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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Not sold on the casting of the parents, though.