Film/TV Dec 23, 2008 at 4:00 am

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: He's His Own Grandpa

Two-bit man-child.

Comments

1
bring on the old-baby pitt... i could use a good cry.
2
I'm sure the "unconvincing fit" will work better with several bowls of pot. I'm excited for it.
3
Paul,

Speaking for myself, the reason the film fell short was the writing.

With Forest Gump, Roth was able to give the audience a love story that was tangible. Forest & Jenny shared a deep and rich history with one another. They grew up together, played together, received an education together. I could see how a man would fall in love. It's why I still ball my eyes out when he talks to her grave.

But with Benjamin, I was left wanting more. Their shared experiences were rather brief, and I felt that she basically just showed up, and hey, let's move in together.

(Don't worry, NO spoiler) And the ending, well, I had problems with it. It felt like everything Benjamin's mother taught him was discarded and forgotten for lack of courage to live this imparted wisdom: We are all human. We all share this bond. But we all have different paths.

But the film is visually beautiful, and yes, moving at times. (Fincher's still one of my favorites)

I don't know. Maybe it's just me. I'm sure if I watched it while knocking back a few beers, I would have left the theatre in a T-shirt covered with tears and snot.

Merry Christmas.
4
It feels like you devoted the entire last paragraph to the hummingbirds, desperately trying to find something to complain about. Both scenes involving a hummingbird put together don't even amount to a minute.
5
Paul, your last few sentences are way too broad. they seem like your harsh summation of a movie that you praised highly for the majority of your review. If its flaws are endearing, and some scenes amount to cinematic perfection, just how unsettling are these mawkish scenes?
6
@ DVD Player Slash Toaster

They aren't unsettling at all. The only thing you'll find unsettling and forced is the relationship with Cate. She's unlikeable even in her prime (The pool scene and after). Pitt was her last resort, and the movie somehow thinks we should pardon that. They never had a connection. There was a scene with them under a table that was interrupted almost immediately, and then there was "write to me." Um, okay. So, when he was her last resort, they buy a house together and constantly fuck. Then she gets pregnant. We were supposed to feel like that's love. I guess it was. Or something.
7
(Spoilers)

Although she did come around in the end. She was old and likely bored as hell, so dealing with his dementia felt like the right thing to do. It worked out.

I loved it.
8
It's sentimental on the surface, but I came away from Button with this cold, eerie macabre feeling. It was not the best movie for someone as obsessed with mortality as I am.
Maybe it was how the undercurrent of the film was how almost every plot point is punctuated with death, and it's meant to show how we should appreciate life, but paired with the grotesque image of a man living out his youth as a near-corpse, it made me feel super-icky.
9
@DVDetc.: Not just the scenes with the hummingbirds, but several of the other scenes—just about everything in the trailer actually; I'm thinking of the space shuttle launch and Pitt on a motorcycle looking like the Wild One and trying to find himself like a Beat and the scene where Pitt and Blanchett are being young and enthusiastic and watching the Beatles on TV—feel tossed into the movie to make it something it isn't. Whereas it's a movie about growing old, there are attempts to make the thing into Forrest Gump. Sorry I couldn't fit all the examples in, but with 300 words, it's difficult to get started sometime. The movie left me feeling sad and empty (but in a good way); I think it works fairly well, and I think it'd be better at about an hour and a half.
10
Paul, wasn't that the Apollo launch...so much for historical accuracy, huh.
11
Too Long, Sluggish Pace and I thought Pitt was all that, it was NOT all that it cracked up for me..
12
I've always wondered whether I'd have liked Forrest Gump but for that unsavory crypto-fascist aftertaste (well-satired, if not directly or deliberately, in Volker Schlondorff's The Ogre, with John Malkovich as a noble idiot held rapt by the mystic grandeur of Nazism). Maybe not; its sun-drenched aesthetic was handled with more comic-strip flair by Tim Burton in Big Fish.

I'm intrigued by this one, and will generally see anything Fincher does. We'll see how it works out for me.
13
You know, I never liked Big Fish. People are always fawning over that movie, like, "Oh, that was SOOOO beautiful! That movie's about a FATHER and SON's bond, you see."

Gimme a break. It was syrupy, nauseatingly sentimental and Albert Finney made me want to punch the movie screen.

Billy Crudup stalking about, scowl-ridden and whining wasn't especially enticing either.

I don't think I laughed once.

Tim Burton hasn't made a good film in a long time.
14
The father/son thing seemed secondary to me. I liked that Burton brushed up against the creepy gothic underbelly that actually makes kitschy Americana and hazy nostalgia . . . edifying? I dunno. He seems to grant it a veracity that the reactionary strains of Gump simply couldn't match. Or maybe I'm just looking for a fancy way of saying it was kinda cool, and rang true for any of us who grew up in small, shitkicker towns, listening to the Smiths and dreaming of escape, and who now have some sort of appreciation for what we had (not that we're likely to go back any time soon).

I don't suppose I laughed once, either, at least not particularly hard. But I wasn't there for laughs, or for a father/son bond. My interests were, as always, strictly experiential; narrative and comedy are the sorts of things with which people interrupt the trip. I was more engaged with it as a series of images that balanced love for a bucolic past and an outsiders seething contempt for same, all through the gauze of memory (or years of psychedelic use). Or something like that.

The script was a formality, at best.
15
This was the gumpiest piece of schlock I've seen since the origional F.G. I hope you were well compensated for praising this steaming, tear-soaked turd of smarmy Brad Pitt on CGI acid. I had the ill-fortune of attending this gem with my mother, otherwise i would have walked out.
The stand out scene for me was the "happy couple in love" montage to fucking Beatles while they fucked in front of the fire and painted each other and their period-appropriate apartment while sporting fashions of the day. It reminded me of myself when I was an independently wealthy, backwards-aging Brad Pitt shacking up with a crippled, anorexic redhead.
16
Historical accuracy my ass. Like a tugboat would really cross the atlantic. Like the ratty crew of the tugboat would really be in the same hotel as the british ambassador. Like upper-class little girls were allowed to wear pants in the 30s. Like a black and white man could really sit together on a bus in the South in the 30s. And is it just me, or did they recycle some footage from & years in Tibet?
17
Just want to say that I've been to Murmansk, and Mr Fincher, that was no Murmansk.
18
Really? I thought this was one of the worst films of the year:

http://mattpayton.tumblr.com/post/678892…
19
A lot of people seem to like this movie - I have no idea why. It was absolute torture to sit through, in my opinion. The two main characters were boring in the extreme. Did they actually have any personalities or conversations? I didn't care in the least about their romance - and found it a little creepy. Aging backward is an interesting gimmick for about a minute - but this seemed to go on forever. It seemed visually uninspired despite the beauty and talent of the actors. The humming bird at the end was so sappy that I wished I could slap the director in the face and demand a refund of my time and money.
20
After seeing this movie I would have thought the guy who wrote Forrest Gump would sue the writer of Button. Until I found out they were the same guy.

http://www.scene-stealers.com/blogs/benj…

I wonder how much he got paid for being soooo creative?

Please wait...

Comments are closed.

Commenting on this item is available only to members of the site. You can sign in here or create an account here.


Add a comment
Preview

By posting this comment, you are agreeing to our Terms of Use.