"These were the lovely bones..."

I saw this after a strikeout one night--sold out. I heard others seeing it the weekend after it opened--or not--sold out. Geeze, this is gonna be good, I thought. Well, it was only what I had once thought: interesting to see just how they did it.


Peter Jackson did it a solid. Saoirse Ronan is a freaky ingénue of course, akin to the likes of Dakota Fanning and Anna Paquin (TrueBlood, holla! Omigod, Comicon is coming and I can't believe I get to go; costume ideas?). Ahem, back to literture and film. Overall, it felt like What Dreams May Come minus the irritating Robin Williams and add the sadness of young, innocent girl life snuffed out. The family was well cast (good job, Marky Mark, and still cute), the "in between" was that of a 14-year-old's (which is so colorful and perfect you almost don't care it takes so long to get back to the plot you can more fully understand), and an aftertaste that makes you so scared for little ones of the hurt that can happen to them...

"These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections—sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent—that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events my death brought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous lifeless body had been my life." 
- Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones