The Lovely Bones

A Young Girl gets murdered. Then gets stuck in a limbo land plagued by CGI. Then a lot of things happens that don't make much sense.

Nominated for:
Best Supporting Actor - Stanely Tucci

Ok so the good news is that my initial concerns about this movie adaptation (that Peter Jackson would create a revenge thriller instead of a story about grief and loss) proved to be false. The bad news is that Peter Jackson had no flipping clue WHAT this story was about, so he created... something... drenched in CGI beyond-this-world limbo nonsense about a murderer (Stanely Tucci's role).

The book is not great to begin with, from a literary perspective, but the author does a phenomenal job of creating believable character with visceral emotions. The most compelling element to the book, however, is the young (and dead) girl's narration. However, in the film version, most of the girl's narration is about the murderer (not about being a 14-year-old girl), and the murderer's emotions, and the murderer's motivations (warning: massive rant up ahead).

By making the murderer the focus of the film, the otherwise introspective story about growth, and sadness, and emotional pain, becomes a voyeuristic spectacle on par with Crime Porn shows like CSI, Criminal Minds, Law & Order SVU... According to stories like these, women are always victims of man's all-powerful lust for sexualized violence. Women are helpless, and the more helpless they seem, the more tragic and perverse the crime. On top of it all, audiences are invited to observe, and delight, in all this horror.

Murder is not glamorous, or romantic, or seductive, nor is the constant victimization of women. And maybe I'm a little over sensitive, given the recent arrest Col. Russell Williams, but I'm beyond sick of watching murder presented as mindless entertainment, and that's what comes across the strongest in this movie. All the other characters EXCEPT the murderer himself get lost in this Creepy-Killer-Show/CGI-heaven, which is a shame, because if the focus had been on any of the other potentially wonderful characters, this movie may have turned out alright.

Best Supporting Actor? No. Tucci was miles better in Julie & Julia, playing a normal, intelligent human being. But you don't see any nods going his way for that, do you?

There is one good thing, though, about this crap-sack, and that's Brian Eno's score.

Eli