Peter Jackson's adaptation of Alice Sebold's bestselling novel about a 14-year-old girl (Saoirse Ronan) murdered by a serial killer (Stanley Tucci). While a few film critics (like Rolling Stones' Peter Travers) have praised the movie, others savaged it mercilessly, calling it "deplorable" (Roger Ebert), "erratic" (L.A. Times' Kenneth Turan) and "doubly appalling" (Village Voice's J.Hoberman). The most vicious of all was Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, denouncing it as "a perfect storm of a movie disaster: You've got good actors fighting a poorly conceived script, under the guidance of a director who can no longer make the distinction between imaginativeness and computer-generated effects. The result is an expensive-looking mess that fails to capture the mood, and the poetry, of its source material". However, it is S.F. Chronicle's Mick LaSalle who's hit the nail on the head by pointing out that "Jackson made as good a film as could be made, and (...) the flaws of "The Lovely Bones" as a film were built into the story's design". Indeed. And while it is far less daring than Jackson's own "Heavenly Creatures" (which shares a lot of similarities with "The Lovely Bones"), its emotional impact is overwhelming.
September 9, 2009
The Lovely Bones (2009) ***
Peter Jackson's adaptation of Alice Sebold's bestselling novel about a 14-year-old girl (Saoirse Ronan) murdered by a serial killer (Stanley Tucci). While a few film critics (like Rolling Stones' Peter Travers) have praised the movie, others savaged it mercilessly, calling it "deplorable" (Roger Ebert), "erratic" (L.A. Times' Kenneth Turan) and "doubly appalling" (Village Voice's J.Hoberman). The most vicious of all was Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, denouncing it as "a perfect storm of a movie disaster: You've got good actors fighting a poorly conceived script, under the guidance of a director who can no longer make the distinction between imaginativeness and computer-generated effects. The result is an expensive-looking mess that fails to capture the mood, and the poetry, of its source material". However, it is S.F. Chronicle's Mick LaSalle who's hit the nail on the head by pointing out that "Jackson made as good a film as could be made, and (...) the flaws of "The Lovely Bones" as a film were built into the story's design". Indeed. And while it is far less daring than Jackson's own "Heavenly Creatures" (which shares a lot of similarities with "The Lovely Bones"), its emotional impact is overwhelming.
