It's been a few years since Alice Sebold's wonderfully moving The Lovely Bones was optioned.  It could have been an overly sweet book about going to heaven.  Instead, it gets under your skin to become one of the best novels of the decade. Hollywood loved it.

Time passed, and, man, does this sound like a terrific movie.  First, it's got Peter Jackson as director, and thank heaven he's doing this an not the video game movie, Halo, right now.  Jackson also wrote the screenplay.

The cast looks terrific, too: Rachel Weisz, Michael Imperioli, Stanley Tucci, Ryan Gosling, Susan Sarandon and young Irish actress Saoirse Ronan (The Clinic, Proof)as the little girl who was raped and murdered.  Hopefully, The Lovely Bones will be much more than a tearjerker.