OK, so with the light of dawn, I'm not quite as mad about the movie adaptation of the book. But at 1 a.m., I finally broke down and took a sleep aid because every time I would settle in to sleep, the images would begin and I didn't want nightmares. So I would perk up and try to shift my thoughts somewhere else.
In all fairness, perhaps the written word does not disturb me as much as visual images. But I do think there is more to it than that. I got the book out and my husband and I will re-read it, fresh after watching the movie so I can have a witness.
In the book, the girl dies in the first 15 pages. I didn't keep track in the movie, but they took a really long time to set up the characters, and to set up the creepy guy and for the murder to take place. Then, following the murder, (she isn't raped in the movie as she is in the book), they show the scene of creep-man's bathroom where you see mud and blood everywhere, and a straight razor sitting on the side of the sink. OK, that is enough to do me in. I don't recall any of that imagery from the book. It was bad enough the way she died in the book but that wasn't the REASON for the book. The murder was the catalyst of the book.
They spend a WHOLE lot of time focusing on the family dynamics after the murder and OK, I'll have to re-read it, but I don't remember that the creep was a mass-serial killer...was he? Who kept scrapbooks and newspaper clippings and a sketch book of his trap contraptions? They spent a great deal of time on HIM. And the Family, and the Dad. Not so much on the Heaven transition.
As I remember the book, a girl dies in a bad way, and then has an experience of the afterlife that was very different than anything I've ever encountered, I thought it was interesting. And as I remember it, she was instrumental in solving her own murder...that was the purpose for her staying longer.
I don't recall a budding romance, or her channeling into a girl from school who could see spirits so her boyfriend could give her her first, and last kiss.
From my perspective, they got it all wrong. They focused on the grisly and the spooky and the suspense and left out the spiritual which is what *I* thought the book mainly focused on. The love and the transition, along with justice for creep-man.
I didn't used to think of myself as a prude, so it makes me feel like an old person...like my mother or grandmother to say that I find so much of movies and TV increasingly upping the ante on the fear, violence, brutality, sexuality, and dysfunction of the world and everything needs to be loud, flashy, multiple frames per second assault on the senses. Is that due to my age?
Part of my frustration at times, is the over-the-top portrayals of spirituality, life after death, ghosts, etc. I quit watching Medium and Ghost Whisperer because they just kept making it scarier and scarier, and more brutal. Ghost's don't appear that way. I've never seen ONE who showed up mangled or in the gruesome form in which they died. They appear, most often in the way they were happiest, at an age or time that you would most recognize them...not all ghoulish and freaky. While I'm happy that media is starting to take an interest in the supernatural and spiritual in a more mainstream way, they are portraying it in a way that makes it frightening to people and keeps in shrouded in a place where the average person dare not go. That's a problem...a separate problem from this movie.
I wish we had gone to see Dear John instead. Maybe next weekend.
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