The Lovely Bones (2009)

My name is Salmon, like the fish. First name, Susie. I was fourteen years old when I was murdered on December 6th, 1973. I wasn’t gone. I was alive in my own perfect world. But in my heart, I knew it wasn’t perfect. My murderer still haunted me. My father had the pieces but he couldn’t make them fit. I waited for justice but justice did not come.

— Susie Salmon

The Lovely Bones is based on the beloved 2002  book by Alice Sebold that has been receiving universally bad buzz since the award season have started. Director Peter Jackson tries to recapture the spirit of the book while incorporating his signature technological flair. The only reason that I saw this movie was the awards buzz surrounding Stanley Tucci. He is probably a bright spot in this hodgepodge of a movie.

The movie is told in perspective of a 14-year-old girl named Susie Salmon (Saiorse Ronan) who is a typical teenager growing up in Pennsylvania. She is full of life, hope, and dreams of being a wildlife photographer when she grows up. There is a British boy at school that is interested in her, Ray Singh (Reece Ritchie).

She doesn’t get along with her parents, Jack and Abigail (Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz) when they have a petty fight about their shutterbug using all twenty-four rolls that gave it to her along with her camera for her birthday.

That fateful day December 6, 1973 would alter the course of their Norristown neighborhood forever. After school, Susie was walking across a cornfield when a neighbor living across the street from the Salmons, George Harvey (Stanley Tucci) approaches her and lures her into a makeshift pit.

Her parents are worried for her when she didn’t come home. Jack canvasses the neighborhood with her picture. Abigail calls the police. Detective Len Fenerman (Michael Imperioli) investigates the case. Before there were pictures in the back of milk cartons or amber alerts, the police have a tough time finding Susie, but it’s too late for her.

What the adults don’t know is that “the weird girl” of the neighborhood, Ruth Conners (Carolyn Dando) runs into Susie bolting down the street after escaping from the pit. The unclear thing is that it was her ghost. Susie realizes that she is dead, but is stuck in a type of purgatory called “The In-Between.”

Realizing that Susie is not coming home, the family thrown in chaos when the days turned into months as George Harvey is not caught. He cleans up his tracks, because he is a seasoned serial killer. Thinking that Harvey is getting away with her murder, Susie decides to help her family to find the clues to bring her killer to justice.

This premise seemed very interesting. I have not read the book, but I read a synopsis of the book after I saw the movie. The timeline was condensed from a decade to a year. If Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens incorporated all of the elements from Alice Sebold’s book into the movie, it would have been a more sappy mess then it is.

The family dynamics seemed off with Jack obsessing over his bottle ships, the mother reading cookbooks, the grandmother (Susan Sarandon) wants to makeover the kids to take their mind of their murdered sister. What? I could not buy Wahlberg and Weisz as a married couple. I think they were miscast. The dialogue at times was very wooden and sometimes melodramatic.

The tone runs the gamut of intense drama to fantasy to comedic farce. Disjointed. It’s not cohesive as a narrative. I don’t think that Jackson was the right person to direct this movie. Perhaps somebody like Catherine Hardwicke could have handled the material better with Jackson’s team, WETA doing the stunning visuals.

The CGI effects in the movie were spectacular, but it feels like it was sensory overload at times. I thought that for the most part Saoirse Ronan gave a good performance as well as Stanley Tucci as the serial killer.

Judgment: There is a great revenge story hidden beneath a muddled adaptation under a bunch of bells and whistles.

Rating: **1/2

District 9 (2009)

You are not welcome here.

Currently, ranked at #26 of the Top 250 of All of Time on IMDb is District 9. It is the brainchild from writer/director Neill Blomkamp who expanded his short film, Alive in Joburg into this current incarnation. After the disappointing announcement that the Halo movie was scrapped five months into production left Blomkamp and producer Peter Jackson into creating something great out of the broken pieces.

Over twenty years ago, an alien mother ship descended over Johannesburg. The officials were concerned about the public’s reaction to the aliens. After discovering the sickly aliens trapped on the ship, the government set up a township for the aliens called District 9. It is a heavily fortified compounded where the alien could live without much interaction with the human race.

Tensions between the aliens and the citizens come to a head when some of the aliens are restless and want to go home, but they have no resources to get back on their home planet. A company called Multi-National United (MNU) named a Michael Scott type guy,  Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) to head up the removal of the aliens to relocate them to another settlement outside of Johannesburg.

A camera crew comes with him to seek how his method works to try to get the aliens to cooperate with the removal processes. The first thirty minutes of the film was shot in a documentary style. During one of the evictions, he stumbles on a vile of alien bio-genetic material. He accidentally sprays it on himself as slowly his DNA is infused to the new genetic material of the alien. He becomes public enemy number one when the very company that he works for want to harvest him.

The movie deals the fun up a notch when the guy realizes that the world that he knew would never be the same. He teams up with an alien, Christopher Johnson to help himself out to clear his name also help the aliens find their way back to their home world.

There are obviously strong parallels towards Apartheid that crippled South Africa during the eighties, the interment camps during the height of WWII and the Jim Crow/segregation time when separate was equal. There is also a connection to swine flu panic is happening recently when he exposed to the alien material.

This movie is not the typical run of mill sci-fi alien action movie. This takes a pointed look at people’s reaction to things that they seem different. How they want to make it go away or destroy it. There is no clear-cut good guy/bad guy template here. The lines blur almost instantly. This ballsy move makes you appreciate the film even more for its originality.

This film should be a huge wake up call from Hollywood studios. You don’t need to throw $100 millions dollars to a movie that would turn out to be a piece of elephant shit like X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Terminator Salvation, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen or G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. This movie was made for a mere $30 million. The CGI looks a hell of a lot better than these “blockbuster.” The people from Jackson’s company WETA should be applauded for creating realistic creatures that lived and breathe. Learn something from this, Hollywood executives. Maybe you need to go back to the basics of filmmaking.

The atmosphere was fantastic. The performance from Sharlto Copley who has his feature film debut was great. The action sequences were solid. This movie is not for the squeamish. There are some blood, gore and vomit.

Judgment: Run, don’t walk to watch this movie.

Rating: ****1/2