The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button

Not long after I saw Avatar in January, me and my friend Sean were casually discussing TV shows that were incredibly good but poorly marketed and subsequently cancelled before finding a larger audience. The usuals were tossed around: Arrested Development, Mr. Show (my all-time favorite show), Boomtown, blah blah blah, you get the gist. Somewhere along the line, my friend referenced an episode of Lost and I had to admit my never having seen it. I explained it wasn't like I didn't want to but it seemed like one of those shows that you couldn't pick up mid-season and really "get." Even with a dedicated Lost Groupie in the room with you, explaining who each character is, how they're all interconnected, who fucked who, who wanted to fuck who, what the Dharma Initiative was/is, why that nerdy little Ben guy keeps getting his face pummeled by everyone who comes onto the screen, what's up with John Locke, etc, I knew I'd have to start with Season 1, Episode 1. It would take a Mormon-style commitment but Sean called it "the best show he's ever seen" and coming from him, that carries some weight. 

As it turns out, you can watch all the past episodes of Lost on a number of websites, everything from Netflix to Hulu to ABC.com. I Q'd up season 1 in my Netflix and said to myself, "If this is one of those gay-ass bandwagon shows like American Idol, I'm gonna be so pissed." 


That was eight weeks ago. 

I became the worst kind of addict to Lost. Season 1 got in my brain like heroin and I was hooked. That show is like Gilligan's Island on PCP. They should rename the show Lost: It's Complicated. But once you start, much like hookin', you can't quit. My wife was on the phone with a producer from 'Intervention.' I would spend an entire weekend watching show after show after show. Not just to get caught up but because I wanted answers, goddammit. It was really touch-and-go for a while there. About a week ago, I got completely caught up with the show and now I look forward to Tuesday nights like compulsive eaters look forward to buffets opening. I still have more questions than answers but I'm hoping this final season will tie everything together finally or I predict riots. No joke, I'll loot and burn things if no one explains the damn numbers by the end of the series finale. I'm also 99% certain there will be a tie-in to another J.J. Abrams show, FlashForward. If you haven't been watching that show, the new episodes premiere this week, March 18th!


So for those of you that have been persistently asking what the hold-up has been on another review: That's where I've been... I never intended to quit doing my blog but once you've heard Kate's siren call, it's Game Over, man. Once I snapped out of it and came crashing back to reality, not spending every waking moment trying to squeeze in "just one more episode!" or recruiting my friends, cult-style, to watch the show with me, I had some free time to start watching movies again. Last week, I blew the dust off the DVD's I got in the mail several weeks back and sat down to enjoy...

Theatrical Release: Christmas Day 2008

Genre: Drama

Sub-Genre: Para-Chick Flick

Starring...


Brad Pitt as the one with the Curious Case


Tilda Swinton as Elizabeth Abbott (a British redhead who's about as appealing as copy paper)


Cate Blanchett as Daisy (the redhead he seriously trades-up for)


Jared Harris as Captain Mike Hawk (at least that's how I heard his name pronounced)


Taraji P. Henson as Queenie (who never aged until one day she was just dead)

Overview: A baby is born on the same day The Great War ends. Also making it's debut on this day: A clock in the New Orleans train station that runs backwards. I'm sorry, no one was pissed about this? I realize the guy the city of New Orleans commissioned to build a giant clock was blind but he said he purposely built the clock to run in reverse. Asshole... It's a useless clock now, isn't it?! By the way, 'The Great War' is the name for World War I that's used by people so old they were literally born in a barn, then got on with their chores. So Benjamin Button is born on this wackiest of days looking more like an angry, wrinkled old man than most babies do. He's also born with old man afflictions: Arthritis, cataracts, an addiction to NCIS, and an inability to control his bowels. Naturally, Benjamin's birth mother dies rather than raise a baby with reverse progeria, and his father drops him off with cabfare on the steps of an old folks home, where he can access all the oatmeal and Fox News and old man wants. 

As Benjamin grows up, his old fart's body gets younger but he's mentally just a little kid. This leads to cringe-worthy scenes of discomfort, like when you see an 80-year-old Benjamin up in the middle of the night with a 6-year-old Daisy, playing "fort" under a table. I got a little bile in my throat when Benjamin says to Daisy, "I'm not as old as I look..." which I'm sure is on a NAMBLA bumper sticker somewhere. So Ben gets older (younger?), discovers girls (thanks to a hooker with a heart of gold), and gets a job on a tugboat with a tattooed old sailor. He bounces around the world, never stops loving Daisy, nails a married chick, goes to war, finds out who his Dad is, becomes a millionaire button empire magnate (Button's buttons, seriously?), and buys a shrimping boat with Lieutenant Dan.

Expectations: Low to Medium - The preview always showed Brad Pitt riding a motorcycle... without a helmet! Not very safety conscious. 

I refuse to feel sorry for a birth defect that causes you to be born old, ugly, and crippled and then you "deteriorate" into Brad Pitt. Hell, I was born with a harelip but I'm not growing into Girard Butler as the years go by. The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button is based on a short story written by the full-time alcoholic and part-time author, F. Scott Fitzgerald. The idea is a good one, a baby born old who grows younger as his life progresses, but when I watched the movie I found myself creeped out more often than I felt sympathy for Benjamin. The only time Benjamin could really enjoy his life is somewhere in his mid-30's to mid-40's. Before then, he'd just be a 20-something who looks 60 (think Nicole Richie) and then you end up falling for some middle-aged lady who looks like Conan O'Brien when she says, "I can feel the wind in your cheek." On the other hand, if you wait until you're 60 but you look 20, you're gonna be the weird college-age kid in the club wearing a cardigan, sensible loafers, and Brut by Faberge. I could never get past this feeling of awkwardness and it carried through the whole movie for me. 


I also found myself drifting off repeatedly thinking of questions the movie never addresses or seemed incongruent with the symptoms of Benjamin Button's disease. Some of these questions I couldn't (and still can't) seem to answer...

Is he going to be a 70-year-old who looks 7 and has a thing for geriatrics? 

If Benjamin was born with all those old man maladies and then he had zits when he got older/younger, why did he also have dementia (an old man's disease) when he was physically 10?

He dies as an old baby. Nine months after he's dead, is he just going to be a sperm in a coffin?

When he's 21, he looks 60 and ends up nailing Tilda Swinton, who's about 40. Does that make her a Cougar? Is she robbing the cradle or robbing the grave here?

As he grew younger, he shrank into a little baby. Why wasn't he born a full-grown old man? It would've explained his mother dying during child birth. No detailed explanation needed. I saw Aliens, I can imagine it would've been a lot like this for her...

I guess all of these glaring, unanswered questions were no big whoop for the Academy Awards, um, academy, who nominated the movie for 13 Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Actor (which should've gone to Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler but instead went to that tool, Sean Penn). The film went home with three Oscars, all for Makeup, Visual Effects, and Art Direction, which the film admittedly deserved. I think it was too mediocre a movie to win Best Picture but apparently that doesn't matter anymore, does it? I'm looking right at you, The Hurt Locker.


Not a bad movie if you've got a rainy Saturday afternoon to kill or if you've got a new girlfriend and you wanna play a lengthy movie to make out during. As far as I'm concerned, I'll probably always want answers to my questions about this "disease." 

Overall: 5 out of 10. At 2 hours and 45 minutes, this movie is just too damn long. It's a full half-hour longer than the movie it's ripping off in the first place, Forrest Gump. The only difference between the two films is the disease the title characters are suffering from: Benjamin Button has reverse progeria (aka Benjamin Button's disease) and Forrest Gump was a moron. Here's a laundry list of identical plot points and characters featured in both films:

Benjamin Button	Forrest Gump
Daisy	Jenny
Capt Mike	Lieutenant Dan
Adventures on a tug boat	Adventures on a shrimping boat
Daisy rejects Benjamin's love when she's young and having fun	Ditto. Replace “Daisy” with “Jenny”
Set in the South (New Orleans)	Set in the South (Greenbow, Alabama... It's in the county of Greenbow)
Becomes independently wealthy when his Dad dies	Becomes independently wealthy through sheer dumb luck
Battle scene with German U-boat where Capt Mike loses his life	Battle scene with VC where Lt. Dan loses his legs
Queenie	Mama
Daisy returns to Benjamin one-day, out of the blue	Jenny returns to Forrest one-day, out of the blue
Daisy gets hit by a car	Jenny gets hit by the AIDS
Benjamin Button disease	Asperger's
Set against the backdrop of Hurricane Katrina, for no discernible reason	Hurricane Camille is in there somewhere
Ran away to India to get over Daisy	Ran across the country because he “just felt like running”

I'm just sayin', someone should be getting sued.

Best Scene: The battle with the German U-boat. There are some tense moments immediately before the tracer rounds start flying through the air at the tugboat. Awesome imagery of the gunfight, gratifying end result. Poor Theodore, though...

What my wife said: "I figured since they showed him as a baby-sized old man, wouldn't he be an adult-sized baby?" Well put, Jessi...

Who would enjoy this movie: Girls who are into The Bachelor. Guys who are into girls who are into The Bachelor.

Watch it if you like: Forrest Gump. Better yet, just watch Forrest Gump again...

Next in the Q: I've got two movies on the way, Pulp Fiction and District 9. Not sure if I'm gonna do a review of either but it'd likely be Quentin Tarantino's Travolt-Comeback Vehicle, if I had to choose between the two...

If Vinny Barbarino was from Oklahoma.