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dhartzell
Reviews
The Lovely Bones (2009)
It's OK to be brutally murdered. Really.
I didn't read The Lovely Bones when it was published, but like anyone who follows books I was familiar with its chillingly improbable premise: a girl dispassionately recounting her murder and its aftermath. You can't help wondering what the point is, unless you're a deeply religious Christian who considers the trials and tribulations of life on Earth to be merely a brief pilgrimage to the Great Reward Beyond. But this book wasn't issued by a deep south religious publisher like Thomas Nelson, so it couldn't be about that ... could it? I'm sure Peter Jackson didn't think so, because the Christian fundamentalist market wouldn't be big enough box office to guarantee a profit on this startlingly gargantuan effort. As a narrative The Lovely Bones seems very much removed from the panoramic scale and sweep demanded by effects-intensive sagas like Lord of the Rings or King Kong. But Bones makes it clear that Jackson isn't comfortable doing without CGI. As he envisioned it, the story offered rich opportunities to put dozens of graphics effects artists to work realizing a verdant, craggy, mountainous, oceanic, running-through-the-rye kind of otherworld that, while it avoids the cotton-ball clouds and angels-strumming-harps we think of as typical Hollywood shorthand for heaven, often veers towards a Daliesque (or maybe I should say Tim-Burtonesque) surrealism that takes over the story and makes the earthbound characters' concerns (assuming we haven't forgotten them entirely) seem not only trivial but oddly irrelevant.
Which is a shame, because when Jackson tires of his effects-driven heaven he gets back to the story of how the dead Susie still possesses the will and the power to influence the behavior of her live family. There's nothing unconventional about this idea, of course -- it's a standard conceit in movies ranging from Topper to Ghost. But unlike Jackson's scenes of heaven, which often go on a bit to no particular end, Susie's spiritual visits to Earth and her family propel the story forward and sometimes take them -- and us -- in unexpected directions. And they make plain dramatic sense in a way that Susie's through-the-looking-glass afterlife mostly doesn't.
Still, by the end of the movie, after we've experienced the static, somewhat sanitized tableaux of the violent murders Stanley Tucci's pedophile has committed (the movie has nothing to say about the far more troubling subject of extreme sexual deviancy; Tucci's pervert here is reduced to that standard horror device: a serial killer) you can't help feeling you're being asked to admit that the devious violent terrors lurking around the corner from the world's Stanley Tuccis is a small price to pay for the wonderful CGI heaven that awaits. And anyway, just as serial killers effectively pick their victims at random -- so Mom and Dad, please don't beat yourselves up for failing to stop him! -- so random events eventually do those nasty serial killers in. (Thanks, Mr. Icicle and Mr. Sheer Cliff!) Don't you feel better now? I didn't. Although I admit that, a full day after seeing it, I'm still struggling to make sense of The Lovely Bones. Which is more than I can say for the last movie I saw with my 12-year-old daughter: Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeaquel.
The Jackie Robinson Story (1950)
Robinson is the movie
While Jackie Robinson was never in danger of Oscar consideration for this performance as himself, within the confines of a low-budget movie with a creaky script he does a creditable job.
And perhaps more to the point, his charisma is palpable ... and almost makes it obvious why Rickey decided he was the man to run the gauntlet in 1947. He's just so damned likable!
Also: I have to say that the heart of the movie -- and I don't think *any* actor could have done a better job here -- is the sequence where Robinson shows up for his first practice with the Montreal Royals. He tries to join a couple of pepper games without success and, on his third try, grows tired of being ignored and calls for a fellow player to throw him the ball. Cut to a medium close up of Robinson as he pounds his mitt and, with a poignant look of anxiety, expectation, and defiance, holds it up, asking for the throw.
Nearly as good is the smile that crosses Robinson's face when the player with the ball (who gets his own reverse shot, looking at his white teammates skeptically as if to say, "Should I throw to this {your racial epithet here}?") finally tosses it to him. That smile and Robinson's gesture with his glove on catching the ball -- the kind major league infielders usually reserve for acknowledging someone's sparkling play --says more than any dialog could. And it feels unscripted in its natural tension and release. Brilliant!
I doubt Robinson needed *any* coaching to do that scene. And I suspect nobody then or now could have done it better.
Robinson is the movie. Most everything else, with the possible exception of the young Ruby Dee's serviceable (if undemanding) performance as Robinson's wife, is window dressing.