Written by: Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson
Full credits at IMDb
Dear moviemakers,Every movie based on a popular novel need not have its soundtrack saturated with voiceover. I know you guys (none of you are women, right?) think it’s a way to honor the audience-beloved source material, but it’s actually disrespectful to the words that once sat silently on the page. Because it shows that you have no concept of the differences between media—what works in print versus on a screen. In this case, Mr. Jackson: rather than honor the spirit of Alice Sebold’s novel by retaining chunks of its language, you have merely photocopied it, fashioning a blurry facsimile with the margins cut off.
But really...what else would you expect from a movie without the deep-down beauty its title suggests, but only a superficial attractiveness with a vacuous core? There’s a difficult story buried somewhere in this movie about freeing our souls from the psycho/material miseries that weigh them down, about finding numinous liberation in Letting Go. All that remains, though, are some bromides about the afterlife that are about as comforting as a pat on the shoulder from a stranger.
Keep reading my discussion with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine
Watch the trailer:
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