The Lovely Bones

And the winner for worst film of 2009 is …(sound of vomit bag being torn open to reveal the results) Lovely Bones! A truly mortifyingly bad movie, Lovely Bones tells the tale of young Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), whose daddy (Mark Walhberg) loves her ever so much until she’s raped and killed by Mr. Harvey (Stanley Tucci), who, it turns out, is not a very nice man at all. Then she goes to a beautiful afterlife where a magical girl (Nikki SooHoo) becomes her playmate in fields of liquid flowers and giggling rollercoasters. So, the moral is that if you kill a little girl she gets to have the bestest time of her life. Tucci is interestingly weird and effectively creepy as the killer, and Rachel Weisz, though underutilized, is fabulous as Susie’s mom. But the movie is dragged down by an awful script that actually includes the line, “I loved the way a photo could capture a moment before it was gone.” O yeah, it’s awesome to capture moments before they’re gone! There’s almost nothing good to say about this two hour excrescence from director Peter Jackson, so I can only beseech you not to go see it, unless you think greeting cards with sunsets on them are our greatest source of philosophical comfort. If so, God bless you.