476 The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

[Tom Hagen]

PLUS: An essay by film critic Kent Jones

Do I win a prize or something?

Jones was a spot-on educated guess. It would be nice if they could include the Fincher Q&A that Amy Taubin did online for Film Comment.

[jbnugent]

Pleasantly surprised to see this wonderful film getting the Criterion treatment, even if their involvement is minimal (per the David Prior e-mail info mentioned it the "What?!?..." thread).

On a somewhat related note- someone summarized Ebert's review of this film earlier in the thread. I usually look to Ebert first after seeing a movie to get his take, and have found his reviews to be in sync with my impressions. We could not have been more polar on our opinions of this film. Honestly, remarking about the repugnance of making love to an older woman? He completely missed the depth of love shared between the two characters. Love is truly blind. Timeless and ageless as well. To put Ebert's growing disconnect in perspective, see his praise for "The Happening". I found Button to be a wonderful story, despite its departures from the source material. Gump similarities aside, this was a well made and well told story that I thoroughly enjoyed. to each his own...

My 2 cents.

Jimmy

Apparently moved from the "What?!?..." thread, where the Ebert summary is referenced.

[MoonlitKnight]

This film struck me as a cross between "Forrest Gump" (same screenwriter, so what do you expect?) and "The Elephant Man." It's definitely not as slick, glossy, emotionally sterile, or as self-important as most big studio awards season entries these days.

[Napier]

That being said, I tried to watch this twice in the theater and fell asleep both times. And no I'm not narcoleptic, I once sat through a Hitchcock triple feature at the Brattle, and yes there were two long Hitch's in there. Strangers, NBNW and Notorious. I made it through that, but not poor Benjamin.

[domino harvey]

No reading the DVD Beaver review in this thread [-X

[CSM126]

What moron thought it would be cute to make you select the individual chapters of the docu seperately if you want "MAterial not included in PLAY ALL"? What's the point? Is it supposed to be like extra special double probation secret deleted scenes? That's the dumbest idea I've heard of in a while. But it seems to fit with the general stupdiity of the guy who produced the disc and went around blabbering about Criterion being hard to work with.

Oh, and those menus he was so proud of designing look like something Criterion would have put out in 1999. Slap the original bar logo on top of them and voila. That fake menu someone posted on youtube is more visually pleasing.

And to think this will be so many a person's introduction to the Criterion brand. Oi.

[exte]

The menus are fine and elegant.

[domino harvey]

Perhaps if I was making a banner for my Geocities fan page that shadow font would be appropriate. In any other context, including DVD menus, it ain't.

[Mr Sausage]

Any further posts whining about Benjamin Button being in the collection will be deleted along with those just removed. We already had a thread dedicated to that very topic, which gave you plenty of opportunities to bitch and moan before it got closed because you guys couldn't resist insulting each other along with the movie.

[kaujot]

So Paramount and/or Fincher's people wouldn't even let Criterion get away with the figure-8 case. Ouch.

[cdnchris]

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button DVD Review

[Tribe]

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button DVD Review

Interesting how the supplements disc has the copyright warning and the like. I wonder if the non-Criterion personnel involved in this project also wanted the same warnings on the movie disc.

[cdnchris]

Blu-ray review. I don't have captures yet, but I'll have some up tomorrow.

Interesting how the supplements disc has the copyright warning and the like. I wonder if the non-Criterion personnel involved in this project also wanted the same warnings on the movie disc.

The Blu-ray does the same thing. Maybe it was some sort of compromise, though annoying when you just want to get to the supplements menu. While I think Paramount had more to do with the production of the disc than Criterion, it at least has the same look and feel of a Criterion Blu-ray, with the same menu navigation and timeline feature. It's just that opening of the second disc that is annoying.

[eerik]

Blu-ray.com review

[bearcuborg]

I couldn't find a credit in the booklet (if you can call it that, it's 3 pages folded up) for the designer of the DVD package. Is this usual for a Criterion release?

[domino harvey]

My guess is that it like everything else was done in-house at Paramount and they probably have a contractual policy to not credit their designers.

[Narshty]

I was curious to see what Kent Jones would say about this unfortunate film in his essay. Alas, in the opening paragraph:

I don’t think any of us, however, would have guessed that Fincher, with Zodiac and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, would achieve a vision of time so heartbreakingly acute as to rival those of John Ford and Orson Welles.

*speechless*

Every second of Benjamin Button, every shot and every cut, every gesture and every facial expression, every turn in its narrative and every visual effect, is devoted to the contemplation of time’s passing.

The question is, is there any movie that doesn't contemplate time's passing, even by virtue of having a narrative in which one event impacts upon another? "Every shot and every cut" made me laugh, because I didn't realise visual mastery extended to TV-style coverage and 3-second average shot lengths for most scenes. From this film, it seems Fincher has a hard-on for doing as many set-ups as possible, especially including as many of them as he can in the final cut.

With Pitt, he achieves a character who not only breaks every dramatic rule in the screenwriting playbook but amounts to a potent and moving archetype.

When your titular character is a vacuum, the words "potent" and "moving" seem a little eccentric.

Fincher is a director who knows his craft inside and out. He is also an artist who knows what to use it for, which is why amazement over the seamless technical feat of creating Benjamin out of so many different sources and disciplines tends to disappear early on. In film after film made in the digital era, technical wizardry is the tail that wags the dog. For Fincher, it is just another expressive tool.

Amazement does indeed disappear early on, for me along the lines of: "There's a CGI shot." "And another." "That's all computers." "More compositing." I'm trying to think of a single instance of technical wizardry not being an expressive tool and am coming up blank.

And the film’s beautifully measured pace, set like Pitt’s performance to New Orleans time, never stops to linger over this or that technical achievement.

But lingering, instead of such over-editing, would go a much better way to make an audience absorb something and then be able to feel its loss. The movie just rattles headlong through unconnected incidents in an attempt to feign plot and scope.

This must be the most ludicrous, unconvincing piece of effusion Criterion has ever included in a release.

[CSM126]

This must be the most ludicrous, unconvincing piece of effusion Criterion has ever included in a release.

Oh I dunno. That Armageddon essay was pretty rediculous. They allowed the writer to outright deride the film's critics as being mentally handicapped

Armageddon is not for the faint-hearted, the slow-witted, or the dim-eyed. (Those who claim that it was hard to tell where characters were in relation to each other in the space should take another look.)

and this BS

It is true that Armageddon, a perfect example of Bay’s work, illustrates his “take-no-prisoners” form of storytelling, in which he trusts an audience to figure things out. (One of its strengths is its minimum of dreadful exposition that over-explains the inevitable pseudoscience.) Yes, it gives audiences a lot to absorb. Yes, it cuts quickly from place to place, person to person, event to event. But it is never confusing, never boring, and never less than a brilliant mixture of what movies are supposed to do: tell a good story, depict characters through active events, invoke an emotional response, and entertain simply and directly, without pretense.

basically says movies are better if they're dumb and mostly plotless and smart films with actual story are garbage. Oi.

[bearcuborg]

Narsh, good post. I read that and threw up a little in my mouth too. However, this is Kent Jones we're talking about here...so, at least the source is bullshit to begin with...

And CSM, I never read the Armageddon piece, but yeah...that shit is ridiculous despite the fact that I kind of like the movie.

And, back to TCCOBB, did anyone else notice this?

[colinr0380]

Jeanine Basinger was Michael Bay's tutor at University so she shouldn't be considered to be a disinterested observer of the career of one of her most successful students and able to offer an unbiased critique! (And the fawning Armageddon essay seems rather restrained compared to the four hour Bay/Basinger love-in on their commentary over the director's cut of Pearl Harbor!)

[Rich Malloy]

Not since "Solo con tu whatever" has a Criterion film been such a chore for me to sit through.

I've never read Fitzgerald's short story, but I consider myself something of a fan of the author. To put a finer point on it, "Gatsby" was one of those novels that impacted me greatly as a young reader and has stayed with me as few other books have. I'm so besotten, that even the somewhat arch closing line brings me to tears whenever I have cause to recite those words out loud.

But even if I dismiss those details that Fincher obviously added to a story I haven't read - not just the Katrina setting, but perhaps even the entirety of that utterly unnecessary framing device of Daisy on her deathbed being read the Button diary - even dismissing all those elements, I can find neither point nor purpose to this story.

I can't even grasp the purpose of the narrative's main conceit. Somebody help me out here: is there anything illuminating about having Button age backwards?

I've got nothing against any of the principals of this film. Fincher, I like, Fitzgerald, I love. Pitt, I admire. Blanchette, I adore. But getting from beginning to end of this film was nothing less than a chore, and I find that I've taken absolutely nothing away from the experience save the niggling, depressing sense that my boyhood esteem for Fitzgerald should perhaps be reconsidered.

[souvenir]

I wouldn't view Fitzgerald any less because of the film. The only thing they took from his story was the premise and the title. It's otherwise unrecognizable.

[cdnchris]

Yes, the story is completely different and the movie has next to nothing to do with it.

[Rich Malloy]

I wouldn't view Fitzgerald any less because of the film. The only thing they took from his story was the premise and the title. It's otherwise unrecognizable.

I should have read Fitzgerald's short before posting my thoughts. I've spent the last 20 minutes doing so.

Whew. Not only is there no idiotic framing device, there's no Daisy, even. And Mr. Gateau's hamfisted signifier of the bleeding obvious is not an invention of Fitzgerald's, thank god, despite calling to mind certain other portentious edifices and monuments in his work. More than that, this work of farce contains not one ounce of the perfunctory sentimentality that lards Fincher's film like little saccharine bomblets, each as false as Kevin Smith's dialog or Tim Burton's forced whimsy.

Although I'd not place it among F. Scott's upper tier works, it does not even remotely resemble this unfortunate film. If I represented the Fitzgerald estate, I'd sue to remove that credit... er, blame.

[Svevan]

I can't even grasp the purpose of the narrative's main conceit. Somebody help me out here: is there anything illuminating about having Button age backwards?

I think Cate Blanchett's character pretty clearly states the flick's "main conceit" when she says "We're meeting in the middle." To me, the extended scenes of Blanchett and Brad's perfect life together are the main part of the film, even though they come late. The first hour and a half or so of the flick are mostly existential, about Brad being misplaced in the world and malformed in comparison to everyone else, but the section with Blanchett and Brad is where everything clicks. That a person, or two people, have only a short period of time where things will be perfect is I think where the film's (uneven) themes settle best. Yes it's sentimental, but in a certain way it reminds me of the aging and flashback structure in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp; both films are about living in a world where you don't feel like a full participant. Blimp feels outworn and useless in old age, while Button's mismatch of body and spirit, and subsequent outsider perspective, lasts for the majority of his life (except the aforementioned "perfect" period in his and Blanchett's lives).

I don't think there's anything deeper than that - the film's ending ("some are dancers") confused me as to what the whole enterprise was about. Gonna rewatch it soon to reassess.