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bessieclark
Reviews
The Lovely Bones (2009)
Death by 1000 cuts
This film, like King Kong before it, suffers from a bad edit -having been cut down from a roughly 5+ hour assembly to the 135 min final running time. And as with King Kong, Jackson and his editor have cut the wrong bits out, favoring big action over character development and creating a CGI world over building a real world with real people.
There is basically no back story for any of the characters, and if they have relationships with each other we never see it. Other comments suggest these character driven scenes were shot and deleted.It felt like there was a better film in there, but the director was trying to cover all bases and got seriously distracted by creating landscapes (that move! that change!)round his characters instead of attending to the characters themselves.
As a viewer (who had read the book- though not a big fan of it) I had no sense of who either parent was apart from the sketchiest of details. The film starts out okay, but with Susie's disappearance (and the introduction of her 'in between' existence), the film starts to go seriously wrong.
Remember the sequence in Kong with the dinosaurs that went on and on and on... well there's a lot of running round in the after life, running and laughing, laughing and running...
Character development has never been Jackson's strong point (the obvious exception being 'Heavenly Creatures') and his editor here has done nothing to help us feel connected with the characters.The performances are okay but it would be interesting to have seen this film where equal time was given to developing a real world to go with that hideously banal heaven. They are more like pieces being moved round a chessboard than real people with real emotions.
My only hope is that Jackson changes editors for the next film, or uses the LOTR method of employing more than one editor- the mish mash evident here, and on his previous film seriously undermine his skills as a film maker.
The Cult (2009)
Slow and not nearly as clever as it thinks it is
I'm a big fan of unfolding the story/ back-story as you go along style of drama but the unraveling is happening so slowly in The Cult that I'm finding it pretty unengaging. So technically the series looks great, the performances with a few exceptions are fine, but the pace of the story telling is killing the story.
There's some good stuff in there but it's so snuggly wrapped up in the 'mystery' that it's hard to watch. Too much set-up people.
Also the music is all wrong- if only they'd gone for something warmer... it would have been a lot more watchable. It's a small thing but I think it makes a huge difference.