Come on, admit it. Who hasn't, on occasion - perhaps at the end of a long day - settled down to watch a movie and chosen something iffy but light, rather than risk scorching synapses with grimmer fare? Why risk the raw misery of a Hunger, after all, when you can enjoy an ill-advised third trawl through How to Lose Friends and Alienate People?
Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones, on paper, looks like the sort of film which one might find one's self avoiding on a quiet Sunday night. It centres on a 14-year-old girl, played by Atonement's Saoirse Ronan, who is murdered by a paedophile and finds herself caught in her own personal purgatory, a fantastical place from whence she is able to peer down at her family as they struggle to cope with the aftermath of her death.
This first trailer proper for the film doesn't entirely remove the sense that Jackson is delving into material which may prove tough going for viewers, but it does intelligently set up the movie's major selling point: Susie Salmon, as played by Ronan, really is a lovely little girl, and we very much want her family to find out who killed her and help the police bring him or her to justice. So it needn't all be doom and gloom.
Furthermore the spectacular depiction of Susie's limbo existence takes the movie into a fantasy realm reminiscent of the work of Terry Gilliam, although the suggestion that a terrible death can lead to a place of wonder and joy is itself at the very least potentially facile, at worst, repugnant.
The Lovely Bones, which also stars Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz and Susan Sarandon, is due to hit UK cinemas in January next year, so we still have plenty of time to psyche ourselves up for the experience. Your thoughts on this one please: does the trailer strike a dissonant note? Or are you intrigued by the prospect of something rather out of the ordinary?
