2009 - THE LOVELY BONES, the emperor has no clothes

Talk about over reaching.  Lord of the Rings ringmaster Peter Jackson somehow got it into his head that he was the perfect person to take on this best selling chick book about a girl murdered by a pedophile.  Filming this book would require a filmmaker who could bring a special sensitivity to a story about the ghost or whatever of the  girl looking down from heaven or somewhere viewing the lives of her family and her murderer. What The Lovely Bones got was a director whose specialty was killing "Orcs" on screen.

The Lovely Bones is amazing in it's awfulness.  It's pretty clear now that Peter Jackson made a deal with the devil not unlike that of Faust to make The Lord of the Rings films, because The Lovely Bones could in no way have been made by the same guy, it is inept on almost every level.

So much about the film is just offensive.  The whole murdered girl stuck in some sort of strange heavenly Disneyland prancing around having fun while her family suffers from her death is just incredibly misjudged and tasteless.  Heaven is the usual Christian fantasy that looks like some sort of city rose garden or bird sanctuary probably the last place anyone would want to end up.  The spirit of the dead girl blathering on about the meaning of life and death makes her death seem seem more trite than tragic.

I'm not even going to get into the comedy relief provided by Susan Sarandon as the eccentric grandmother.

As usual this flop of film once again only goes to prove the brilliance of Rod Serling's Twlight Zone series.  This "life after death" stuff was the kind of thing that series could do in a half an hour (including commercials) and with a lot more film making skill than Peter Jackson could do on a budget of $65 million dollars.

And what's with Mark Wahlberg's haircut.

136 minutes. Written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson.