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Stanley Tucci’s performance as a neighborly serial killer of young girls is a haunting highlight of Peter Jackson’s imaginative film “The Lovely Bones.” |
Peter Jackson’s beautiful and scary fantasy “The Lovely Bones” resonated with me on a personal level that most people won’t quite understand.
It’s narrated by a 14-year-old girl who has been presumably raped, then murdered by a man she meets while on the way home from school in 1973. Her body is never found.
As a crime reporter, I covered the case of Barbara Glueckert, a 14-year-old Mount Prospect girl who had been presumably raped, then murdered by a man she met while on the way home from school in 1976. Her body has never been found.
If there was ever an audience for whom “The Lovely Bones” would easily connect, it would be people involved in that case. People like me.
And yet, so much of the emotional essence of “The Lovely Bones” has been crushed under an avalanche of spectacular, Salvador Dali-esque visions of the afterlife that the movie seduced my eye, but lost my heart.
Jackson, coming off the special effects epics “King Kong” and the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, is infatuated with the wrong things in this movie, mainly, the wondrous visions of the “in-between” where murdered girls congregate in dreamlike landscapes decorated by colorful images and symbols that have no meaning for us. Not yet. (Read more…)