The Lovely Bones & Hereafter

          Today I have decided to clump together The Lovely Bones and Hereafter because I felt similar vibes and have similar feelings about these two movies. I saw each of these films while they were in theaters. The Lovely Bones was based upon the book of the same name, and it is about a girl (Abigail) viewing her old world from director Peter Jackson's idea of a sort of heaven where girls with similar tragic endings go. In Abigail's case, she was raped to death by a creepy middle-aged man (George), who she keeps track of while in the heaven. While I was watching the movie, I could feel that the actors and Jackson were trying to make this story feel real and visionary when I could only roll my eyes at every risk they took. For example, as a huge fan of flashbacks, I usually love it when especially bright lighting and cinematography tricks are used to differentiate the past from the present. However, Jackson's technique in creating the heaven with long fields, a big cliché tree of life, slow movements, disappearing girls, and the actors' slow tongues made it utterly fake and not somewhere that I would go when I die.

          Hereafter should have been a short. It felt like the whole movie was setting itself up for something that never came. Perhaps that something should have been Marcus having George talk to his late twin brother, or just something of meaning. If it had been a short film, then it could have gotten away with an ending being the beginning of whatever the audience's imagination wants. However, this was not a short, and it should have been cohesive rather than clumping a bunch of different, disconnected stories together. The ending to this film was completely dissatisfying and one of my least favorite endings of any movie. Furthermore, this Clint Eastwood-directed feature was advertised as being about a guy (George) who connects with the dead even after quitting this profession. Well guess what: this profession as a sort of ghost whisperer was featured more in the two-and-a-half-minute trailer than it was in the entire length of the movie. The only good part was the tsunami in the beginning -- which was followed up by Eastwood's vision of a dark space where one can communicate with the dead. It seemed as though the whole fifty-million-dollar budget was spent on the tsunami with no money left to create a "communication center" (as I will call the darkness with mere shadows; it is no more intricate than it appears in the trailer) worth seeing, since connecting with the dead was supposed to be a major component after all.