"The Lovely Bones", de Peter Jackson (críticas)

The New York Times

By A. O. SCOTT

We all like children, and — at least in our capacity as moviegoers, book-club members and consumers of true-life melodrama — we seem to like them best when they’re abused, endangered or dead. Nothing else is quite so potent a symbol of violated innocence, a spur to pious sentiment or a goad to revenge as a child in peril. This is hardly news (Charles Dickens

made a nice living trafficking in the suffering of minors), but for some reason the past decade has seen an epidemic of cinematic and literary crimes against the young.

“The Lovely Bones,” Alice Sebold’s 2002 best seller, now a film directed by Peter Jackson, stands out as a singularly bold and complex treatment of this grim and apparently inexhaustible theme. In spite of the horrific act at the center of the story — the rape, murder and dismemberment of a 14-year-old girl — the novel is not depressing or assaultive but rather, somewhat perversely, warm, hopeful and even occasionally funny.

Ms. Sebold pushes the dead-child narrative to an emotional extreme, and at the same time undermines its exploitive tendencies, by means of a simple and radical formal device. She makes the victim, a daughter of ’70s suburbia named Susie Salmon (“like the fish”), an omniscient, beyond-the-grave narrator, with a lively voice and a comfortable perch in the afterlife from which to survey the doings of her family, her friends and the neighbor who killed her. The novel is conceived with enough audacity to make this gimmick intriguing, and executed with enough art to make it effective.

Mr. Jackson’s film, from a script he wrote with Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, his frequent collaborators, shows less audacity and too much art. Susie’s unearthly home, in the book a minimally sketched, nondenominational purgatory where the dead loiter on their way to heaven and keep tabs on unfinished business down on earth, has been expanded into a digitally rendered Wonderland of rioting metaphors, crystal seas and floating topiary. It’s a mid-’70s art-rock album cover brought to life (and complemented by a score composed by the ’70s art-rock fixture Brian Eno), and while its trippy vistas are sometimes ravishing, they are also distracting. “Heaven,” a Talking Heads song once pointed out, is “a place where nothing ever happens.”

Accordingly Mr. Jackson’s interest in the “in-between,” as this suburb of heaven is called, is primarily visual. The drama is all down below, where the surviving members of the Salmon family contend with the loss of their eldest child. Susie’s sister, Lindsey, is played by Rose McIver; her brother, Buckley, by Christian Thomas Ashdale, while George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), the reclusive, seething killer, prunes his rosebushes and decorates dollhouses. By all appearances he has gotten away with his crime, and Susie hovers in the in-between partly in the hope that she might find a way to bring him to justice.

She is, in any case, obsessed with the lives that go on without her, in particular with the ways her siblings and friends and father (Mark Wahlberg, agonized) and mother (Rachel Weisz, narcotized) deal with losing her, something the audience never has to endure. We are always in Susie’s company, soothed by her voice-over narration and tickled by her coltish high spirits. This puts a curious distance between us and most of the characters in the film — it makes us, in effect, Susie’s fellow ghosts — a detachment that Mr. Jackson’s stylish, busy technique makes more acute. His young heroine, played with unnerving self-assurance and winning vivacity by Saoirse Ronan, cares desperately about the poor living souls left in her wake, but it is not clear that Mr. Jackson shares her concern.

Yes, he grooves on the wild color schemes and peculiar fashions of 1973. (Richard Kelly had a similar field day with 1976-vintage patterned wallpaper and fat neckties in “The Box,” his recent entry in the suburban-’70s-supernatural sweepstakes.) And this director’s fondness for odd angles, intense close-ups and trick perspectives — he films one scene as if peering out from the rooms of a dollhouse — animates a drab Pennsylvania landscape of shopping malls and half-developed farmland. As a pictorial artifact “The Lovely Bones” is gorgeous. It pulses and blooms and swells with bright hues and strange vistas.

But it does not move. Or, rather, as it skitters and lurches from set piece to the next, papering the gaps with swirls of montage, it never achieves the delicate emotional coherence that would bring the story alive. My point is not that Mr. Jackson and his fellow screenwriters have taken undue liberties with the book, a complaint that some other critics have made. On the contrary, the problem with this “Lovely Bones” is that it dithers over hard choices, unsure of which aspects of Ms. Sebold’s densely populated, intricately themed novel should be emphasized and which might be winnowed or condensed.

The filmmakers’ evident affection for the book expresses itself as a desperate scramble to include as much of it as possible, which leaves the movie feeling both overcrowded and thin. The anguish in the Salmon household is dutifully observed: dad smashes his collection of model ships, mom withdraws and then flees to California, and in the middle of it grandma arrives, a brassy boozer played by Susan Sarandon. But there is a puppet-show quality to their grief, and also to the puzzlement of the detective (Michael Imperioli) investigating Susie’s death and the sorrow of her schoolmates, Ruth (Carolyn Dando) and Ray (Reece Ritchie), the object of Susie’s first and last major crush.

The title of “The Lovely Bones” refers to the relationships among these people that knit together in Susie’s absence. In Mr. Jackson’s version, though, they are hastily and haphazardly assembled, so that nothing quite fits together. The movie is a serial-killer mystery, a teenage melodrama, a domestic tragedy and a candy-hued ghost story — a cinematic version of the old parlor game in which disparate graphic elements are assembled into a single strange picture. It’s sometimes called Exquisite Corpse.

“The Lovely Bones” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). The murder of a child, discreetly handled.

THE LOVELY BONES

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Peter Jackson; written by Mr. Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, based on the novel by Alice Sebold; director of photography, Andrew Lesnie; edited by Jabez Olssen; production designer, Naomi Shohan; music by Brian Eno; produced by Mr. Jackson, Ms. Walsh, Carolynne Cunningham and Aimée Peyronnet; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 19 minutes.

WITH: Mark Wahlberg (Jack Salmon), Rachel Weisz (Abigail Salmon), Susan Sarandon (Grandma Lynn), Stanley Tucci (George Harvey), Michael Imperioli (Len Fenerman), Saoirse Ronan (Susie Salmon), Rose McIver (Lindsey Salmon), Christian Thomas Ashdale (Buckley Salmon), Carolyn Dando (Ruth) and Reece Ritchie (Ray Singh).

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Village Voice

By J. Hoberman

A one-film cabinet of curiosities, The Lovely Bones turns the most successful CGI director of the '00s loose on one of the decade's prime literary phenomena: Cults collide as Peter "Lord of the Rings" Jackson tackles Alice Sebold's bestselling New Age gothic, the story of a rape-murder-dismemberment and its aftermath, narrated by its 14-year-old victim from heaven.

A season that has already brought adaptations of a once-controversial classic picture book about a disturbed child, and its grown-up Doomsday evil twin ("normal" child on the road in a disturbed world), is capped by a vision dramatizing the ultimate parental nightmare. In Jackson's hands, The Lovely Bones is doubly appalling. Part Disney's Alice in Wonderland, part Fritz Lang's M, the movie is horrific yet cloying, alternately distended and abrupt, sometimes poignant and often ridiculous.

The Lovely Bones begins with a flurry of activity, both inside the snow globe that's introduced as a metaphor for the afterlife, and outside in the prosaic, comforting suburban universe into which Susie (Saoirse Ronan) was born. The actress, outstanding as the child snitch in Atonement, is engagingly hyper-expressive, and the filmmaking is similarly kinetic, full of floating camera moves and breakneck cross-cutting. Jackson hits the high points of Susie's young life, speeding toward her brutal demise—but not so quickly as to bypass the novel's provocative cautionary setup.

Published in the aftermath of 9/11, The Lovely Bones' adroitly comforting synthesis of Our Town and Anne Frank was widely appreciated as a lyrical tale of grief and reconciliation, but it is also a malign fable of adolescent coming-of-age. Susie's first kiss, about to be delivered by her first crush, is interrupted—and rudely de-romanticized—by the school principal's irate tantrum over the anatomically correct female nude that Susie's weird friend drew for art class. Ignoring this omen and walking on air in anticipation of her first date, Susie is enticed down the rabbit hole that her strenuously innocuous serial-killing neighbor (Stanley Tucci, barely recognizable and supremely creepy) has prepared as her death chamber. She leaves this world horrendously despoiled yet essentially innocent.

Punishing sexual curiosity is not a foreign notion for Jackson, who broke into movies making gross-out horror flicks. Fans will remember the scene in Dead Alive in which a chaste lad's first kiss triggers his mother's transformation into a flesh-eating zombie. Still, he has the tact to omit the gruesome details of Susie's murder—and will later expunge the ludicrous scene in which Sebold allows the girl's ecstatic return to earth.

Unfortunately, he shows no such discretion in literalizing the novel's vague metaphysics. Once upon a time—see his 1994 comedy of adolescent matricide, Heavenly Creatures—Jackson sensationally infused movie naturalism with garish special effects. Here, all is subservient to the digital splendors of Susie's heavenly abode—a constantly mutating realm of spacious skies, purple mountains, and undulating amber waves of grain, not to mention crystal beaches, foggy forests, and the peripatetic cosmic gazebo from which she observes her family and murderer's doings.

All characterizations are sacrificed to steep in Susie's celestial surroundings. Initially touching, her parents (Rachel Weisz and Mark Wahlberg) are dwarfed by the ongoing pyrotechnics. Stealing scenes as Susie's cheerfully dissolute grandma, Susan Sarandon struggles to provide the reality principle—in vain. Although the novel also drowned in a vat of syrup, Sebold got by for nearly 100 pages on the unsentimental clarity of her style and sustained verisimilitude of the narrator's adolescent voice. Jackson demonstrates no such chops. Indeed, he consistently undermines the movie's uncanny elements by over-dramatizing events, such as Susie's fleeting visitations, that have their own inherent power.

As the novel suggests a form of talk therapy, Jackson's adaptation is a misguided tribute to the magic of the movies—which have always specialized in reanimating the dead. But there is something to be said for representing the actual world and there are some things that can only be visualized in the mind's eye. What heaven could have been more radiant than a child's view of her suburban neighborhood—what spectacle more divine than Susan Sarandon's wig?

jhoberman@villagevoice.com

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By Stephanie Zacharek/Salon

There are all sorts of ways to botch a book-into-film adaptation: A filmmaker can be too cavalier about changing an author's character conception or meaning, or he can be so slavishly respectful of those things that he fails to make a work that resonates cinematically. He can rely too heavily on the use of voice-over; he can miscast one actor, or every actor; he can simply fall down on the job of capturing the lyricism or muscle of a particular writer's prose, as plenty of great directors have done. Adaptation is an art, not a science, and it's a thankless job to boot: Not even the most graceful filmmaker can escape the carping of the "Movies are always inferior to the books they're based on" crowd.

But with his garish, pointless and downright inept rendering of Alice Sebold's 2002 novel, "The Lovely Bones," Peter Jackson has hit a new low in the annals of movie adaptations. Sebold's novel tells, in the first person, the story of a 14-year-old suburban girl named Susie Salmon who, in 1973, is raped and murdered by one of her neighbors. Susie finds herself in a teenage girl's version of heaven -- a heaven filled with the things she loved in life, including dogs and ice-cream shops -- from which she can view the world, specifically her family, as it goes on without her. The story Sebold tells here is less about victimhood than it is about the interior lives of families; she explores not just the ways in which they cope (or fail to cope) with grief, but the weird little mechanisms that make them tick in the first place, the things that only an outsider -- a dead girl, watching from somewhere else -- can see clearly.

"The Lovely Bones" is a fiercely delicate and often funny piece of writing, a work of fantasy with a solid footing in reality, and it wouldn't be an easy book for any filmmaker to adapt. But Jackson (aided and abetted by frequent collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, who co-wrote the screenplay with him) has reinvented Sebold's story in the most facile and heedless way imaginable: He's turned it into a supernatural thriller. Susie is played by Saoirse Ronan, the young actress who gave such a marvelous performance in the 2007 film "Atonement," and it's perfect casting: Ronan, with her translucent skin and unblinking, observant eyes, has the look of a wide-awake but confused angel, a girl trapped between two worlds. But Jackson requires nothing of her beyond that look of alert innocence. Instead of giving her a role, he asks her for little more than a single expression. Susie barely figures into the story here: Jackson plunks her into her heaven -- in the movie's terms, it's more of a pre-heaven holding pen -- and then pops in to visit her occasionally so she can open her eyes wide for the camera. If Jackson is stingy with his lead actress, he's generous with the special effects: Susie's heaven is sometimes a misty, moody-looking Middle-earth-style landscape; at others, it looks like a rejected set from H.R. Pufnstuf, a brightly colored cartoon afterlife in which she's doomed to flounce around in flower-power granny gowns, a fashion hell if ever there was one.

Jackson doesn't seem to realize that you don't need fancy effects to re-create heaven -- that, in fact, it's maybe better to imply heaven than to attempt to show it outright. Jackson is all about showmanship, which is a positive trait in the right context: His Lord of the Rings movies were satisfying and gorgeous entertainments, and taken together the three films constitute an honorable adaptation of the J.R.R. Tolkien source material. Jackson's "King Kong" was less popular with audiences, but I still admired his eagerness to attempt a grand, go-for-broke spectacle.

But Jackson is all wrong for "The Lovely Bones." The picture was originally given to Lynn Ramsay, director of the strange, beautiful, elegiac Scottish picture "Morvern Callar," and it hurts to think about the picture she might have made. Jackson is certainly cunning: Susie's killer, neighborhood loner George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), is a builder of dollhouses, and Jackson uses some clever camera angles to take advantage of these props. At one point Harvey and the detective assigned to the case (Michael Imperioli) play a game of hide-and-seek on opposite sides of one of these diminutive structures, peering furtively at one another through doll-size doorframes and windows, a metaphor, perhaps, for the cop's failure to see the big picture inside the small one.

But it appears that tricks are all Jackson has; any deeper understanding of the material eludes him. In his hands, this isn't a movie about grief or about families, but a haphazard whodunit -- or perhaps more of a "whocares?" considering that here, as in the book, the killer is revealed practically at the beginning. Jackson has a fine cast to work with here: Susie's parents are played by Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz, who are touching even when they're not trying to be. Maybe that's because even though they're certainly old enough to be parents in real life as well as on-screen, they still look young enough to seem invincible. But on the other side of Jackson's lens, their sorrow plays itself out in the most bland and obvious terms. Wahlberg's character, frustrated by the police's inability to come up with a suspect, spends an inordinate amount of time chasing down his own unlikely leads. Meanwhile, there's Stanley Tucci just a few doors down, skulking around in his bad comb-over -- you'd have to be blind to miss the pervert/murderer signals he's sending out with every Actors Studio twitch of his eyelids.

Somewhere in the middle there, Susan Sarandon (as Susie's glam, hard-drinking grandma) shows up with her cleavage, and the mood brightens considerably. But not for long. "The Lovely Bones" is a perfect storm of a movie disaster: You've got good actors fighting a poorly conceived script, under the guidance of a director who can no longer make the distinction between imaginativeness and computer-generated effects. The result is an expensive-looking mess that fails to capture the mood, and the poetry, of its source material. David Byrne once sang, "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens." There's way too much going on in Peter Jackson's heaven -- and yet it isn't nearly enough.

"The Lovely Bones", de Peter Jackson (más críticas)

By Glenn Kenny

I've mentioned this before, but I think it bears repeating: I was quite a bit more excited about the prospect of Alice Sebold's novel The Lovely Bones being made into a movie when Lynne Ramsay, the Scottish visionary behind Ratcatcher and the spectacular Morvern Callar, was attached to said adaptation. Not excited enough to go out and read the novel, which is told from the point of view of 14-year-old Susie Salmon, the victim of a horrific rape and murder. I did wonder if Ramsay would jettison the book's first-person narration, as she did with Morvern Callar, also an adaptation of a novel, and find a new way to tell the story. I wondered quite a few things. And then, for reasons never made fully clear in the trades, at least to my knowledge, Ramsay was off the project, replaced by writer/director Peter Jackson and longtime partner and co-writer Fran Walsh, and longtime co-writer Philippa Boyens. At first I rather resented this, not least because it likely meant that I was going to wait that much longer for the next Lynne Ramsay film. (Morvern Callar came out in 2002; Ramsay, it appears, is currently preparing to shoot We Need To Talk About Kevin.) As my investment in the actual source material was minimal, I didn't feel much beyond that, except, you know: Peter Jackson, whose sensibility I like and whose films a largely admire, was going to direct it, and so I was probably going to want to see it on some level. Had a studio handed it over to Joel Schumacher we wouldn't be having this conversation.

And so, Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones, a film I found, well, enormously frustrating. I was not put off by the elaborate CGI visuals that many viewers of the film take to depict "Heaven" (and as a matter of fact, they don't depict Heaven, which you'll understand if you're paying attention; Jackson addresses the issue very diplomatically in user-driven interview I conducted with him for The Auteurs' Notebook); and I don't think that it looks too much like What Dreams May Come, or some such—have you seen What Dreams May Come lately? Totally different thing, and bad.

No, my frustration stems from the picture's thoroughly inconsistent tone, the way it can grab you by the throat one minute and make you throw up your hands the next. A picture that can cut from a searing depiction of a father's grief to a goofy montage of his tipsy mom moving in to "help," scored to the tune of The Hollies' "Long Cool Woman," to cite the one instance that doesn't involve dropping a major plot spoiler. The sore-thumb-like lapse in judgment is not an entirely new feature for Jackson; remember the depiction of the Skull Island natives in his King Kong, or the ill-advised soft-show with which Naomi Watts entertains the titular lug in that film? (Although Watts was so game she almost pulled it off, I have to say.) One feels rather grateful for Tolkien fanatics, if it was the fear of their wrath that kept Jackson so thoroughly focused and faithful in his Lord of the Rings telling.

First, it's a fantasy/thriller, and as the film depicts Susie's awful death, and how she sees her killer from the afterlife getting away with murder, the thriller aspect here is particularly ferocious. Bones also wants to be an intimate portrait of how a family heals, or doesn't heal, in the wake of such a terrible trauma. And a little of it wants to be an affectionate half-sendup of the American '70s. And of course there's no reason this film can't be all three. But Jackson seems incapable of mixing, or melding, his modes. Instead, it's as if the film starts, and then stops and restarts every time he wants to switch gears. He's got a lead foot on the clutch.

And more I cannot say, without giving away major parts of the film's storyline. I will note that I had many of what I call "Deuce" moments watching the film; that is, times when I felt like yelling something up at the screen. Not in a good, excited way, like "Get out of that vent you stupid motherfucker the demon is crawling right up your ass," knowing all the while that the demon's gonna catch up with whoever anyway; but in a bad, irritated way, like "What the hell is wrong with you people why aren't you calling the goddamn police RIGHT NOW!" Of course you can't do that in a screening room. After the picture's been out for a while maybe we can get into it, and we can get into my...wait for it...philosophical objection to the film, too.

Before I go, though, a word about Brian Eno's score. Again, I am frustrated, and I'm a big Eno fan. Actually, I'm frustrated on account of being a big Eno fan; viewers who aren't familiar with the guy's work are simply not going to have this problem. Which is: about one-third of the score (at least) is adapted, mashed-up, or remixed from previously-released Eno work from the '70s. Mostly. Which meant that during crucial stretches of the picture, this viewer, and a colleague who's also similarly knowledgeable, were sucked into a game of "Name That Brian Eno Tune" for much of the movie. You're supposed to be galvanized, emotionally fraught, by some on-screen violence, and instead you're thinking, "Interesting how he staggered the intro to Robert Fripp's guitar solo on 'Baby's On Fire' so that the most frenzied part would hit just as [name redacted] is getting whalloped with a baseball bat..." But as I said, the majority of viewers won't have this problem, and nice for them.

Cinco preguntas para Peter Jackson (The Auteurs)

Director Peter Jackson has had one of the most unusual journeys in contemporary film history, going from frantic micro-budgeted shock-horror-comedy grossouts shot in his native New Zealand in the mid-80s to helming some of the biggest-budgeted and highest-grossing screen fantasies ever, notably the once-deemed impossible-to-film Lord of the Rings trilogy. His latest picture is an adaptation of the horrific and hopeful afterlife saga The Lovely Bones, based on Alice Sebold’s best-selling novel about a young girl’s quest for peace and resolution in the wake of her brutal rape and murder.

Jackson graciously consented to entertain questions from The Auteurs community members for a brief interview, which was conducted by Notebook contributor and former Premiere film critic Glenn Kenny. We were able to successfully pitch five questions; they, and their answers, follow.

***

KYLE ST-AMOUR-BRENNAN asks: What are your thoughts on the current economic climate in relation to film production? Does the continual integration of digital technology in Hollywood (you being a heavy supporter of the RED digital cinema camera), make it actually cheaper to make a film, or has it just allowed more money to be allocated more so on postproduction elements (special effects, etc..) ?

PETER JACKSON: Interesting. The main problem with the current climate is not so much to do with the advent of new technologies as it has to do with the changing face of distribution, and the changing nature of the audience demographics as well. The studios are finding it harder to make sense of the film industry, partly that has to do with the fact that studios are now part of these large corporations for which film is just a part of the conglomerate’s larger business. So there’s this particularly weird way in which Wall St. is controlling the production of movies, leading to quite a depressed time, where there doesn’t seem to be a market for medium or small budget films. Some of it’s the change in distribution, some of it’s a little bit to do with piracy; it’s all more complex than I could ever go into and I’m not an expert.

However, I think it’s a cycle. And eventually I think we’re going to arrive at a place where the internet and that type of technology settles down, and the film industry figures out a way to live with it. I’m looking forward to that particular conflict coming to an end within two or three years.

I don’t think any of it has much to do with digital cameras. I think there’s a whole economic thing going on that’s quite serious. We’re also talking about the audience, too, the fact that young people today have a multitude of different things to do, ways to occupy themselves during the weekend, and that going to the movies has a lot more to compete with.

But I do feel optimism. And where I do feel optimism, that’s where digital technology comes in. When I think my depressive thoughts of how hard it is to make interesting movies, I remind myself, “Hang on, there’s a generation of young people with access to movie equipment that’s cheaper and of higher quality than ever before.” Cameras like the RED camera. It makes me feel like saying, “If you’re out there reading this, go and get to making movies!” I really feel like it could lead to as exciting a creative explosion in filmmaking as what happened in the 70s.

The thing that excites me most about the RED, incidentally, is the image quality. I like the fact that is was designed by a camera buff. Jim Jannard’s passion is to create a digital camera available to everybody. Each generation of the RED is just going get better and better.

DIMITRA LAINA asks: How did musician Brian Eno get involved in this project? Was he your first choice to score the film?

JACKSON: Our first choice was to have no soundtrack composer, but to do as Martin Scorsese often does and create a soundtrack of a multitude of songs from the period in which the film takes place, the early 70s, knowing that the style of a Hollywood score seemed inappropriate for the material. Fran Walsh, my partner and a screenwriter on the film, is much more of a music expert than I am, and loves that period of music, and she compiled a list of about twenty songs to put in the film. We wrote a lot of the songs into the script, to give us the feel of how thing went here, how there, and so on. And during the beginning of post-production, we were contacting the copyright holders of the various songs and among them were Brian Eno’s “The Big Ship,” an instrumental he did, and the other was “Baby’s On Fire.” We contacted Brian, and he was curious about the project, he had read the book, and we started talking on iChat. And he was a big childhood hero of Fran’s, so she was just beside herself with joy that he was communicating with us; and during the course of our discussions, he asked who was doing the score. And we said, “Well, we don’t really have anybody doing a score.” And he asked, “How would you feel about my volunteering my services?” And we said, “Yup, we would feel pretty damn good!” And that’s how it happened. He had a real enthusiasm for the project that kept up the entire time.

GEORGE ZAVER asks: Where did your inspiration come for your depiction of Heaven in The Lovely Bones?

JACKSON: Well, that’s really something that came about in the script-writing phase, and it’s good to talk about it, because it seems to be something of a common misconception: Heaven is not depicted in The Lovely Bones, the book or the film. It’s a common mistake that people make, even reviewers. Heaven is really a place that Susie Salmon, our heroine who is murdered, is trying to get to. The problem is, during her time in the book and the film, she is trapped in this limbo state called “the in-between.” Which is why this part of her after-life is not depicted as a fixed physical location, which is what she’s trying to get to. We’re not saying, “When you die, this is what it’s going to look like.” We conceived it as a dream-like state. Here we’re seeing her life force, or spirit, no longer anchored to earth and existing in world of subconscious, a world of dream, seeing images based on dream imagery, metaphor, it’s like surrealist art. Dali, that sort of thing. The audience is not supposed to fully understand everything; it’s more about an overall effect we want to present to you. And of course the emotion of the story. That dictated everything we tried to do in that realm.

JOHN KEEFER asks: Would you consider going back to low budget horror filmmaking an interesting challenge? Is there anything that appeals to you about that idea? Or since your massive, and deserved, success could you not shake what you've learned to make a truly small film, as Hitchcock did with Psycho?

JACKSON: The answer is yes to all those questions! Very much so. I do have a lot of different ideas for films I’d like to make and definitely, going back to low budget movies interests me greatly. Having made expensive movies, they have a pressure about them and expectations around them that are okay it, you know, those are the movies you want to make at that time and those means are the only way you can make them.

In the last year I produced a science-fiction film called District 9 for 30 million dollars, which is still a good deal of money but it’s relatively low budget, and I would love to do some films in that range. That was a very enjoyable experience. I’m still the same guy who made Dead Alive, I haven’t changed, and I’d love to do another film, a few other films, in that mode.

AUSTIN DALE asks: Many, many, many of your films appear to be heavily influenced by avant-garde cinema. How have films from the margins of mainstream taste changed the way you view filmmaking and expression through the cinema, and which films or aesthetic ideas have influenced you the most?

JACKSON: My God! What a question!

I have reasonably broad film taste. I don’t regard myself as at all unusual; I’m a regular guy. I’m a fan of a bunch of different directors, a bunch of different styles, but I like to think that I’m a regular guy. I like to think that I like good movies and I don’t like bad movies! I like a lot of James Cameron, a lot of Steven Spielberg

To get inspired, while I’m directing, if I’m tired and I feel my imaginations seizing up, I put Scorsese’s Goodfellas or Casino on DVD and either of those films reminds me what great filmmaking is, and they serve as a tonic, and an inspiration.

I’m a huge James Bond fan, and whenever a new Bond picture’s about to come out, I feel as if I’m ten years old again, and I’m hoping to see the greatest action film ever made.

So I don’t have particularly unusual taste, then!

"The Lovely Bones", de Peter Jackson (críticas)

(U.S.-U.K.) A Paramount release (in U.S.) of a DreamWorks Pictures presentation in association with Film4 of a Wingnut Films production. Produced by Carolynne Cunningham, Fran Walsh, Peter Jackson, Aimee Peyronnet. Executive producers, Tessa Ross, Steven Spielberg, Ken Kamins, James Wilson. Co-producers, Philippa Boyens, Anne Bruning, Marc Ashton. Directed by Peter Jackson. Screenplay, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, based on the novel by Alice Sebold.

Jack Salmon - Mark Wahlberg
Abigail Salmon - Rachel Weisz
Grandma Lynn - Susan Sarandon
George Harvey - Stanley Tucci
Len Fenerman - Michael Imperioli
Susie Salmon - Saoirse Ronan
Lindsey Salmon - Rose McIver
Buckley Salmon - Christian Ashdale
Ray Singh - Reece Ritchie

By TODD MCCARTHY

Peter Jackson's infatuation with fancy visual effects mortally wounds "The Lovely Bones." Alice Sebold's cheerily melancholy bestseller, centered upon a 14-year-old girl who narrates the story from heaven after having been brutally murdered, provides almost ready-made bigscreen material. But Jackson undermines solid work from a good cast with show-offy celestial evocations that severely disrupt the emotional connections with the characters. The book's rep, the names of Jackson and exec producer Steven Spielberg, and a mighty year-end push by Paramount/DreamWorks will likely put this over with the public to a substantial extent, but it still rates as a significant artistic disappointment.

There has been cautious optimism among longtime Jackson followers that this material might inspire him to create a worthy companion piece to his 1994 "Heavenly Creatures," which similarly involves teenagers and murder in an otherwise tranquil setting and remains far and away his best film. The potential was certainly there in the book, which reminds of Dennis Lehane's successfully filmed novels "Mystic River" and "Gone Baby Gone" in its devastating emotional trauma, but offers the distinctive perspective of the most entirely plausible omniscient narrator in modern literature.

Unfortunately, the massive success Jackson has enjoyed in the intervening years with his CGI-heavy "The Lord of the Rings" saga (the source of which receives fleeting homage in a bookstore scene here) and "King Kong" has infected the way he approaches this far more intimate tale. Instead of having the late Susie Salmon occupy a little perch in an abstract heavenly gazebo from which she can peer down upon her family and anyone else -- all that is really necessary from a narrative point of view -- the director has indulged his whims to create constantly shifting backdrops depicting an afterlife evocative of "The Sound of Music" or "The Wizard of Oz" one moment, "The Little Prince" or "Teletubbies" the next.

It's a shame, because the first half-hour or so suggests that Jackson, had he taken a vow to keep it real and use not a single visual effect, still has it in him to relate a human story in a direct, vibrant manner. Aided immeasurably by the spirited teen actress Saoirse Ronan ("Atonement"), who plays Susie, the early scenes depicting the ordinary life of the Salmon family in a midsized Pennsylvania town possess a heightened quality charged by lively thesping and Andrew Lesnie's dynamic mobile camera (pic was shot with the Red digital camera system).

"We weren't those people, those unlucky people to whom bad things happen," Susie intones from above, as we watch her interact with attractive young parents Jack and Abigail (Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz), sporty sister Lindsey (Rose McIver) and younger brother Buckley (Christian Ashdale), boozy glamorpuss grandma Lynn (Susan Sarandon) and handsome first crush Ray Singh (Reece Ritchie), just before she announces she was murdered on Dec. 6, 1973.

Even before the deed is done, it's plainly stated that the perpetrator is neighborhood solitary guy George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), a man marked as creepy by his utter ordinariness. While Tucci, adorned with stringy blondish-brown hair, moustache, large glasses and a raspy voice that tightens and elevates under pressure, is good enough to validate all the scenes involving this bland monster, Jackson shows his low-budget horror-film roots in the way he shoots the sinister scenes, with silhouetting white lights, heavy fog effects, wide-angle closeups and generic synth backgrounding from Brian Eno's otherwise effective score.

While the script by the "Rings" trio of Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Jackson at first inventively reshuffles elements to cinematic advantage, over time it serves more to dilute the impact of some story elements -- the father's obsessive determination to nail George no matter what, Lindsay's romance, the passage of years -- and eliminate others, including Ray's beautiful, long-suffering mother and the relationship between Abigail and local cop Len Fenerman (Michael Imperioli), whose efforts to solve Susie's murder are maddeningly frustrated.

Once Susie is installed in her heavenly quarters, for which Jackson digitally dedicates himself to continuously changing the wallpaper, the emotional link to the family is ruptured and never fully repaired. There are intermittently intense scenes: Lindsey proves herself a resourceful if somewhat reckless spy, and the ever-meticulous George almost blows his cover on occasion. The way Jackson only partially reveals the killer's face at times is effective but stands in stark contrast to the wobbly treatment of so much else.

As the story progresses -- in a way that points to resolution in one sense and a simple petering out in another -- it becomes clear that the actors are being deprived of any meaty, well-developed scenes to play; we learn more about them early on than toward the end, making this a film of slowly diminishing returns.

With reddish hair, brilliantly alive eyes and a seemingly irrepressible impulse for movement and activity, Ronan represents a heavenly creature indeed, a figure of surging, eager, anticipatory life cut off just as it is budding. Less quicksilver and more solidly built, McIver's Lindsey properly begins in her live-wire sister's shadow only to grow gradually into an impressive figure. Chain-smoking and depleting the liquor cabinet, Sarandon camps it up for a few welcome laughs, while Ritchie seems a likely candidate for teen idolhood.

Mainly, it's Wahlberg and Weisz who are shortchanged by the film's divided attention between earthly agony and astral accommodation. Both thesps are OK as far as things go, but that's not nearly far enough.

When it sticks to the everyday neighborhood inhabited by its characters, "The Lovely Bones," which was shot on Pennsylvania locations and in New Zealand studios, finds a reasonable equilibrium between drama and production values. When it ventures beyond it, heaven turns into Hades. With: Carolyn Dando, Nikki Soohoo, Andrew James Allen, Jake Abel, AJ Michalka, Tom McCarthy, Stink Fisher.

Camera (Deluxe color, widescreen, DV), Andrew Lesnie; editor, Jabez Olssen; music, Brian Eno; production designer, Naomi Shohan; art directors, Chris Shriver, Jules Cook; set designers, Philip Thomas, Darryl Longstaffe, Barry Read, Christina Crawford, Miriam Barrard; set decorators, George DeTitta Jr., Meg Everist; costume designer, Nancy Steiner; sound (Dolby Digital/DTS/SDDS), Hammond Peek; supervising sound editors, Brent Burge, Chris Ward; sound designers, Dave Whitehead, Christopher Boyes; re-recording mixers, Boyes, Michael Semanick, Michael Hedges; senior visual effects supervisor, Joe Letteri; visual effects supervisor, Christian Rivers; digital visual effects, Weta Digital; stunt coordinator, Peter Bucossi; assistant director, Carolynne Cunningham; second unit director, Richard Bluck; casting, Victoria Burrows, Scot R. Boland, Avy Kaufman, Jina Jay, Liz Mullane. Reviewed at the Landmark, Los Angeles, Nov. 18, 2009. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 136 MIN.

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Wendy Ide (Times of London)

In many ways Alice Sebold’s massively successful metaphysical coming-of-age drama was an unexpected choice of movie for Peter Jackson. After the vast undertaking of The Lord Of the Rings trilogy, followed by the exuberant, overgrown B-movie that was King Kong, this sentimental tale of a murdered teenager called Susie Salmon watching her grieving family from a personal afterlife seems intimate by comparison.

It seemed likely to be closer in tone to the claustrophobic femininity of 1994’s Heavenly Creatures than to the massive event movies for which he later became known. But Jackson’s predilection for richly textured layers of fantasy runs riot here and the approach is anything but understated. “Small-scale” no longer appears in Peter Jackson’s filmmaking lexicon.

The Lovely Bones, which was given its premiere last night at the Royal Film Performance in the presence of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, is a domestic tragedy that unfolds under a mushroom cloud of flamboyantly kitsch special effects. Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) spends most of the film observing events from her personal purgatory, the “in-between”. It looks like a teen magazine photo story styled by Salvador Dali and directed by Tarsem Singh. This twinkly butterflies-and-rainbows aesthetic invites inevitable and unwelcome comparisons to Vincent Ward’s 1998 mawkish afterlife weepie What Dreams May Come and, worse still, Darren Aronofsky’s New Age clunker The Fountain. Far more interesting is the design of the real world. The small-town suburbia of the 1970s is imbued with a slightly oppressive otherness — it’s as much an “in-between” as the place that Susie now inhabits.

The production, by all accounts, was not entirely easy, not least because the actor Ryan Gosling, who had gained 20lb and grown a beard for the role of Susie’s father Jack Salmon, quit the film over creative differences just days before the shoot started. Mark Wahlberg stepped in to replace him, turning in a couple of powerful scenes in a mostly workmanlike performance.

Rachel Weisz is effective as the mother hollowed out by her grief; but Susan Sarandon’s boozy, chain-smoking grandmother feels too much like a contrived piece of light relief to temporarily distract us from the violent death of a 14-year-old child.

It’s Ronan, ultimately, who gives the most affecting turn. Gangly, unformed, she’s like a flower cut before it has had a chance to bloom. She captures the uncertainty and intensity of thwarted teenage passions perfectly but, set against the artifice and the manipulative tendencies of the story, her admirable performance is rather swamped.

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From Time Out London

Let nobody say that Peter Jackson doesn’t like a challenge. After filming Tolkien’s three ‘The Lord of the Rings’ books and spending over $200 million on a new three-hour version of ‘King Kong’, the New Zealand director who started out making splatter horror in the late 1980s has turned to Alice Sebold’s hugely popular ‘The Lovely Bones’, the 1970s-set American novel narrated from beyond the grave by Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), a 14-year-old who is raped and murdered by a neighbour in a field near her suburban home . From a vantage point somewhere between heaven and earth, Susie follows the reactions and behaviour of her parents (Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz), her sister (Rose McIver) and her killer, Mr Harvey (Stanley Tucci), as she struggles to gain the closure that will allow her to depart this earth completely.

Not that we see anyone raped or even murdered in this $100 million, 12A version of the story: Jackson softens the edges of both the initial tragedy and its fallout among Susie’s family. But that’s not the main fault of the film. The real let-down is its heavy reliance on overblown special-effects sequences to represent the celestial limbo where Susie resides immediately after death. Coming across like Salvador Dali was commissioned to represent Middle Earth for the New Zealand tourist board, these scenes dominate the film to such an extent that you begin to doubt that Jackson has much concern for the real family disaster at the film’s heart. Wahlberg, Weisz and McIver are all sidelined in favour of the magic of the animator’s hard drive. It doesn’t help that a gin-swigging Susan Sarandon is called on to play Susie’s louche grandmother for inappropriate comic effect just when you feel the film could do with a touch more tragic weight.

However, these are mere niggles compared to the film’s fatal flaw: perspective. Who’s telling us this story? The answer, of course, should be Susie Salmon, and at points, we hear some of the book’s first-person narration as voiceover, including the well-known opening – ‘My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973 – which graces the film’s opening and close . But there’s no consistency to Susie’s presence as the prism through which we see her story. Certainly the chocolate-box look of this American suburban world, which barely ever feels real, suggests that it’s a 14-year-old girl’s view of life. Yet there are whole sections of the movie when we forget Susie’s all-seeing eye and don’t know whether we’re in a family drama, a crime thriller or a horror. There are distracting hints of all three, without any of them taking hold and defining the tone of the film.

There are good points. Saoirse Ronan is a compelling presence as Susie Salmon, especially as she must have been acting alone and against a green screen for much of the shoot, and both her and the film are strong at capturing her burgeoning attraction to her schoolmate Ray (Reece Ritchie), a hint of adult sexuality cut short by tragedy. Stanley Tucci is creepy as Mr Harvey (even if he resembles a million movie paedophiles), and Jackson is at his best as a director when creating a sense of dread around Harvey whenever he’s anywhere near Susie or, later, her sister. Yet there’s no escaping the digital glare of Susie’s half-dead existence – a glare that threatens to blind us to anything remotely human in this drama.

Author: Dave Calhoun

Peter Jackson's "The Lovely Bones" (trailer)

"The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn", de Steven Spielberg, se estrena acá antes que allá

Según Variety, la película llegará a los cines de Europa y América latina entre octubre y noviembre de 2011 mientras que se estrenará en los Estado Unidos recién el 23 de diciembre de ese año. La inusual movida, aseguran, tiene que ver con que Sony y Paramount creen que la película tiene más posibilidades comerciales fuera de los EE.UU. que en ese país, tal vez por la fama internacional de la historieta. La película será lanzada en 3D en todo el mundo.

En esta nota previa de "Variety" se dan muchos más detalles de la producción.

By Tatiana Siegel

Steven Spielberg this week will quietly wrap 32 days of performance-capture lensing on "Tintin," then hand the project to producer Peter Jackson, who will focus on the film's special effects for the next 18 months.

Although the baton-pass is stealthy, "Tintin" is anything but a low-profile project. And that's just the first of many contradictions inherent with the film, which brings together two of cinema's visionaries.

The Tintin comicbook series about a globetrotting teenaged boy reporter, which originated 80 years ago in Belgium, is wildly popular in many countries around the world. In the U.S., however, the character is little-known, especially among children.

Spielberg and Jackson's respective camps have tried to keep a lid on the details of what is expected to become a three-film franchise while hyping the one-of-a-kind aspects of "Tintin's" motion-capture technology, which is being created by Jackson's New Zealand-based effects house Weta.

Just don't ask too many questions.

Spielberg's longtime spokesman Marvin Levy, who welcomed a story on "The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn," said, "You have to see it to understand (the technology). It really can't be described."

But he quickly nixed the idea of a visit to the set. "That wouldn't be feasible," he says.

The film's other producer, Kathleen Kennedy, is happy to talk about "Tintin," but admitted the world Spielberg and Jackson are creating is hard to describe.

"It's extremely difficult to explain to someone unless they are standing here next to me," Kennedy says from the Los Angeles set. "And usually then their reaction is, 'Oh my god.' "

Kennedy and Spielberg acquired the project in 1983 after Spielberg's interest in the project was piqued by critics' insistence that his "Raiders of the Lost Ark" harkened back to Tintin's escapades in exotic locations.

But the pair couldn't realistically begin developing the pic until about two years ago, when motion-capture technology finally caught up with the demands of the story. Spielberg received his introduction into the fledgling technology via his producing role on "Monster House." But Jackson, who joined Kennedy and Spielberg on the project in early 2007, is clearly a master of the form. Both the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy and "King Kong" elevated performance-capture to never-before-seen realism.

Jackson's role as mo-cap mentor to Spielberg, however, prompts the question: Who exactly is steering the "Tintin" ship?

Spielberg will receive sole directing credit on the first film, though even that distinction seems murky given that Jackson is doing the more time-consuming work, spending a year and a half creating the Tintin's world vs. Spielberg's one month on set. Jackson also traveled to Los Angeles for rehearsals and for the first week of shooting.

"It's hard to delineate between directing and producing on films like this," explains one project insider.

Kennedy insists that the transitions between the two creative talents are relatively seamless. "They are amazingly collaborative, even more so than Steven and George (Lucas were on the 'Raiders' films)."

And then, there are the two filmmakers' differing styles and thematic vibes: Spielberg is more character-oriented and relatively lean while Jackson revels in lavish visuals ... and running times.

The conventional wisdom has always been that Spielberg would direct his "Tintin" film, and Jackson would have his own. (It has long been reported that Jackson will helm the second chapter of three "Tintin" films.) There was even speculation that the two films would be shot back to back, much like Jackson's "Lord of the Rings." However, there is no second film in the immediate future or even a script for one at this point.

Paramount and Sony, the first film's co-financiers, have yet to greenlight a followup to the $120 million project and are waiting for a script before making a decision.

The first film, which was No. 11 in Georges "Herge" Remi's 24-book Tintin series, was written by Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish.

Jackson is currently taking a stab at the second film and sketching out ideas, though he wouldn't necessarily take screenplay credit for that film and could possibly hand script duties back to Moffat, Wright and Cornish.

Even the casting of the first film suggests a strong Jackson influence: Beside the inclusion of "LOTR's" Andy Serkis, the helmer made a personal call to enlist star Jamie Bell, who played a supporting role in Jackson's "King Kong."

But Spielberg's camp insists he will have a firm handle on all aspects of the film, including its special effects. Jackson and Spielberg have rigged a video conferencing system by which Spielberg is able to see everything Jackson sees at the Weta facility in New Zealand.

Spielberg and Kennedy also are making their presence felt with the project's early marketing decisions.

Paramount, which will distribute the film in all English-speaking territories and Asia, has the bigger challenge, with much lower awareness of the property in these territories, particularly the United States.

But one Par top exec downplayed any perceived challenges.

"It's not like there was any awareness on 'Kung Fu Panda' either," the exec says. "We had to go out and introduce this property to the world."

Still, "Kung Fu Panda" enjoyed a high-profile voice cast, with stars Angelina Jolie and Jack Black tubthumping in the film's behalf. By contrast, the only household name in "Tintin's" cast is current James Bond incarnation Daniel Craig, who is notorious for eschewing press junkets.

Sony, which is handling all overseas regions outside Asia, will likely have an easier time selling the film ahead of its planned 2011 release because the comicbook, which has been translated into 50 languages, remains hugely popular in the territories Sony will handle, including non-English-speaking Europe and India.

If anyone can overcome the film's challenges and silence the questions, it's the combined superpower of Spielberg and Jackson. Still, this highly anticipated collaboration continues to beg more questions than it answers.