The Lovely Bones (2009)

Tags

Drama, Fantasy, Mark Wahlberg, Movie, Rachel Weisz, Romance, Rose McIver, Saoirse Ronan, Stanley Tucci, Susan Sarandon, The Lovely Bones

even my cool hat couldn't protect me...

PG-13

Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Stanley Tucci, Susan Sarandon, Rose McIver

Buckley: Grandma, I know where Susie is.
Grandma: Yeah, Susie’s…gone to heaven, sweetheart.
Buckley: Lindsey says there is no heaven.
Grandma: Alright then, she’s dead.
Buckley: You might be dead soon.
Grandma: Why do you say that?
Buckley: Because you’re old.

After being murdered, Susie (Ronan) is stuck in a sort of limbo between earth and heaven, unable to move forward due to the ties she can’t break.  Meanwhile, her family struggles to move on after being struck by this tragedy.

Yikes, this movie is just all over the place.  Is it a serious drama about a murdered 14 year old girl?  Is it a Twilight-esque love story?  Is it dark and scary?  Is it a family movie with a few comedic interludes?  Well…it tries to be all of them, and only succeeded occasionally.

I liked some of the visuals and the idea of Susie being unable to leave behind her need for vengeance and her desire to protect her family.  That stuff was pretty good, but the entire romantic subplot involving her need for one kiss with this boy she knew for about 12 minutes was tiresome.  As was the entire grandmother character.  She’s supposed to be some big whirlwind of personality, but she feels totally out of place in this movie.  Especially the montage of her cleaning up the house.  It reminded me of the clean-up montage featuring Goldie Hawn in Overboard.  That fit in that movie…not in this one.

Also, I hate to say it, but Mark Wahlberg once again displays his lack of dramatic acting ability.  Plus, he and Weisz have absolutely no believability as a couple.  No chemistry there at all.  For this movie to work, the family needed to feel like a real, loving family, and it doesn’t.  It all just feels fake.  The only real quality performance is from Stanley Tucci.  He is very very creepy as the killer, George Harvey.  Maybe too creepy, as I’m not sure what kid (or adult) would trust that guy for a second.

The imagery of semi-heaven, or whatever it may be, is alright, but nothing profoundly great.  Those kinds of sequences are more in Peter Jackson’s wheelhouse, so I was expecting a little more from them I guess.

There are a couple of other good moments, and it will surely draw a tear or two at times (a story about murdered children is bound to), but all in all, it just feels like a big jumbled mess.  I’m sure the book had more room to expand on certain characters and themes, but obviously they couldn’t all fit into the movie.  So, we’re left with some shallow characters and a lot of confusing scenes.

Don’t follow creepy men into their creepy underground bunkers.

10 – 2.5 because the tone of the movie is just all over the place – 1 for the characters not being very well developed – 1 for some iffy acting = 5.5

The Brothers Bloom (2009)

Tags

Adrien Brody, Comedy, Drama, Mark Ruffalo, Movie, Rachel Weisz, Romance, The Brothers Bloom

you fought a mummy, eh? well, I fought King Kong, so...yeah...

PG-13

Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel Weisz

Bloom: You don’t understand what my brother does.  He writes his cons the way dead Russians write novels…with thematic arcs and embedded symbolism and s***.  And he wrote me as the vulnerable anti-hero…and that’s why you think you wanna kiss me.  It’s a con…

Stephen (Ruffalo) and Bloom (Brody) started out as con men early in life.  Stephen is the brains behind most of the schemes, and Bloom is tired of playing the characters that Stephen thinks up for him.  Bloom wants something real.  Stephen convinces him to do one last con with him, and Penelope (Weisz) is the mark.  It’s a complicated con, and Penelope ends up being a much more interesting and unusual mark than they expected.

I really really liked this movie.  It’s energetic (for most of its running time), funny, interesting, romantic, and even touching now and then.  Everybody seems to be having a blast making it, especially Rachel Weisz.  She’s as charming as I’ve ever seen her as the somewhat loopy Penelope.  She’s a lonely woman, rich via inheritance, living in a huge castle of a house.  As she tells bloom, she “collects hobbies”, meaning she sees something interesting, then learns how to do it.  This leads to a highly amusing montage of her talents, including juggling chainsaws while balancing on a very tall unicycle.

Brody is sympathetic as Bloom, the more passive of the two brothers.  He’s played so many roles in cons that he doesn’t even know the difference between real and fake emotions any more.  Is he falling in love with Penelope, or is it just acting?  I guess you’re a pretty good con man if even you can’t tell the difference.

At first, Ruffalo seemed like an odd choice to me as the more aggressive, genius brother who’s not afraid to get a little violent now and then, but he won me over pretty quickly.  He and Brody have a good chemistry that was really needed if this movie was going to work.

The setting all feels like it should be in the 1930s maybe, but then there’s cell phones and Lamborghinis, which place it clearly in a more modern era.  I guess the con men theme lends itself more to an older era, so the costumes and locations reflect that.  It’s strange, but it adds to the quirky, offbeat tone of the movie.

There’s solid acting, a good script, great visuals (and visual humor), good music, and likable characters.  It all adds up to a movie I definitely plan to see again.  Admittedly, in the end, the movie does start to get a little too convoluted and loses steam just a bit, but it’s still a satisfying conclusion to a great story.

You can make a pinhole camera out of a watermelon.

10 – 1.1 because it does get convoluted and overlong near the end = 8.9