I really really really liked The Lovely Bones, a movie about murder and grief funneled into a big huge emotional slow-motion close-up panoramic fantasia swirling-camera special-effects Brian Eno CGI tear-streaked period-piece whirligig. It made me cry. The serial killer material was unusually well-handled and realistic, in that greasy nauseating biting-on-tinfoil way that those men are. It used a bunch of actors I personally have an affinity for, like Mark Wahlberg and Michael Imperioli, as buttresses for a CGI-as-metaphor spectacle, something you’d seen hints of here and there in King Kong and The Lord of the Rings, but here Peter Jackson goes full-on Heavenly Creatures with it. It had a fine Brian Eno score, including a couple of cues from his weird-pop days (I heard “Baby’s On Fire” coming about three minutes before it really started). There were A-class suspense sequences and a musical montage set to the Hollies’ “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress.” If you wanted to read it as a horror movie that just spends an unusual amount of time with people who aren’t threatened by the monster anymore, you could do that, and I actually suggest that you do. Right down to the tricky climax, it made meaning from the stuff of moviemaking. If it were nine years ago or so, I could see myself getting stuck in a k-hole with this movie, staying up past everyone else in my house and watching it and living with it night after night. I found it strange and very sad.
Key question: have you read the book?
No, although my wife, who also really liked the movie, did and coached me on some of the differences.
I haven’t seen the movie yet (one of the downsides to being a parent… the last movie I saw in the theaters was UP, and that was flanked by a five year old and a two year old) but what I’ve read about the differences made me doubt I’d want to. I’d heard, for instance, that Jackson et al downplay the sexual aspects, which are central to the book, since Sebold wrote the book with her own rape experience as a jumping off point.
But I find I appreciate your taste in movies, so I might give it a try.
(BTW, I’m listening to your 2009 compilations, and find I appreciate your tastes in music as well. Thanks much for posting that 🙂 )
That’s true, they don’t show the rape and don’t discuss it. But if you know anything about this type of killer, it’s implied. Either way, I promise you you don’t come away from that scene thinking “Gee, that really could have been more horrifying and awful than they made it.” The brutality and tragedy of the act and its outcome are not given short shrift.