The Lovely Bones

Seen at: Cinemark Fort Collins, matinee about three weeks ago.

What kind of movies should Hollywood make fewer of? How about movies like this?

The Lovely Bones winds up in my pile of movies that I just found stupid on many levels. Stanley Tucci got an Oscar nomination for his performance of a serial child killer, but I sure hope this movie is not rewarded with an award.

The story here is a huge let-down, basically because it makes the mistake of thinking that the core narrative is about the deceased girl. No, the core human narrative is about the living parents searching for their lost daughter. In that sense, the story completely fails because it offers absolutely no resolution to what should be the core narrative. We're supposed to feel resolved at the end because our perspective of identification with the dead girl, not with the parents. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. The cheap-o "cosmic revenge by icicle" at the end only made it worse.

This is the problem with movies about the afterlife in general. It's a bad premise and leads to bad narrative. The classical era recognized this, which is why one never saw afterlife stories except as "world of whimsy" comedies. Trying to make a serious drama while using the afterlife as a story crutch is a big "fail" in my book. Story tension should be generated (and released) on the human condition, not the the post-human condition. Otherwise you are wasting my time in the auditorium.