watching the lovely bones again

I just watched the lovely bones again from years and years ago (I don't really remember, except it's got great visuals, peter jackson directed it, his great landscapes.. I also just watched the three lord of the rings for the first time so.. and filming in NZ too, I remember seeing a lot of lotr tourist packages when I went there in the summer) and it's great, I know it was a book first, and I did read a bit of it, it was really surreal and hard to read at the age I tried to read it. saoirse ronan is brilliant actress, and her narration was perfect too, just like how she'd be if she was stuck in the in between between life and death. its a tragically beautiful story, a fourteen year old girl murdered and watching over her family, but what stands out in this film is the surreal landscapes that I haven't really seen much in films, like a surreal painting, elements from her real life crashing into her in between, and the way it was directed, very visually strange... like, the ship-in-a-bottles that she and her father worked on crashing onto the beach she was in, hugely upscaled.. and the ball that belonged to a previous victim of her murderer... and these symbols crossover in real life too, and her father could feel her presence, like when he held that decayed flower but it bloomed for a second, at the same time she took out the flower from the box that held her body in the real world, and how the candle flickered in the reflection but not in real life... little things like this that shows that she was still there with them even with her life being taken away so abruptly. in the beginning when she was just killed it seemed that she was just in another dimension of the same town, and I always find that concept distressing and extremely horrific, like you're so close but so far, truly a placeless place. (could that be heterotopic? not a confirmed place though)

there was a part where she tries to get to this gazebo near the beginning (where she was supposed to meet that boy and the landscape turns watery, and she cant get there, shes sinking, and its that unstable earth feeling that similar to the earthquake-like feeling I experience in dreams (and in real life in NZ in 2011) but also this reminds me strongly to that scene in *tales from earthsea, when he had that nightmare when the landscape turns into sludge and he can barely move, which, now that I think about it, also is similar in *howl's moving castle, when sophie was in the past and seeing howl in that world, and the memory is slipping and she's sinking in the ground,, which is happened in the quicksand scene in *nausicaa too, when they slipped into the underground part,, I didn't realise this kind of sinking happens so much in ghibli movies but even in *spirited away she was slipping under that sludge from that river god bath, reminiscent to how she nearly drowned as a child,, it's this total feeling of things slipping out of control and every move you make is making everything more difficult/worse, and the fear of death by smothering/drowning, and it feels surreal/dream-like because you always see it in movies and never really experience in real life...

i'm definitely taking inspiration of the upscaling of objects like they did in the lovely bones, like its a sure indication of 'this is not reality' ... it would be good to look at some surreal paintings too... also, to rewatch that beginning scene of *rango.