Movie Review: The Lovely Bones

*-&- I Love It..! It's poignant, gripping, emotionally alive and gorgeous. Though i feel i have to warn everyone who hasn't yet seen this film, that it's very distressing! I seriously never cry at films, EVER! I now know why you can 'never say never' in the end lol.. Since i cried all the way through. My tears never stopped, my face burned, i got dizzy and lightheaded (+ very heavy hearted) very quickly.. *bows head in shame* I got so encased in the film like no other film before.

It's weird isn't it? When you think you'll never find a romantic comedy funny or get angry with a film, get energetic from the adrenaline (or without shame weep over portrayed heartbreak) that's when you kick yourself in the teeth because 'that random pick of a film' broke you down and made you laugh, made you cry in the end.

'The Lovely Bones' broke my heart, it's my new tear jerker. Replacing my only other one in a million weepy film 'My Dog Skip'. Now don't laugh, i have a good reason, I'm a dog lover... (it's a animal thing) lol XP Please if you haven't had a chance to watch this film yet, you might get a surprise as it may 'haunt' you a little afterwards... :)

Stephanie x

Review:
Is there a filmmaker in history who’s made four bigger back-to-back movies than Peter Jackson? Fellowship, Two Towers, King, Kong… that’s a total of 30 words in the full titles, 745 minutes in running time (883 if we’re talking the extended cuts), $1.3bn at the box office and more spectacle, CG extras and horizon-stretching battles than a T-Rex could shake an Oliphant at.

So how’s this for a change of pace: an intimate family drama set in a small American town (one street, primarily) and faultlessly recreating the early ‘70s. It’s a lost world but there’s not a dinosaur in sight – though a beast does live across the street and Jackson gets to flex the fantasy once more by visualising a land so vast and fertile it makes Middle-earth look like a disused parking lot. Welcome to heaven.

Confused? Then you haven’t read Alice Sebold’s 2002 bestseller The Lovely Bones, to which Jackson and partners Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens cleave faithfully but not, wisely, reverentially. It tells the imaginative, heartfelt tale of Susie Salmon (“like the fish”), a 14-year-old who is raped and killed by Mr Harvey, her inconspicuous neighbour. Only she’s not ready to die, instead loitering around the gateway to the afterlife and peering back over her shoulder as the murder investigation unfurls below.

Sensitively cast - Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz as Susie’s parents, Susan Sarandon as vulgar Grandma, a bewigged, bespectacled Stanley Tucci as Harvey and Atonement’s Saoirse Ronan as poor, hurting Susie – Lovely Bones is a touching, at times distressing film. It deals with loss, grief, rage, familial breakdown and love, most of all love. But it’s also energetic and entertaining, the camera already moving whenever Jackson cuts into a scene and the horror/thriller elements given just enough fizz to recall the director’s early genre forays (minus the splatter) but not so comic book as to undercut the drama.

The Lovely Bones, both book and film, opens with a close-up image of a snowman trapped in a snow globe. The image reverberates around the entire movie. From Susie Salmon sitting on her heavenly gazebo narrating her own life following her brutal murder, to her father Jack (Wahlberg, good hair) building intricate model ships inside delicate bottles to her mother Abigail (Weisz) keeping Susie’s room in pristine untouched condition to her killer George Harvey (a terrific, meticulous, barely recognisable Tucci) carefully tending to his miniature doll house, these are characters looking to build ideal worlds but who eventually become ensnared by them, unable to move on, tethered by their pain. If this makes Lovely Bones sound like a draining downer, it shouldn’t: it is poignant, gripping, emotionally alive (but never sentimental) and gorgeous. All this from the man who brought you Meet The Feebles.

With its heady teen protagonist and themes of murder intertwined with the fantastical, on paper this felt like Jackson returning to the intimate, small-scale milieu of Heavenly Creatures (the fascination with the afterlife connecting with the real world also touches base with Jackson’s forgotten flick The Frighteners). Eschewing Sebold’s almost comic vision of the afterlife as a kitsch heavenly high school, Jackson’s vision of “the in-between”, a holding pen between Earth and Heaven, is a cornucopia of digitally enhanced vistas, flower iconography, quickly shifting landscapes and startling memorable images: a horrific bathroom vignette, a fleet of ships in bottles bobbing on a sea, a gazebo planted firmly in the middle of a midnight lake with the moon as a clock.

It defies most conventions and it defies most categories too. It is part ghost story, part romance and part murder mystery.

Release Date: Jan 29th 2010
Certificate: tbc
Genre:
o Drama,
o Horror,
o Thriller
Starring:
o Mark Wahlberg,
o Rachel Weisz,
o Susan Sarandon,
o Saoirse Ronan,
o Michael Imperioli
Director:
o Peter Jackson


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The Lovely Bones (Novel)
by Alice Sebold





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