The Lovely Bones (2009)
The Lovely Bones (2009) — So I read and thoroughly enjoyed the book this was based but had heard several negative reviews and therefore didn’t go into this movie with very high expectations. But low expectations were greatly exceeded as I enjoyed the movie quite a bit. True a lot of things were missing from the book but it’s a movie; you can’t always put every single word onscreen (though I did miss the sister’s whole story which is only briefly hinted at in the movie). What works: That weird perpetually-distracted look that Marky Mark always has actually FITS with this role and Rachael Weisz and Susan Sarandon both do their roles well (especially since Weisz is given less screen time to do it in). Stanley Tucci is seriously unnerving and every moment he is on screen is played for maximum suspense. And Peter Jackson knows how to do suspense. The movie really belong to Saoirse Ronan following up her Oscar-nominated role in Atonement (by the way can any Irish people tell me just how in the hell you pronounce her first name?). The imagery for the afterlife scenes are very well done (the guy who Lord of the Rings is good with imagery, who’d have guessed?).
Persistence of Vision 