Trailer en Francais: The Lovely Bones
By Craig Kennedy - November 13th, 2009; 1:03 pm
From France, here’s another look at one of the last few Oscar unknowns: Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones. It’s a more dramatic and ethereal take than the first US trailer and better I think.
Stream it after the jump.
Based on Alice Siebold’s popular novel, Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones starring Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci and Michael Imperioli opens December 11.
Filed under: Trailers
Tags: Mark Wahlberg, Michael Imperioli, Peter Jackson, Rachel Weisz, Saoirse Ronan, Stanley Tucci, Susan Sarandon, The Lovely Bones
The screenplay was solid. I have highish hopes for this one.
Not sold on the casting of the parents, though.
There is no new footage in this trailer. Its just a cut up and sped up version of the original.
Been awhile since I watched the US trailer, but this one feels different in tone if not content.
I have a bad, bad feeling about this.
I get your drift, frank.
I didn’t read the book. But creating a compelling visual world from that type of subject matter will be difficult at best.
And I say this knowing full well that Peter Jackson is a talented director. Plus I adore Saoirse, Rachel, Susan and Thomas McCarthy.
Instead of anticipation I feel dread. As in lots of it.
It just looks likely to confirm everything his detractors say about him.
I’ve been aware of him since his early NZ cult stuff, and have mostly been a fan. But King Kong showed signs of an ego going off the rails (the running time, the rejection of Howard Shore’s score), and the business with Gosling seemed to point in the same direction. And now he makes this prestige production in which every scene apparently goes to 11.
LOTR and Kong needed to be bigger-than-life, and his other films are basically comedies, so his overbaked style wasn’t necessarily a liability. I recently went back to Heavenly Creatures to see if it was similarly lacking in, shall we say, directorial elegance. The answer turned out to be yes — but it worked anyway because it suited the material. He throws everything but the kitchen sink into that film, but taken subjectively as a reflection of the girls’ mental state, it’s justified.
But he now seems unable to tone it down under any circumstances. I sense a shark-nuking moment, and expect lots of crying and huge close-ups and slow-motion and gratuitous special effects and thundering music.
He’ll probably win another Oscar.
For me, the problem with all of these trailers is that they seem to emphasize the least interesting parts of the book to me, or at least the parts that I remember the least. It’s possible these are just edited for mass audience appeal and Jackson doesn’t spend an inordinate amount of time on the “afterlife” or the thrillery aspects of the murder investigation. I keep thinking of Heavenly Creatures, which had it’s own fantastical elements but spent most of its running time establishing the two leads and their increasingly strained relationships with each other, their families and reality. If I recall, the trailer for Heavenly Creatures was equally overloaded with effects shots and dreamy moments, but I could be wrong about that.
A two hour effects fest that ends up in standard murder thriller territory isn’t doing the source material any justice, but I guess we’ll see. Honestly, I don’t think this material is easy to dramatize but if I thought anyone had a handle on that, it would be Peter Jackson. That might be 1995-era PJ and not 2009-era PJ.
I’d generally agree with your comments, Frank, although I think HC holds up a little better than you do but that’s predominantly on the strength of the two amazing lead performances.
Oh, but I do think it holds up. Sorry if I didn’t make that clear. As I said, the style suits the subject. It works. It’s just that seeing it in the light of his later work, the tendency toward gimmickry is more apparent.
Plus, the shock of the gross-out splatter guy turning respectable has been lost. If Eli Roth made a film like HC tomorrow, he’d also be praised for doing something different. (Not that I find any of his work half as entertaining or energetic as Dead Alive.)
I just wonder if PJ can ever learn to hold back a bit. I get the sense that he’s terrified the audience will get bored and wander off if he stops peddling his unicycle in circles while juggling flaming batons.
“Plus, the shock of the gross-out splatter guy turning respectable has been lost.”
True. Neither of them is showing any signs of ever becoming David Cronenberg and Tarantino upstaged all the grindhousers with Inglorious Basterds. I think PJ has always been more in the realm of a mainstream filmmaker anyway. I just hope he’s kept his flaming batons to a necessary minimum for this one.