Netflix delivered The Curious Case of Benjamin Button to Kamran’s apartment a good month ago. I’m the one who put it on our list, yet I’m the one who kept dragging my feet, because three hours of Brad Pitt doesn’t excite me like it does normal women.
I’m trying to catch Kamran up on five seasons of “Lost” so we’ll both be prepared for the final season when it airs in January, so we spent a few hours on Friday night and all morning Saturday watching episodes from season two. Kamran was getting too good at guessing exactly what was going to happen next (seriously, am I the only one who’s taken by surprise by every minute of the show?), so we stopped at one point and decided to finally watch Benjamin Button so we could send it back and stock up on Halloween movies to give us an excuse to eat loads of candy pumpkins.
It sucked. We didn’t care about any of the characters, though they were obviously intended to be intriguing in the way all of the characters in movies like Amélie or Fargo are. And the worst part was that it seemed like Benjamin’s getting younger really had no effect on anything. Aside from kissing a woman for the first time as an old man, any of it could have happened to someone who wasn’t aging backward. And the Hurricane Katrina stuff? CRAP, and obviously not from the Fitzgerald short story.
To be fair, there were two scenes I liked:
1) Benjamin leaves Daisy because he’s growing too young and doesn’t want her to have to take care of both him and their baby. As he’s walking out in the middle of the night, she opens her eyes, and they silently look at each other for a moment before he walks out the door.
2) Daisy’s grown daughter reads postcards written by Benjamin to her. They say totally vague and cheesy one-liners like “do the things you love”, but they still touched me somehow.
I just find it insane that this was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar the year after There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men were, especially when there were so many good films that year that The Diving Bell and the Butterfly wasn’t even nominated.
What did I miss in the movie that everyone else saw?
6 Comments
Haven’t seen it and probably won’t.
Honestly, my grudge against it stems from the fact that Daisy’s a ballet dancer, and I don’t like watching movies with dancers in them. It makes me nostalgic.
And since “nostalgia” is an emotion in a category other than Happy and Rage, I want nothing to do with it.
I liked this movie, but I would never say it was that special, plus it was way too long. I think I just liked it because upon leaving the theater (where I was crying) I seriously cried in the car all the way home. I’m such a softie when it comes to “we-will-never-ever-in-a-million-years-be-together-but-I-want-you-so-badly” romances.
BTW I watched “Grey Gardens” a couple of nights ago, thanks to your recommendation. I thought it was pretty fascinating, but made me really want to take a shower afterward and get rid of my two cats.
I enjoyed it, in a kind of passive way. Then in the car on the way home, Jamie and I started listing all the ways in which it was actually Forrest Gump. Then someone actually made a movie of that and put it on YouTube. And the circle of life is complete.
The “OHHH” really made that title.
Yeah. I don’t regret not seeing this.
At least with movies like The Saw there’s a small element of surprise or mystery. Yes, you know how it’s going to end and you know who’s going to die. But you don’t know the order in which characters will die, nor the precise method of their execution.
Every part of Benjamin Button was completely predictable. If any character wasn’t a cliche, it’s because the character was a combination of cliches.
Another part of the Benjamin Button hype that I didn’t understand is how people thought the makeup/special effects were so incredible. Destroying Manhattan or sinking the Titanic are amazing effects.
Making someone look really old? That’s an impressive trick for a grade school play.
Yo! That movie sucked Donkey Balls.
The movie was so boring that I almost died.
I was literally walking towards the white light for a few minutes.