THE LOVELY BONES

This should have really been titled The Piece Of Crap! Really, I’ve been trying to figure out how to review this without the use of major profanity. That’s how awful it is. I seriously wanted to ask for my money back–and I hadn’t even paid! (It was a screening.) I would have walked out in the first half hour, as very many people did, but I figured that it just had to get better. I figured wrong. (No wonder director Peter Jackson lost so much weight recently–he must have thrown-up looking at his own movie!)

People whose opinions I had previously respected told me that they had read the novel and it was great. One of them said, “The director should be shot,” because he had veered so far from the author’s vision. I agree that he should be shot, but only after the author.

What kind of sick mofo writes this kind-of stuff???!!! It’s bad enough that there are so many deviants who perform this kind of evil every day in the real world–why would we need fiction of it? And what kind of pervert would publish it? And what miscreants would then think to turn it into a movie??? I’m way beyond appalled. There is just absolutely no reason for it.

(Since writing this, I’ve done research on both the book and the film, and it turns out that the author had unfortunately been raped herself, in college. While I’m totally sympathetic about that, she should seek therapy rather than writing a disgusting novel to foist on the unsuspecting public. The one saving grace of the movie is that, thankfully, they left-out the rape that she put in her book.)

In case you’re wondering why I would choose to go see it, I had no idea what it was about, which turned out to be the sick murder of a young teen-age girl and the pain her family subsequently suffered. I have way better use of two and a quarter hours, even if I just sat in a chair and did nothing. (I never check-out the storyline of a film before seeing it, to let it just unfold before my eyes. Maybe I should change that policy after this debacle!)

Now that I did indeed waste my time, and space in my brain, my mission is to save you from doing the same.

Putting the horrible story aside, the film itself is dreadful. It reminded me of the old Robin Williams movie, What Dreams May Come, and that’s the first comment my guest made to me when the credits rolled. It’s slow and insipid. And extremely unsatisfying.

There are two small consolations, which are far from worth the pain, time, and money. One is the about two minutes of real scariness that don’t end in horror, involving the dead girl’s sister snooping through the killer’s house, which would have been okay had I seen it with a cute guy with a hunky arm to hold.

The other is the wonderful performance by Susan Sarandon. But if you want to see one of those, just rent Lorenzo’s Oil and watch her face as she’s receiving her son’s diagnosis. I still can never figure out how she got that one tear to fall. (I’m sure it was just a divine accident, but still…)

Whenever Mr. X and I see that Jennifer Connelly is in a movie, we know to stay away from it because basically everything’s she’s in is painful to normal folk. That’s now my policy with Saoirse Ronan, and thank goodness it happened before I learned how to pronounce her name!

If I had to narrow this review down to just a single sentence, this is it: They can’t invent that bad-memory-erase pill fast enough to save me from this one.