The Lovely Bones (2009) **

Undeniably a different approach to a story, The Lovely Bones is about a Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), your typical 1970's teenager with David Cassidy on her walls and a Babarino-esque boy on her mind. The movie opens happily enough, with her finally getting asked out by THE boy. Life is good. Until she is murdered on her way home from school. At this point the film falls into a pit of despair as Susie watches from what I can't really call heaven and I can't call it purgatory. As much as she seems to enjoy her new found dimension I guess, for the sake of me looking up the exact term, we'll call it Disney of the Dead. As I said, Susie is watching from Disney for the Dead as he parents (Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz) grieve in their own way and her murderer (Stanley Tucci) sits, waiting for the demon in his soul show up again.

One of the tings you'll notice about The Lovely Bones is that the acting is great. There's emotion on the screen without the film becoming a sob fest. Everyone does a great job and it shows. There are really two main problems with the film that drag it down from a good movie to the level of average/mediocre. The first problem is some of the story elements. There are times in this film where you'll think to yourself "People wouldn't act this way" even in the face of the disappearance and murder of a child. Believability suffers in this case. The second problem is the entire idea of Disney of the Dead. The reason I gave it that name is because this is apparently the happiest place off earth. Sure, Susie watches her family go through hell, but at least there's a nice cut away of playing in this place that can be anything, right along with yourself. Hell, sign me up to be murdered by Stanley Tucci if the afterlife is this good! Unfortunately, the Disney of the Dead scenes take away from the film tremendously. There's one point where Susie meets her murderer's other victims. It's supposed to be a poignant scene of a group of people that share a common bound in that their lives were cut short. Sadly, director Peter Jackson, who is obviously used to directing CGI creatures gives us a sequence that is the equivalent of a Tampax commercial. Derailed.

But that's essentially what The Lovely Bones is- Peter Jackson showing us that he can do more than long winded CGI films about elfs and Greg Allman. To give him credit, the scenes that don't occur in Disney of the Dead are well directed, though there are a few shots that make you think a second rate Scorsese was behind the camera. It's those damn CGI filled fun fests that take away from the film instead of adding to it. What this really amounts to is a failed experiment for Jackson. Time to go back to the well (The Hobbit).