Sunday, October 10, 2010

Movie Sunday: The Lovely Bones

Image from here.

Hey, two weeks in a row! I'm amazing.

The Lovely Bones is a Peter Jackson movie about a young girl who gets murdered by a neighbor, and probably could have been a great movie. Unfortunately, it suffers from two of my pet movie peeves. First, it was marketed as some supernatural detective story, which is not really the point at all. I can forgive that to a degree. Like most really good stories, it is hard to categorize.

The second problem is more serious, and less forgivable. The movie is longer than it needs to be, and partially because of this, has significant loose ends. (This is the part where I get to talk about how things were better in my day.) Movies used to last an hour and a half, and anything that tried to keep moviegoers in their seats for two hours or more had better be the freaking Lord of the Rings.

Lovely Bones would have been a great ninety minute story. But in order to kill two hours and a half, they were forced to introduce extra complications, which made the middle drag, and in turn created plot elements that couldn't be properly resolved.

Still, it was in interesting story, and a fresh perspective. And the cast was very strong. Even Marky Mark was good. We definitely thought it was worth the time investment.

6 comments:

  1. The book was pretty good. This is in our queue but it's down pretty low and we have about 90 movies on the list. I don't think I'll move it up. TCM had 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre' on last night, which made me think about our Sunday movie nights at the AAC...

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  2. I'm not keen on films of books I've liked (or worse, loved), so I won't be watching this one. Offhand, the only films I can think of that lived up to the books were Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, and the Harry Potter movies. I was once told severely on a movie course that I should never compare the film with the book, but rather let the movie stand on its own - bollocks!

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  3. I loved the book, and chose it for my reading group about a year ago. (They absolutely hated it-they're a squeamish bunch, and resented that the murderer wasn't punished)

    I didn't even know there was a movie; thank you. It's now in my netflix queue, because I also like Peter Jackson, notwithstanding the Rings trilogy(not a Tolkien fan,sorry)

    I used to feel the same way about books vis a vis movies made from books, Pueblo girl, but A Clockwork Orange taught me how to (I guess) let the movie stand on its own. . .Admittedly, there are movies that dishonor the books/stories they're made from (anything Disney, for instance) but that's different.

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  4. i adored the book, which is why i haven't seen the film. agree that it probably could have been done well in 90 minutes... the book made me weep. sounds like the movie might have just given me 'roids...

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  5. So, it sounds like I need to read the book and forget I saw the movie. Thanks, ladies!

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  6. Read the book for sure - was awesome.

    on another note....Stanley Tucci was 'amazing' as murderer in the movie - so creepy. Yet when I watched 'Easy A' I found him rather attractive. Cool yet disturbing that he can be so versatile.

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