The Lovely Bones

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)

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)

In short, weird. Jackson is a good director, but the story jumps from one level to another too often and so it’s hard for the viewer to build a sufficiently strong bond with any of them. Visually exquisite and emotionally very strong scene from “purgatory" sometimes contrast weirdly with the “real world" (yes, mainly with smokey Susan Sarandon), but despite it all, Jackson manages to hold it all together. Sometimes it isn’t about what story you tell, but how you tell it. (16/04/2010)

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)

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)