The Lovely Bones

Can this movie really get under someone’s skin and make them rave about it? Peter Jackson is once again great in terms of details; for example, the depiction of a chilling clash of the purest childhood innocence with the most terrible human evil (murder) is unique in its credibility. But the multi-level collage that follows the promising start of the film, and especially the final outcome of the individual plot lines, raises a single key question: “What the hell did the filmmaker want to say with this confused film?” Clarify the meaning of specific scenes and characters would actually require a dozen such questions, but I do not want to spoil this for anyone. So I ask only one harmless question: What is the meaning of Susan Sarandon’s comic character for the dramaturgical concept of this film? Or is she in the film only because the director is a fan of hers? The problem with The Lovely Bones doesn’t lie in its fantasy images (those are beautiful when they stand alone), but in its completely dysfunctional narrative vision. (23/02/2010)

Lynne Ramsay was originally supposed to adapt the novel into a movie before the soft cuties Spielberg and Jackson took it away from her and made it into a bouncy castle that made the novel’s author herself want to puke. Esoteric vegan lemonade for parents who need to cope with the loss of their offspring by imagining that they're in a better place now, all of it seasoned with the greatest stereotypes and clichés in the character of Stanley Tucci. As goofy as the film is, I'm all the more annoyed at how it drowns out some masterful visual ideas (no, I don't mean the ones in the heavenly veil, but the dollhouse tour, for example) or entire sequences (the creaky floorboard in the pedophile's house). Jackson is slowly becoming the kind of director here who even adds leaves to the sidewalk digitally, and that's not a good way to go. (29/06/2020)

Peter Jackson has lost his sense and has become a shallow megalomaniac with a tendency towards the kitsch. When it comes to the shallowness of the dialogues, Lovely Bones is like Emmerich’s 2012, and I’m not exaggerating, but in a wannabe intense drama this is a lot worse. Are we supposed to laugh with that scene about the clumsy grandma? It actually reminded me of that cringe-worthy Czech film Panská Jízda with Martin Dejdar. Is the film portraying coming to terms with the loss of a family member with dad letting himself be beaten up, mum going somewhere to the countryside to pick apples and the siblings behaving as if nothing had happened? Is Jackson taking the piss? The direction and performances are excellent, but what’s the point when every word uttered by the characters made me want to plug my ears and shake my head at how shallow and fake it sounded. When the smiling kids start walking among the cornrows, I was reminded of the terrible final scene of Knowing (but at least the plot of that one had some balls) and I just wrote off the film and decided to have fun with every incoming cliché for the rest of the runtime. PS: Anyone who dares to compare this film with The Fountain (it shares only part of the theme and Rachel Weisz), either positively (it’s just as good), or negatively (it’s just as bad), or to rate the visuals and the story better than Avatar’s is either stupid or blind. PS2: This is the same guy that made Braindead, OMG! (04/01/2010)

If there’s nothing happening, not even a death can change things (screenplay) and less often means more (special effects). The images we see are often beautiful, but also absolutely empty of emotion. It would never have occurred to me that Peter Jackson would end up suffering from the syndrome that accompanies the works of Tarsem Singh. But in the first half-hour it has everything it needs, including emotions, which are so important for movies like this. But this just makes the rest of the movie that much more painful, because this outstanding “prolog" just proves that the movie could have been different. For instance, more in terms of hints instead of spectacular CGI landscapes. (03/01/2010)

Too long, very uninteresting in places, full of images that might have looked better in a photograph. At times it felt like two or three films mixed together. The only thing that worked for me in this film was the music, it was perfectly able to complement the images the film wanted to show me. The pictures could be pretty, but they don't work as a 135-minute film. It can be moving, but so can any movie where someone's daughter is murdered, where the deceased talks about their departure, that final one. Maybe I was expecting too much, something more different, something more suspenseful, something with a better story; this one didn't move along very well, plus the ending didn't add much (was the filmmaker just trying to say "The mills of the gods grind slowly"?). A better 2 stars. (28/06/2010)