Grade: C-minus
There was cautious optimism among longtime followers of director
Peter Jackson that
The Lovely Bones
might inspire him to create a worthy companion piece to his 1994
Heavenly Creatures
, which similarly involves teenagers and murder in an otherwise tranquil setting and remains far and away his best film. The potential was certainly there in the book, which reminds of Dennis Lehane's successfully filmed novels
Mystic River
and
Gone Baby Gone
in its devastating emotional trauma, but offers the distinctive perspective of the most entirely plausible omniscient narrator in modern literature.
Unfortunately, the massive success Jackson has enjoyed in the intervening years with his CGI-heavy
The Lord of the Rings
saga (the source of which receives fleeting homage in a bookstore scene here) and
King Kong" has infected the way he approaches this far more intimate tale. Instead of having the late Susie Salmon occupy a little perch in an abstract heavenly gazebo from which she can peer down upon her family and anyone else - all that is really necessary from a narrative point of view - the director has indulged his whims to create constantly shifting backdrops depicting an afterlife evocative of
The Sound of Music or
The Wizard of Oz
one moment,
The Little Prince
or
Teletubbies
the next.
It's a shame, because the first half-hour or so suggests that Jackson, had he taken a vow to keep it real and use not a single visual effect, still has it in him to relate a human story in a direct, vibrant manner. Aided immeasurably by the spirited teen actress
Saoirse Ronan (
Atonement
), who plays Susie, the early scenes depicting the ordinary life of the Salmon family in a midsized Pennsylvania town possess a heightened quality charged by lively acting and Andrew Lesnie's dynamic mobile camera.
"We weren't those people, those unlucky people to whom bad things happen," Susie intones from above, as we watch her interact with attractive young parents Jack and Abigail (
Mark Wahlberg,
Rachel Weisz), sporty sister Lindsey (
Rose McIver) and younger brother Buckley (Christian Ashdale), boozy glamorpuss grandma Lynn (
Susan Sarandon) and handsome first crush Ray Singh (
Reece Ritchie), just before she announces she was murdered on Dec. 6, 1973.
Even before the deed is done, it's plainly stated that the perpetrator is neighborhood solitary guy George Harvey (
Stanley Tucci), a man marked as creepy by his utter ordinariness. While Tucci, adorned with stringy blondish-brown hair, moustache, large glasses and a raspy voice that tightens and elevates under pressure, is good enough to validate all the scenes involving this bland monster, Jackson shows his low-budget horror-film roots in the way he shoots the sinister scenes, with silhouetting white lights, heavy fog effects, wide-angle closeups and generic synth backgrounding from
Brian Eno's otherwise effective score.
While the script by the
Rings trio of
Fran Walsh,
Philippa Boyens and Jackson at first inventively reshuffles elements to cinematic advantage, over time it serves more to dilute the impact of some story elements - the father's obsessive determination to nail George no matter what, Lindsay's romance, the passage of years - and eliminate others, including Ray's beautiful, long-suffering mother and the relationship between Abigail and local cop Len Fenerman (
Michael Imperioli), whose efforts to solve Susie's murder are maddeningly frustrated.
Once Susie is installed in her heavenly quarters, for which Jackson digitally dedicates himself to continuously changing the wallpaper, the emotional link to the family is ruptured and never fully repaired. There are intermittently intense scenes: Lindsey proves herself a resourceful if somewhat reckless spy, and the ever-meticulous George almost blows his cover on occasion. The way Jackson only partially reveals the killer's face at times is effective but stands in stark contrast to the wobbly treatment of so much else.
As the story progresses - in a way that points to resolution in one sense and a simple petering out in another - it becomes clear that the actors are being deprived of any meaty, well-developed scenes to play; we learn more about them early on than toward the end, making this a film of slowly diminishing returns.
With reddish hair, brilliantly alive eyes and a seemingly irrepressible impulse for movement and activity, Ronan represents a heavenly creature indeed, a figure of surging, eager, anticipatory life cut off just as it is budding. Less quicksilver and more solidly built, McIver's Lindsey properly begins in her live-wire sister's shadow only to grow gradually into an impressive figure. Chain-smoking and depleting the liquor cabinet, Sarandon camps it up for a few welcome laughs, while Ritchie seems a likely candidate for teen idolhood.
Mainly, it's Wahlberg and Weisz who are shortchanged by the film's divided attention between earthly agony and astral accommodation. Both actors are OK as far as things go, but that's not nearly far enough.
When it sticks to the everyday neighborhood inhabited by its characters,
The Lovely Bones, which was shot on Pennsylvania locations and in New Zealand studios, finds a reasonable equilibrium between drama and production values. When it ventures beyond it, heaven turns into Hades.
Posts
to a group of co-workers who were too young to remember that Dudley Moore came to notoriety as one half of the comedy team of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore (I will try to find a copy of their Tarzan bit to post here).
, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
, Silkwood
, Primary Colors
et al) in June, I'm betting there are a number of folks that didn't know Nichols first gained fame as part of the comedy team of Miike Nichols and Elaine May. If you didn't, the above clip will give you some idea of what you missed.
I welcomed the news that Dallas City Manager Mary Suhm has named Dallas Assistant Chief David Brown to succeed retiring Chief David Kunkle as the head of the Dallas Police Department.
star Russell Crowe, who won an Oscar for his performance in that film, threatened to kill one of the producers for the film with his bear hands and almost refused to say the film's most famous line, according to a book expected to be published next month.
, is the leading candidate to play Lisbeth Salander in the director David Fincher's English-language version of Stieg Larsson's popular novel The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
, an engrossing thriller I am currently reading. It also appears that Brad Pitt is the leading candidate to play the financial reporter who joins with Salander to solve the 40-year-old mystery of a missing heiress. Personally, I think both are excellent choices. The question is whether the book's sequel, The Girl Who Played with Fire
, which may even be more popular than the first book, be filmed with Mulligan as well.
(2009) As fiercely unsentimental as this film is, it offers by the end a measure of hope, and because that hope is so hard-won, it has the ring of truth. Star John Malkovich is one of the few actors capable of conveying genuine intellectual depth. GRADE: A
(2010) A pleasurable nonsense and another reminder that one of the great pulls of cinema is the spectacle of other bodies in blissful motion. GRADE: B
(2009) A feature-length talkathon built on a sketchy premise, some unpersuasive psychology, a pinch of politics and strong star turns from Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt. The appeal of all those words runs out long before the director Oliver Hirschbiegel turns off the spigot. GRADE: C-PLUS 
(2009) This is potentially wonderful, if not exactly new stuff, but co-writers Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown's willful refusal of coherent narrative and determination to pack every idea about art they ever had into one scenario, make this fiendishly gorgeous movie more exhausting than exhilarating to watch. GRADE: B
(2009) Although the inept filmmaking and tiresome gags give the air of coming from one truly bored misogynist, it took two screenwriters (Patrick Casey, Worm Miller) and two directors (David & Scott Hillenbrand) to create this stake through the heart of film comedy. GRADE: F
fan. I did like The Truman Show
... a lot ... but I liked it in spite of Carrey. I don't know what anyone sees in Man on the Moon 
and The Majestic
and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
is one of the most overrated films of all time. The nicest thing I can say about the bulk of his comedies is that aren't as bad as those from Adam Sandler
and Yes Man
, did not perform anywhere near expectations. His so-called gay comedy, I Love You Philip Morris, has been shelved, at least for the time being. Three other projects with which he's involved - Ripley's Believe It or Not, The Three Stooges and Damn Yankees - are going nowhere. 
, a quiet and lovely film by the French director Claire Denis, is partly concerned with measuring that distance, the bewildering chasm between huge and tumultuous international movements and individual lives. It is self-evident that the story of Joséphine and Lionel, an African immigrant whose wife was German, is bound up in a complicated history of demographics and political economy. The fact that nearly all of the characters in this film are French while few are white is a further index of how the European landscape has changed in recent decades. 
(her 1988 debut, not to be confused with the more recent Juliette Binoche-Johnny Depp 
confection) and Beau Travail
(1999) she has examined some of the political contradictions and psychological pressures of this colonial legacy, but in 35 Shots of Rum it remains in the background, like those classroom discussions. Which is not to say that matters of race and nationality are irrelevant to the movie, only that their relevance is implicit, either too obvious or not pressing enough for the characters themselves to discuss.
, another recent film by a French director who has sometimes trafficked in provocation and extremity. Both movies embed extraordinary thematic richness within a simple, almost anecdotal narrative framework, and both achieve a rare eloquence about the state of the world by means of tact and reticence.
can be described as six guys sitting around in barely furnished rooms, talking. Actually, one of the six says nothing at all: he sits quietly in the chair to which he’s tied, bruised and bloody and shaking and wondering if — or maybe just when — the other five will kill him.
and Time to Leave), and he finds himself surrounded by roaring British lions. Loverboy’s tormentors are Tom Wilkinson, Stephen Dillane, John Hurt, Ian McShane and Ray Winstone, an honor guard of refined ruffianism.
, the great 2000 gangster drama in which Winstone trembled before the reptilian menace of Ben Kingsley). Her name is Liz, she is played by Joanne Whalley, and she is both marginal to the action and a central catalyst of the drama. Loverboy is her lover; Winstone’s Colin is her jealous, heartsick husband; and the rest of the blokes are Colin’s underworld pals, doing him a good turn by delivering up his rival for rough justice.
