Hi there! It's the author's overweight male spouse, pinch-hitting while the mistress of the house summons her muse for other work. I don't know about those two sometimes. *suspicious*
Anyways, let's talk about some changes I've been working on. The big thing is that we have a Facebook page now. So those of you who are addicted to the social networking thing (read: Farmville) can now talk about us or to us on the biggest computer social network on the planet. Yay!
The next thing is I'm working on making Mary Anne's book list page a little more attractive by changing out the text links with cute little rectangular buttons like so:
Did you know there weren't any standard set of buttons for Amazon or Barnes & Noble or any other website that sells books? I know, it's crazy, isn't it? So I have to create my own and hope I don't get sued for adding to their profits.
Now we come to the content portion of this post: a movie review. Mary Anne and I watched The Lovely Bones last night on one of our many premium cable channels.
WARNING! SPOILERS AHEAD! IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE AND DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT'S IN IT, TURN BACK NOW! Otherwise, click the "More" link below.
The first gripe about the movie is that it's directed by Peter Jackson, which means it's about an hour too long. This is par for course for Jackson, who can't seem to make a movie less than 2.5 hours in length. It's all the eye candy and dreamworld sequences that he's got to put into every single movie he makes. Yes, it's pretty. Yes, it's breathtaking. Yes, my bladder fills up 3 or 4 times while all of this is going on so when Jackson gets to an actual plot point I usually miss it because I'm taking a bathroom break.
That's why the movie theaters are dying - Peter Jackson films and DVRs. Pause, hit the latrines, and you don't miss a thing. The only alternative is to wear Depends to the local cineplex.
Before I discuss the plot of the movie, let me preface it by saying I have not read the book on which it was based. I think that's Jackson's main problem in movie length: he tries to put an entire book on the screen. At least that's what I encountered with his Lord of the Rings Trilogy. So if he tried to cram a whole book into a feature-length movie, that would be, once again, par for course.
That said, the main plot of the movie is that a 14-year-old girl, Susie, is murdered by a BTK-type killer who is never caught by the police. This murder happens near the beginning of the second act in the story arc, so once you see it you know the movie's not going to be about saving Susie. It's about the interaction between her ghost and the material world. Because Susie won't let go of earthly things and events, she is stuck in a sort of Purgatory, though it's a very pleasant one whenever she's not looking at her old world.
The entire story arc doesn't end like a movie usually does (par for course!), which I guess it supposed to make it all deep and profound. We get a foreshadowing of this when we see Susie's mother reading Camus near the beginning of the movie. Absurdism, which is the Camus philosophy, presents us paradoxes that I detest and find ultimately repugnant.
The paradox in the movie is that Susie must be forgotten in order to be important - a Camusian position if ever there was one. The aftermath of her murder is the near destruction of her family. Her father becomes obsessed with finding her murderer, while her mother wants to move on but can't. Her siblings are caught in the middle of this tumult and their questions and fears are overwhelming.
Susie's ghost is almost as obsessed and enraged as her father, except that she knows who her murderer is. She wants justice. She wants retribution for her treatment. Her body is still in her killer's house, hidden away in a safe in his basement where he can go and fantasize about and relive the moment he sliced her up (a moment not shown on screen, but our imaginations fill with more than sufficient horror).
Finally, the child murderer is almost caught when Susie's sister finds the much sought after evidence needed to bring him to justice. But he escapes and in the process dumps the safe containing Susie's remains in a place where it will never be found. Susie is then free to be forgotten and her family is shown moving on with their lives. The killer dies an undignified death after never having been caught, but his death is a vaguely karmic one that is (once again!) foreshadowed in the dreamlike sequences in Susie's Purgatory.
It would have been a much more satisfying movie to me had there been a more vengeful ending for the murderer. At one point in the movie the father deduces who the killer is and immediately goes for revenge. Dad's rage gets him into trouble though and lands him greviously injured in the hospital. Right after this we see the killer start packing up his murder kit and I thought he was going to go to Susie's house where the children and the mother-in-law (played with great hilarity by Susan Sarandon) were unprotected. The killer doesn't do that, though. Too bad. It would have been a wonderful opportunity to see a beatdown administered to Mr. Killer by a half-drunk pill-popping hag with a heart of gold.
I would have probably liked the book much more than the movie. I can handle absurdism and some fairly deep philosophical musings in books I read.
In a movie, it just comes across as pretentious claptrap. Hey look at me, I'm reading Camus! Hey look, I understand that everybody dies and I think it's a just a part of life that should be accepted and expected! The universe is ultimately unfair and the only thing we can do about it is to realize it's unfair and write books about it and be French! Isn't it strange how we are exceptional creatures in a world where being exceptional doesn't matter! Oui oui, where is my beret?!
That's the problem with books versus movies. Books, to me, are like a steak and lobster dinner, while movies are popcorn and peanuts. I can take a long, drawn-out, dark nihilistic book. That crap is depressing in a movie.
I guess, much like my wife, I have a need for happy endings too. Oh well, there's still Charles Bronson movies.