August 3, 2011 Assignment

Response to “The Kitchen of Meanings”:

Signs can have a double meaning or a message within them. Langue is not important when the signs speak for themselves. A simple sign can tell you about a person for example on how they live or what their likes are. Although it is hard to interpret all the signs in the world it is not possible to occur unless there is no interruption while observing the signs. To truly understand the meanings of signs your must have patience and the time for it.

Reviews on The Lovely Bones (since I am not sure yet which I want to do I am posting both the movie and the book reviews, this one is for the book):

The Lovely Bones is Alice Sebold's debut novel, a remarkable story about love and family and letting go. Susie Salmon is 14 when she is raped and murdered by a neighbor, a serial killer of women who moves from town to town after each of his crimes. Susie's death sends her family into a tailspin as they each try to cope with the tragedy in their own way. Susie narrates the story from heaven, watching her friends, family, and the murderer move on with their lives. Alice Sebold does a wonderful job catching the rhythms and interactions of a family and community, and is surprising at times with the strength of her prose in a story about loss and finding the love that was never gone. The Lovely Bones is highly recommended.

http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/lovely_bones/

What Remains

By Katherine Bouton
Published: July 14, 2002

THE LOVELY BONES

By Alice Sebold.

328 pp. Boston:

Little, Brown & Company. $21.95.

IT takes a certain audacity to write an uplifting book about the abduction and murder of a young girl. But consider that the bones of ''The Lovely Bones'' belong not to the victim but to an abstract and quite positive idea -- namely, that bones are the structure on which living things are built. Alice Sebold's accomplished first novel takes the metaphor of ''bones,'' tainted by overuse, shakes off the thriller trappings and turns not only this but many other clichés upside down.

It also takes a certain daring to write a book narrated by someone who's dead. Not only dead but murdered, and not only murdered but murdered at the age of 14. Susie Salmon (''like the fish,'' she tells us in the very first line) is in heaven. And, yes, she's looking down -- but with a fishy eye.

All is not well in the world Susie has left behind. Her grief-stricken mother has an inappropriate fling and flees to California. Her distraught father attacks her best friend, Clarissa, in the cornfield where Susie was murdered, inexplicably mistaking Clarissa for Mr. Harvey, the creep who lives nearby.

Mr. Salmon suspects -- and we know -- that Mr. Harvey is the murderer. But the police fail to solve the crime and Mr. Harvey leaves town, turning up here and there over the years, observed by Susie but, alas, rarely by the authorities. I won't reveal whether he's caught, but setting the novel in the early 1970's does avoid the necessity of dealing with what one suspects would be a quick resolution in the age of DNA analysis.

Susie has a younger sister and a much younger brother, as well as a boyfriend, Ray Singh, with whom she is on the verge of a sweet first romance. She also has a strange friend named Ruth, who plays a greater role in Susie's life after it's over than during it. Susie will appear to each of them over the coming years. Her brother, Buckley, takes the sightings more or less in stride. ''Do you see her?'' he asks a playmate not long after the murder. ''That's my sister. . . . She was gone for a while, but now she's back.'' But Ruth's sightings of Susie affect her increasingly deeply. As she grows up, acting as witness to crimes past becomes her obsession.

This is a high-wire act for a first novelist, and Alice Sebold maintains almost perfect balance. There are a couple of faltering moments: it seems implausible that Susie's grieving father would implicitly encourage his surviving daughter to nose around in the murderer's house looking for clues. And in a scene toward the conclusion of the book that strains credulity, Ruth does a kind of involuntary channeling that allows Susie one last moment with Ray. But Sebold catches herself in the nick of time, and the book ends on the same appealingly plain-spoken note that it opens with: ''I wish you all a long and happy life,'' Susie says.

Why did Mr. Harvey kill Susie Salmon? Sebold, perhaps wisely, stays away from this tricky territory, though his mother's early abandonment of him seems to be a contributing factor. Susie's chilling description of the crime opens the novel. In brief, dispassionate sentences she tells us how Mr. Harvey lured her into his secret cellar under the cornfield, how she fought back, how ''hard-as-I-could was not hard enough.'' ''I wept,'' she writes. ''I began to leave my body; I began to inhabit the air and silence. I wept and struggled so I would not feel.'' It's a difficult first chapter, and a mesmerizing one.

Susie is our guide through the maze of grief and dysfunction that follows her brutal death. Her dispassionate, observant young voice and poignant 14-year-old view of life don't change much. But she comes to understand things as she might have if she had grown up. Sebold's book is about the mind of a young girl, the reactions of a family to tragedy, the flaws that become enormous rifts under the pressures of grief. And it's about heaven.

In Susie's world, each person's heaven is custom tailored. ''We had been given, in our heavens, our simplest dreams,'' she explains. Susie's heavenly mentor, Franny, a former social worker, occupies a heaven where she can serve others and be ''rewarded by results and gratitude.'' Susie's own afterlife has school but no teachers, peppermint-stick ice cream and fashion magazines.

Susie gradually realizes she's not actually in heaven yet. ''How do you make the switch?'' she asks Franny when she realizes she's only halfway there. ''It's not as easy as you might think,'' Franny replies. ''You have to stop desiring certain answers. . . . If you stop asking why you were killed instead of someone else, stop investigating the vacuum left by your loss, stop wondering what everyone left on earth is feeling, you can be free. Simply put, you have to give up on earth.'' But Susie's not ready to do that, not for a long time. Not until she finally sees something in her family that gives the novel both its title and its resolution: ''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 when Susie is finally free, so are those who loved her. ''When the dead are done with the living,'' Franny tells Susie, ''the living can go on to other things.''

This book happens to have been published at a moment when a real-life kidnapping of a 14-year-old girl, Elizabeth Smart, taken from her comfortable middle-class bed in the dead of night, haunts the news. The very idea of Sebold's subject matter might make a reader queasy. But there's nothing prurient or exploitative in ''The Lovely Bones.'' Susie's story, paradoxically, is one of hope, set against grim reality.

Sebold is also the author of a well-received memoir, ''Lucky,'' about the harrowing experience of being raped as a college freshman. In ''The Lovely Bones,'' as in that book, she deals with almost unthinkable subjects with humor and intelligence and a kind of mysterious grace. Like Anna Quindlen's ''Black and Blue'' and Russell Banks's ''Sweet Hereafter,'' ''The Lovely Bones'' takes the stuff of neighborhood tragedy -- the unexplained disappearance of a child, the shattered family alone with its grief -- and turns it into literature.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/14/books/what-remains.html?pagewanted=3&src=pm

Reviews on The Lovely Bones (movie):

Gazing Down, From a Suburb of Heaven, at an Earthly Purgatory

Saoirse Ronan stars as Susie Salmon in “The Lovely Bones,” directed by Peter Jackson.

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: December 11, 2009

We all like children, and — at least in our capacity as moviegoers, book-club members and consumers of true-life melodrama — we seem to like them best when they’re abused, endangered or dead. Nothing else is quite so potent a symbol of violated innocence, a spur to pious sentiment or a goad to revenge as a child in peril. This is hardly news (Charles Dickens made a nice living trafficking in the suffering of minors), but for some reason the past decade has seen an epidemic of cinematic and literary crimes against the young.

“The Lovely Bones,” Alice Sebold’s 2002 best seller, now a film directed by Peter Jackson, stands out as a singularly bold and complex treatment of this grim and apparently inexhaustible theme. In spite of the horrific act at the center of the story — the rape, murder and dismemberment of a 14-year-old girl — the novel is not depressing or assaultive but rather, somewhat perversely, warm, hopeful and even occasionally funny.

Ms. Sebold pushes the dead-child narrative to an emotional extreme, and at the same time undermines its exploitive tendencies, by means of a simple and radical formal device. She makes the victim, a daughter of ’70s suburbia named Susie Salmon (“like the fish”), an omniscient, beyond-the-grave narrator, with a lively voice and a comfortable perch in the afterlife from which to survey the doings of her family, her friends and the neighbor who killed her. The novel is conceived with enough audacity to make this gimmick intriguing, and executed with enough art to make it effective.

Mr. Jackson’s film, from a script he wrote with Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, his frequent collaborators, shows less audacity and too much art. Susie’s unearthly home, in the book a minimally sketched, nondenominational purgatory where the dead loiter on their way to heaven and keep tabs on unfinished business down on earth, has been expanded into a digitally rendered Wonderland of rioting metaphors, crystal seas and floating topiary. It’s a mid-’70s art-rock album cover brought to life (and complemented by a score composed by the ’70s art-rock fixture Brian Eno), and while its trippy vistas are sometimes ravishing, they are also distracting. “Heaven,” a Talking Heads song once pointed out, is “a place where nothing ever happens.”

Accordingly Mr. Jackson’s interest in the “in-between,” as this suburb of heaven is called, is primarily visual. The drama is all down below, where the surviving members of the Salmon family contend with the loss of their eldest child. Susie’s sister, Lindsey, is played by Rose McIver; her brother, Buckley, by Christian Thomas Ashdale, while George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), the reclusive, seething killer, prunes his rosebushes and decorates dollhouses. By all appearances he has gotten away with his crime, and Susie hovers in the in-between partly in the hope that she might find a way to bring him to justice.

She is, in any case, obsessed with the lives that go on without her, in particular with the ways her siblings and friends and father (Mark Wahlberg, agonized) and mother (Rachel Weisz, narcotized) deal with losing her, something the audience never has to endure. We are always in Susie’s company, soothed by her voice-over narration and tickled by her coltish high spirits. This puts a curious distance between us and most of the characters in the film — it makes us, in effect, Susie’s fellow ghosts — a detachment that Mr. Jackson’s stylish, busy technique makes more acute. His young heroine, played with unnerving self-assurance and winning vivacity by Saoirse Ronan, cares desperately about the poor living souls left in her wake, but it is not clear that Mr. Jackson shares her concern.

Yes, he grooves on the wild color schemes and peculiar fashions of 1973. (Richard Kelly had a similar field day with 1976-vintage patterned wallpaper and fat neckties in “The Box,” his recent entry in the suburban-’70s-supernatural sweepstakes.) And this director’s fondness for odd angles, intense close-ups and trick perspectives — he films one scene as if peering out from the rooms of a dollhouse — animates a drab Pennsylvania landscape of shopping malls and half-developed farmland. As a pictorial artifact “The Lovely Bones” is gorgeous. It pulses and blooms and swells with bright hues and strange vistas.

But it does not move. Or, rather, as it skitters and lurches from set piece to the next, papering the gaps with swirls of montage, it never achieves the delicate emotional coherence that would bring the story alive. My point is not that Mr. Jackson and his fellow screenwriters have taken undue liberties with the book, a complaint that some other critics have made. On the contrary, the problem with this “Lovely Bones” is that it dithers over hard choices, unsure of which aspects of Ms. Sebold’s densely populated, intricately themed novel should be emphasized and which might be winnowed or condensed.

The filmmakers’ evident affection for the book expresses itself as a desperate scramble to include as much of it as possible, which leaves the movie feeling both overcrowded and thin. The anguish in the Salmon household is dutifully observed: dad smashes his collection of model ships, mom withdraws and then flees to California, and in the middle of it grandma arrives, a brassy boozer played by Susan Sarandon. But there is a puppet-show quality to their grief, and also to the puzzlement of the detective (Michael Imperioli) investigating Susie’s death and the sorrow of her schoolmates, Ruth (Carolyn Dando) and Ray (Reece Ritchie), the object of Susie’s first and last major crush.

The title of “The Lovely Bones” refers to the relationships among these people that knit together in Susie’s absence. In Mr. Jackson’s version, though, they are hastily and haphazardly assembled, so that nothing quite fits together. The movie is a serial-killer mystery, a teenage melodrama, a domestic tragedy and a candy-hued ghost story — a cinematic version of the old parlor game in which disparate graphic elements are assembled into a single strange picture. It’s sometimes called Exquisite Corpse.

“The Lovely Bones” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). The murder of a child, discreetly handled.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/movies/11lovelybones.html

The Lovely Bones

Peter Jackson turns Alice Sebold's bestseller mushy

1. The Lovely Bones
2. Production year: 2009
3. Countries: Rest of the world, UK, USA
4. Cert (UK): 12A
5. Runtime: 135 mins
6. Directors: Peter Jackson
7. Cast: Jake Abel, Mark Wahlberg, Michael Imperioli, Nikki SooHoo, Rachel Weisz, Saoirse Ronan, Stanley Tucci, Susan Sarandon

Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, from 1994, was about two young girls who become psychologically driven to commit murder, and who take refuge in an elaborate fantasy world. Now, with his defanged adaptation of the Alice Sebold bestseller The Lovely Bones – which softens and omits its nastier ­elements – it is as if Jackson has taken the spirit of Heavenly Creatures and turned it inside out, or upside down. ­Instead of a compelling nightmare, he has created a bland, girly-sparkly dream. It is a soothing, pseudo-redemptive fantasy which imagines that the teenage victim of a serial killer lives on, looking caringly over the lives left behind, in a weird but lovely-looking limbo, while the nearest and dearest can't get over the death. And then, once the living have got closure, she becomes united with the other victims, skipping hand in hand through a wonderful heaven which looks like a gorgeous meadow. (And the serial killer? When he dies? Well, I guess he gets to go to a different, less nice meadow. Or maybe the movie believes in hell – but can't quite bring itself to say so.)

It's certainly a startling story: a bold mix of horrible and sickly-sweet in a ratio of one to eight. Saoirse Ronan plays Susie Salmon, a teenage girl in the 1970s who is murdered by a local creepo, played by Stanley Tucci. Her spirit lives on, running desperately through the streets after the initial ­assault, ­unable at first to grasp that she is dead, like Patrick Swayze in Ghost. Then she has chilling visions of her ­murderer slumped in his bath, brooding and gloating over his horrendous crime. Susie's spirit visits her family and sees how the marriage of her parents has been all but destroyed. But Susie the ghost has gained a kind of sweetness, an ineffable insight and wisdom into the hurly-burly of human affairs, and sees what the ­living cannot – that everything will kind of be OK in the end.

Like gloopy bestsellers in WH Smith, this movie should come with its own free giant-sized bar of Galaxy chocolate. Saoirse Ronan certainly gives a game performance as Susie, and as you would expect from a Peter Jackson film, the fantasy images are strikingly designed. But everything else? Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz are the implausibly ­great-looking and decent mum and dad, and Susan Sarandon is the lovable, cigarette-smoking, tippling character of a grandmother. They are all entirely phoney. And there is ­something ­fundamentally dishonest about the film, in the way it shows Susie's ­family coming to terms with the loss in what is frankly double-quick time, in ­cosmic parallel to Susie finding her pals in heaven. As to whether The Lovely Bones gives an accurate picture of the afterlife … well, who can say? But in this world, the ­victims' loved ones never entirely get over the crime – at least not in the picturesque way these people do. Surely that's the unlovely truth.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/feb/18/the-lovely-bones-review

Film Reviews

The Lovely Bones -- Film Review

By Kirk Honeycutt, November 24, 2009 08:00 ET

Cast and Crew

Executive Producer: Tessa Ross
Executive Producer: Jim Wilson
Executive Producer: Steven Spielberg
Producer: Peter Jackson
Producer: Aimee Peyronnet
Producer: Frances Walsh
Producer: Carolynne Cunningham
Director: Peter Jackson
Screen Writer: Frances Walsh
Screen Writer: Philippa Boyens
Screen Writer: Peter Jackson
Director of Photography: Andrew Lesnie
Editor: Jabez Olssen
Prod. Designer: Naomi Shohan
Music: Brian Eno
Casting director: Scot Boland
Casting director: Victoria Burrows
Cast: Mark Wahlberg (Jack Salmon), Rachel Weisz (Abigail Salmon), Susan Sarandon (Grandma Lynn), Stanley Tucci (George Harvey), Michael Imperioli (Len Fenerman), Saoirse Ronan (Susie Salmon), Rose McIver (Lindsey Salmon), Carolyn Dando (Ruth Connors)

Bottom Line: Peter Jackson transforms Alice Sebold's startling, unique novel about the aftermath of a terrible murder into a story more focused on crime and punishment.

Peter Jackson certainly is familiar with the challenges of satisfying filmgoers' expectations, having helmed three films derived from J.R.R. Tolkien's immensely popular "Lord of the Rings" novel and a second remake of the iconic film "King Kong." So Alice Sebold's best-selling novel "The Lovely Bones," published in 2002, should be right in his wheelhouse. In this case, though, he has changed the focus and characters to such a significant degree that his film might resonate more with those who have not read the book.
Sebold's otherworldly meditation on unspeakable tragedy and hard-earned healing has been transformed by Jackson into something akin to a supernatural suspense thriller. A philosophical story about family, memory and obsession has regrettably become a mawkish appeal to victimhood.
Readers' eagerness to see the film version, plus Jackson's name above the title, should deliver a significant boxoffice take during the film's initial release. Whether "Bones" will sustain those numbers as it expands domestically and then into foreign territories in January is unclear. This is, to Jackson's credit, daring and deeply unsettling material.
"Bones" is the story of Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl who is murdered Dec. 6, 1973. She is adjusting to her new home in heaven while watching life on Earth continue without her. Her family goes through hell -- her dad having the most difficult time dealing with her disappearance -- while her killer, a neighbor, covers his tracks.
Sebold's stroke of genius is to place her heroine in heaven immediately. She can thus describe with an empathetic dispassion her own rape-murder and her family's realization that the eldest daughter will not be coming home.
In literary terms, she is a first-person narrator and an omniscient observer: She can enter the minds of other characters to know what they're thinking and can even see into the past.
As the years roll by, she witnesses how healing slowly comes but at great cost. A few characters even realize she never completely left; they sense her presence and, on occasion, believe they see her.
The movie, written by Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, is more concentrated, in time and focus. Nor can they get past the crime. They see their movie as a murder thriller, so the role of the killer, George Harvey, has been expanded and is played by fine actor Stanley Tucci (almost unrecognizably so).
The film ventures only about a year into a future without Susie. And, like any crime thriller, it worries about the killer and how he will get caught. It even has Susie rage in heaven against her murderer, demanding vengeance.
In shifting the emphasis, the film version must all but abandon the crumbling relationship between Susie's dad, Jack (Mark Wahlberg), and mother, Abigail (Rachel Weisz), and dramatically alters the nature of the police detective's (Michael Imperioli) involvement with the family.
In the novel, the father immediately senses that George killed his daughter but has no proof, so his mental deterioration makes sense. In the film, he has no clue who murdered his daughter; he just goes nuts.
Saoirse Ronan, so impressive in "Atonement," plays Susie, and she's terrific. She is the glue that holds the story together. Her piercing blue eyes and heartfelt anguish animate both heaven and earth.
This heaven, described only sketchily in the novel, permits Jackson the full range of his visual imagination. Jackson paints a surreal outdoor palace of changing seasons and environments with rainbow colors and swift-as-thought transitions.
Andrew Lesnie's cinematography and Naomi Shohan's production design make earth and heaven not-quite-authentic places. Earth is a suburban, small-town America, more idealized than real. It's as if Susie, in heaven, imagines the town in her mind rather than as she actually sees it. Meanwhile, her heaven is a timeless fantasia that reflects her mental outlook.
The movie relies on the emotionalism of a young girl murdered and an unrepentant killer lurking nearby. It just barely has time for the story's most colorful character, the alcoholic grandmother (Susan Sarandon), who moves in and takes charge of the nearly dysfunctional Salmon household.
The film certainly plays well enough as a melodrama-cum-revenge thriller. The suspense of Susie's sister (Rose McIver) breaking into George's house to find a damning trace of her sister is pure Hitchcock. And Susie's diaphanous appearances -- and a girlfriend (Carolyn Dando) who can "see" her -- suggest "The Sixth Sense."
But a reader might regret the loss of the real issues between Susie's mom and dad. Oddly, in the early minutes, the film hints at developing this only to drop it. Was there a longer version that underwent cuts? Indeed, more than a few characters get introduced briefly only to virtually disappear once everything boils down to victim and perpetrator.
This was never going to be an easy story to film. Using the same characters and many events, Jackson and his team tell a fundamentally different story. It's one that is not without its tension, humor and compelling details. But it's also a simpler, more button-pushing tale that misses the joy and heartbreak of the original.

http://www1.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/film-reviews/the-lovely-bones-film-review-1004048230.story