The Lovely Bones is a 2009 supernatural drama. It is set in 1973 and centres round a 14-year-old girl named, Susie Salmon. One day while Susie is walking home from school she bumps into her neighbour, George Harvey. He coaxes her into an underground den he says he’s built for the neighbourhood children. Here Harvey murders Susie after she attempts to leave. Meanwhile her family begin to worry when she does not return home and her father goes to look for her. With no luck in finding her they call the police who think that her killer was probably someone she knew and trusted. With this information her father sets out to prove it was their neighbour, George Harvey.
Our film and The Lovely Bones are not similar in genre but do have a similar story line. The Lovely Bones does have some supernatural elements that we will not be including in our film, however the idea of a main character whose aim it is to is to prove to everyone that the murderer is someone whom they all trust will be included. The character in our film that does this is her brother, whereas in The Lovely Bones it is her father. Our film does have a happy ending, where the brother eventually finds and saves her. However The Lovely Bones doesn’t even give an indication that she will be rescued. It’s made apparent through the entire film that she is already dead, but in the same way as our film there is the hope that she will be found and her kidnapper/murderer caught.
Review
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/nov/24/the-lovely-bones-film-review
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.
Trailer & Clips
Trailer - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQZq0d1vzOE
Clips - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Zk169N0X8c&feature=related
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