapting a beloved book with his newest film “The Lovely Bones.”
After three Rings epics and a monumental King Kong remake, you now want to go back and tell a smaller-scale story.
Writer-director Peter Jackson began his filmmaking career with strange, outrageous, mostly bloody little films like "Bad Taste," "Meet the Feebles," and "Braindead" before moving on to more mainstream but decidedly odd movies like "Heavenly Creatures" and "The Frighteners."
Like Susie's father and her murderer, Jackson builds models the foam-rubber puppets of his early Meet the Feebles, the exponentially more complicated imaginary realms of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong and invites children of all ages to share his obsessions.
The first hour is, in fact, fairly reminiscent of the two movies that preceded this one - ie there are many sequences featuring just the sort of clunky dialogue that plagued Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers - and Jackson continues to show no interest in keeping viewers who haven't read the novels completely aware of what's going on.
The engine behind it is the mournful tone which channels Thornton Wilder's Our Town for its expression of the fragility of life and the temporary nature of all things.
In its regular shifting between a serial killer thriller set in a desperately unexceptional suburban neighborhood, and an anything-goes world of impossible landscapes and colorful explosions, The Lovely Bones recalls Tarsem Singh's The Cell , though it is the differences rather than the similarities that are telling.
In both of Tarsem's movies ( The Fall is the other), the incredible visions on display are all the more incredible for having the tang of reality: as much as possible, they use practical effects -and it is often not possible, but this is the mark of great CGI use, to create only that which cannot be created otherwise.
Remember recent movies like "What Dreams May Come" or "Constantine" that attempted to replicate visions of heaven and hell?
Particularly in contrast with the detail-rich 1970s suburbia “The Lovely Bones” depicts, its heaven is an airy play-scape that morphs in color and form like the innards of a lava lamp -- recollecting the afterlife depicted in Vincent Ward’s groundbreaking, under-seen “What Dreams May Come.”
The afterlife lends itself too easily to treacly kitsch—remember Robin Williams in What Dreams May Come ?
“The Lovely Bones,” on the other hand, is a far more delicate construction that derived most of its power not from the story it was telling, which was essentially a mash-up of “Mystic River” and “What Dreams May Come,” but from the voice that Sebold used to tell it.
The effect of it is that when Jackson isn't fucking around with his misguided period noodling, he's fucking around in a What Dreams May Come computer-generated fantasia--the two settings having no real connection to one another save their mutually ironclad dedication to avoiding anything of gravity.
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The performances in Atonement are nothing less than captivating, beginning with the young Irish rose Saoirse Ronan (who is also set to play the lead in Peter Jackson ’s The Lovely Bones ).
Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan, the young betrayer of “Atonement’’ and by far the best thing here) perches above her small 1970s Pennsylvania town in a sketchy but surreal afterlife, watching over the years as her devastated family and friends cope with her disappearance.
Susie is played by Saoirse Ronan, who received an Oscar nomination for "Atonement," and is a blue-eyed, freckle-faced, sandy-haired 14-year-old Everygirl.
Fifteen-year-old Saoirse Ronan, already an Oscar nominee for “Atonement,” is impressively mature as Susie, with Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz sympathetic as her grieving parents.
Saoirse Ronan (Atonement) plays a radiant 14-year-old who is murdered by her reclusive neighbor (a nearly unrecognizable Stanley Tucci).
Meanwhile, Ronan (excellent in Atonement) plays the horrific scene to perfection, her eyes turning into saucers, her face ashen as she tries to deny the very real fact of her impending doom.
And it's worth enduring a lot of lame shaky-camera drug-trip sequences when you come across the rare example that works, like Mia Farrow's all-too-real rape nightmare in Rosemary's Baby .
Yet, the conceit on film leads toward hazy premonitions and communication from the beyond the grave - stuff on the level of the 1990 Patrick Swayze-Demi Moore film, "Ghost."
As shown by Atonement and Death Defying Acts, Saoirse Ronan, with her piercing gaze, is a technically gifted child actor, but I don't think that even she can pull off the riskier gambits of the storyline, such as Susie's brief return to Earth in another girl's body.
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Matters aren’t helped by Jackson’s fascination with the “in between,” where Susie cavorts with another girl, Holly (Nikki SooHoo, Stick It), like models in a shampoo commercial made by someone drunk on the possibilities of cartoonish CGI effects.
The movie is roughly as serious about death and dying as "It's a Wonderful Life."