Another post about movies

I consider myself to be a bit of a film aficionado ... I like foreign and indie films ... plus the old classics. I even took a film class in college! Not that this makes me an expert or anything ... but I find it strange that I usually like movies that get really BAD reviews!

Why is that?

Take for example, "The Lovely Bones." It's a film adaptation of a best-selling novel by Alice Sebold (which I did not read ... which also may explain why I liked the movie).

This brings up a point about book-to-movie translations. Should we view it as a comparison, or look to each as an entirely separate entity.

My Mom has started reading the Harry Potter series on my urging. She and my Dad are watching each corresponding movie as she finishes the book. My Dad really likes the movies, but my Mom is distracted by the differences from the books.

Anyway, back to "The Lovely Bones" --- basically, it's about a young girl about to get her first kiss and is in that key point in your life where you're leaving behind childhood and stepping into the great unknown ahead. She lives an idyllic family life with loving parents and a few siblings.

She is then murdered by a man in the neighborhood and enters a "purgatory" or fairyland of sorts of her own creation. She gradually realizes she is dead and has to help her family deal with her passing and her father solve her murder.

Here's what my favorite paper, The Guardian had to say about it:

How does one make a PG-certificate film about the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl? Director Peter Jackson provides an answer of sorts with The Lovely Bones, which leaves the murder unseen and the rape unmentioned.

His reward is a blushing mainstream entertainment that was tonight deemed fit to be introduced to polite society at a royal premiere in Leicester Square. Our reward is anyone's guess.

The drama ushers us through the afterlife of Susie Salmon (Atonement's Saoirse Ronan), a small-town kid in 1970s Pennsylvania who is killed by the local pervert (Stanley Tucci) and looks down on her scattered, shattered family from her place in limbo. She sees her mum (Rachel Weisz) flee the coop and her dad (Mark Wahlberg) come apart at the seams. From this celestial vantage, she starts to fear for the safety of her little sister (Rose McIver), whose jogging route leads her regularly past the killer's suburban home.

It's not that The Lovely Bones is a bad movie, exactly. It is handsomely made and strongly acted, while its woozy, lullaby ambience recalls Jackson's work on the brilliant Heavenly Creatures, before he set forth on his epic voyage through The Lord of the Rings.

Here, he audaciously conjures up heaven as designed by a teenage girl – a kitsch spread of sunflower fields, spinning turntables and the sort of airbrushed waterfalls that could have spilled straight off an Athena poster. All of which is entirely fitting, and often captivating. The problem, though, is that The Lovely Bones also gives us a real world as designed by a teenage girl. The land that Susie leaves behind is so infested with cartoon archetypes and whimsical asides that, at times, it scarcely feels real at all.

Might the fault lie with the source novel? Alice Sebold's best-selling book similarly held up Susie Salmon's innocent fancies as a kind of talisman to ward off evil. It dared to spin a sentimental fantasy out of a grisly tragedy, offsetting the tang of sulphur with the sweet taste of candyfloss. The difference was that Sebold's novel was not scared to look the central horror in the face. This ensured that it at least part earned its subsequent flights into the ether.

The screen version, by contrast, is so infuriatingly coy, and so desperate to preserve the modesty of its soulful victim that it amounts to an ongoing clean-up operation.

Gone is the dismembered body part that alerts the family to Susie's fate. Gone is her anguished mother's adulterous affair with the detective who leads the case. Gone is all mention of what really transpired in that lonely 1970s cornfield. Is this really the best way to secure a crime scene and retrieve the victim? Jackson turns up with his eyes averted, spraying cloying perfume to the left and right.

Anyways ... I forget what I was going to say about why I liked it ... but I did.