Jackson talks LOVELY BONES

Tuesday, April 21, 2009


I am about to commit geek heresy and admit that I wasn't crazy about the Lord of the Rings movies. I thought they were great-looking, well-acted, very long movies with lots and lots of battles and not enough Gollum. And they frustrated me, because I knew Peter Jackson was capable of more.

Peter Jackson's had a very strange career. He got his start with gross-out zombie comedies in his native New Zealand, then he totally changed course with Heavenly Creatures in 1994, a wrenching, visually stunning docu-drama about two New Zealand schoolgirls whose obsessive, shared fantasy life led them to commit murder. It featured a breakout performance by a young Kate Winslet and turned Jackson into a superstar director on the art-house scene... And then he changed course yet again, with the Michael J. Fox supernatural comedy misfire, The Frighteners. I was a huge Creatures fan and I kept hoping that he'd take on another project that challenging. But after The Frighteners he went off to do the Rings pictures and King Kong, then he signed on to The Hobbit and Tin-Tin. It looked like that was it for him, he was just going to make big, noisy epics from here on out.

So I was thrilled when the news hit that Jackson was adapting Alice Sebold's novel The Lovely Bones. The book is an intense, bittersweet story in which a murdered girl struggles to accept her own death and move on to whatever afterlife awaits her. This is exactly the sort of story I'd like to see him take on, something human-scale. Jackson doesn't need the epic clashes of mighty armies to tell a story that dazzles you.

Jackson discusses the film at some length in a new USA Today interview. It's interesting, but it's not the sort of interview that lends itself to excerpts so I'm just going to send you over there to read it.


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About This Blog

"Science fiction plucks from within us our deepest fears and hopes, then shows them to us in rough disguise: the monster and the rocket." - W.H. Auden

Who is he, this one who is called "Greg Stacy"?

Greg Stacy began the MONSTERS AND ROCKETS blog in April of 2009. Prior to that, he was editor of the popular sci-fi/horror news website DARKWOLDS.COM. He has also written for LA WEEKLY, OC WEEKLY, UTNE READER and LOS ANGELES CITYBEAT. He always feels weird writing about himself in the third person.

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