![]() ![]() This ickiness factor seems mostly a product of the license Jackson takes in visualizing the spirit world, not so much the material itself, which he adapted with his wife, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens. You can get together in heaven with the other teenage victims of the same killer, and gaze down in benevolence upon your family members as they mourn you and realize what a wonderful person you were." " The Lovely Bones," he wrote, "is a deplorable film with this message: If you're a 14-year-old girl who has been brutally raped and murdered by a serial killer, you have a lot to look forward to. Even Roger Ebert, who rarely seems to meet a movie he doesn't like these days, came out strongly against the film. Many critics found the film downright reprehensible upon its theatrical release, what with its over-embellished portrayal of a dead teen's mostly blithe perspective-all puppies and colorful orbs-and its almost complete refusal to acknowledge her actual suffering at the hands of her murderer. Meanwhile, back in the afterlife, Susie contemplates passing on from limbo to the bona fide Elysian fields, a rather obvious inversion of the site of her capture: a bunker underneath a fallow cornfield. The Salmons' supremely creepy next-door neighbor, George Harvey (Stanley Tucci, who was Oscar-nominated for the role), has the comb-over and mustache of a stereotypical menace to children, but only gradually does the family-whose elders include Jack (Mark Wahlberg), Abigail (Rachel Weisz), and Grandma Lynn (Susan Sarandon)-zero in on him as a suspect. AM radio blares at the breakfast table and the occasional bell-bottom sashays through the frame snippets of Brian Eno songs crop up throughout the soundtrack. (The Blu-ray of this movie will likely be popular with electronics-store managers in search of outlandishly colorful floor-demo sequences for their colossal HD TVs.) The parallel real-world action takes place in 1970s Pennsylvania. ![]() The 14-year-old serves as a mystical cheerleader for the police investigation while in a liminal state between heaven and earth, depicted as a fantasyland that might well be taken for a lost level of Mario Kart 64. But another one has arrived this week on DVD and Blu-ray: Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones.īased on the popular 2002 novel by Alice Sebold (which, I should say up front, I haven't read), The Lovely Bones chronicles the murder of the young Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) and its aftermath. A perfect example of this type of film is Lawrence Kasdan's Dreamcatcher (2003), a Stephen King adaptation that wraps five or six movies' worth of content into one staggeringly nutty two-and-a-quarter-hour junk opus. Every once in a while there comes along a high-profile Hollywood effects extravaganza so misguided, so full of eyebrow-raising wow-they-went-there moments that it demands to be seen-preferably on the small screen, where expectations are generally more modest and double-takes can be freely indulged by pressing the rewind button. ![]()
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