In the latest Entertainment Weekly, there's a small article dealing with the backlash Peter Jackson is facing for--wait for it--NOT including a graphic rape/murder scene of a little girl in his new movie "The Lovely Bones."
A British newspaper actually took Jackson to task for not including this scene. They're playing it off as him shying away from the hard nature of the book.
The thing is, the book doesn't HAVE a hard nature. Yes, the scene is in the book, but in terms of the overall theme and message of the book, that particular scene does fall into the "take it or leave it" category. It's not essential to the film to show exactly what happened, and to be honest, I'm glad they decided not to show it.
If you read the article, I think Peter Jackson and his partner Fran Walsh make a good case for not including it.
1) They did a computerized sketch of it, and it was very disturbing (obviously). So disturbing, I would imagine, that many people may just walk out of the theater at that point and miss what is probably an absolutely beautiful movie.
2) They didn't want to scar any young actress by putting her through that.
3) Without the scene, they can have a PG-13 movie, and that means younger girls can go see it and perhaps learn a lesson about being more cautious.
Overall, I'm a little upset that people are actually disappointed this scene isn't in the film. I like to think of myself as being pretty liberal, and I don't usually opt for going the easy route artistically, but how a rape scene of a young girl is something people were actually PROMOTING is beyond creepy to me.
Yet another example of how morbid people are getting.
Part of me thinks that there's this bullshit theory that violence legitimizes a film. In reality, it's just that people are so desensitized, they need violent movies to make them feel something. Now they need to go even further and have scenes like this one in films. Am I the only one who thinks we're going to have a lot more pedophiles in twenty years than we do now?
Personally, I don't like violent movies. I've never been a fan of The Godfather. I detest Scarface. I see that there's a direct correlation between these movies' "cool quotient" and the violence they contain, and that offsets me.
Am I being a grandpa here?
What do you think?
A British newspaper actually took Jackson to task for not including this scene. They're playing it off as him shying away from the hard nature of the book.
The thing is, the book doesn't HAVE a hard nature. Yes, the scene is in the book, but in terms of the overall theme and message of the book, that particular scene does fall into the "take it or leave it" category. It's not essential to the film to show exactly what happened, and to be honest, I'm glad they decided not to show it.
If you read the article, I think Peter Jackson and his partner Fran Walsh make a good case for not including it.
1) They did a computerized sketch of it, and it was very disturbing (obviously). So disturbing, I would imagine, that many people may just walk out of the theater at that point and miss what is probably an absolutely beautiful movie.
2) They didn't want to scar any young actress by putting her through that.
3) Without the scene, they can have a PG-13 movie, and that means younger girls can go see it and perhaps learn a lesson about being more cautious.
Overall, I'm a little upset that people are actually disappointed this scene isn't in the film. I like to think of myself as being pretty liberal, and I don't usually opt for going the easy route artistically, but how a rape scene of a young girl is something people were actually PROMOTING is beyond creepy to me.
Yet another example of how morbid people are getting.
Part of me thinks that there's this bullshit theory that violence legitimizes a film. In reality, it's just that people are so desensitized, they need violent movies to make them feel something. Now they need to go even further and have scenes like this one in films. Am I the only one who thinks we're going to have a lot more pedophiles in twenty years than we do now?
Personally, I don't like violent movies. I've never been a fan of The Godfather. I detest Scarface. I see that there's a direct correlation between these movies' "cool quotient" and the violence they contain, and that offsets me.
Am I being a grandpa here?
What do you think?
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