Bah, I watched The Lovely Bones on HBO last night. It reminded me why I avoid Hollywood films.

Someone recommended the book to me a long time ago, something in response to my musings on death and dying (I think it was a guest while I was at Deer Park), and as lovely as the book sounded, at least its title, I never got around to it. I'm sure the book is much better than the movie and give the movie a rotten 4 out of 10 tomatoes.

I almost turned it off after a half hour for all the emotional manipulation and sentimentality, but decided to continue enduring it to give it a fair shake. The Hollywood treatment of forcing situations to be all suspenseful and dramatic, even in red herrings and misleads in situations that you know aren't going to pan out, made me think this material would, from a narrative point of view, have been much better handled by an indie filmmaker.

However, I was intrigued by the treatment of the death experience and give the director credit for the portrayals, although I'm not saying an indie filmmaker couldn't figure out a way to make the portrayals even without the big budget special effects. And it wasn't the cheesy effects that impressed me anyway, but the ideas.

In short, it's about a 14-year-old girl who is raped and murdered by a serial killer and finds herself in a between state, not completely unlike one suggested by the Tibetan Book of the Dead, whereby an aspect of her is still connected to the world she left behind. Her family, on the other hand, has to find a way to cope with her disappearance and the inability of the police to find evidence to implicate the murderer.

The murder itself isn't actually shown, and she herself isn't even aware of it at first, and I thought that was intriguing, as I once imagined that was what death might be like in some cases. There's a difference between what we experience and what might be observed, which is curiously similar to a description of falling into a black hole I heard in a documentary last week.

I liked, among other things, the portrayal of the state the main character finds herself in as one that is a product of her own imagination and takes on characteristics of her own mental state, which may be still connected to objects in the physical world. A lot of the symbols that are portrayed are taken from things reflecting her reality and mental state when she was alive. Pretty keen.

I'll say without giving anything away, even though I highly don't recommend anyone going out of their way to see this film, that the ending of the movie is what one might expect from a Hollywood ending (remember 2012? the world is destroyed, billions are killed and they still manage a happy ending!).

A bit of end narration that I think is lifted directly from the book suggests that the story was supposed to be about the relationships of the people who she left behind, and how she felt comfort in people's ability to go on without her and so she could let go, too. And that's the story an indie filmmaker would have likely done.

That's not what the movie is about. The movie doesn't suggest anything as thoughtful as that, and dwells on the tawdry murder mystery Hollywood-style. Except there is no mystery, just how is this going to develop. I was decidedly not impressed how it developed.