The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button

[picolas]

HD

http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/thecuriouscaseofbenjaminbutton/

[Stefen]

It's up at Apple. This just looks amazing. It's made my list.

[MacGuffin]

Brad Pitt is getting younger every day
Source: Los Angeles Times

It's a tantalizing hook for a film, isn't it? What if your hero was born an old man, only to grow younger every day, from wrinkles to wrinkles, so to speak--don't they say that all little babies look like Winston Churchill? That's the premise behind David Fincher's upcoming "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," which stars Brad Pitt going from geezer-hood to infancy, and falling in love with Cate Blanchett along the way. The film is due in December and has already been touted for Oscarhood. Now that Paramount has put up its first trailer, I have no quarrel with any grand predictions.

The trailer promises us a moody, mysterious and bewitchingly bittersweet look at life, lived in an entirely unexpected way. It also offers the tantalizing possibility that Fincher, one of our era's greatest filmmakers, may have found a way (thanks to an Eric Roth script, adapted from a 1922 F. Scott Fitzgerald short story) to marry his often chilly obsession with serial killers and people in peril to a story with more emotional resonance.

If nothing else, the trailer--largely devised by Fincher, the ultimate hands-on filmmaker--reminds us that not every trailer has to play like a greatest-hits reel culled from the (fill in the blank: funniest, scariest or most exciting) scenes in a film, all so hideously pre-tested that no moment with any ambiguity or mystery could possibly survive. In terms of an opening, it's hard to top the trailer's first image:

As we pull in toward the face of a clock, the narrator (Pitt, with a New Orleans accent) says: "My name is Benjamin Button. I was born under unusual circumstances. While everyone else was aging, I was getting younger--all alone." As he finishes, the clock ticks--backward.

Propelled by French composer Camille Saint-Saens' melancholy "The Aquarium," Fincher shows us Button's life via a series of arresting images: A man rowing on a lonely lake. Pitt, studying himself in the mirror, wearing spectacles and boxer shorts, his head cocked to one side, as if bewildered by his strangely youthful appearance. A father, holding a little girl in his arms, a balloon slipping out of their hands. The trailer ends with the most bewitching image of all: A young toddler, walking with his lover, now aged, hobbling along with a cane.

Thanks to both the images and the music, the trailer does what a great trailer should--it leaves us wanting more, having tempted us with a tale that is both magical and steeped in an air of ineffable sorrow. It feels like just the kind of spooky fairy tale that Night Shyamalan could've made, if he were ever able to get out of his own head and embrace someone else's vision. But I'm eager to see the Fincher version. In the middle of summer, when you're surrounded by movies with dumb gags and cheap thrills, it's a pleasure to look forward to the work of someone who won't subject us to even an ounce of bathos or sentimentality.

[Pozer]

HD

http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/thecuriouscaseofbenjaminbutton/

Youth Withoutwho?

[cron]

awww leave that movie be, y'all.

[El Duderino]

In case anyone wants to know, you can download the script at thepiratebay.org as a PDF. I haven't read it yet, but it's next in line after The Brothers Bloom.

[MacGuffin]

David Fincher, Danny Boyle accomplish their missions
Both directors get the word out on their latest films.
By John Horn, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

TELLURIDE, Colo. -- Directors David Fincher and Danny Boyle came to the Telluride Film Festival with very different motivations for their fundamentally dissimilar films. But both will leave the festival having accomplished pretty much exactly what they needed to do.

Fincher, the director of "Fight Club," "The Game" and "Se7en," appeared at the 35th annual film festival to receive an opening-night career tribute award. In addition to his 167-minute director's cut of last year's "Zodiac," the filmmaker brought with him about 20 minutes of footage from "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," the decades-in-development reworking of F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story about the reverse aging of a boy born as an old man.

The brief glimpses of Fincher's Christmas Day release established a couple of critical facts about "Benjamin Button."

First, the collection of scenes made clear that the director and screenwriter Eric Roth have used Fitzgerald's story as more foundation than blueprint; the many departures from the original story are apparent in the period movie's opening scenes, when Button is born as an infant with a senior's face, not as a fully grown old man from tip to toe. Second, Fincher was able to show that the technology used to insert "Benjamin Button" star Brad Pitt's face onto the torsos of the stand-ins who play the title character at widely different ages is both invisible and effective: Although the body may not be Pitt's, every small facial expression is.

Finally, audiences saw in several overtly emotional clips a side of Fincher that hasn't been clearly obvious in his early work: heart.

"It's probably the most romantic movie I've ever been offered," the director said during a rare Telluride downpour. "So, yes, it's the most romantic movie I've ever made."

Fincher also wants moviegoers to realize that he does not see Fitzgerald's story as an endorsement of the line attributed to playwright George Bernard Shaw that "youth is wasted on the young," that it's a tragedy to have so little life experience when your body is willing, your attitude hopeful.

"A lot of people come away thinking that," the 46-year-old Fincher said. "But I see it the opposite way -- that youth is never wasted on the young."

A year ago, the award-season impetus for Daniel Day-Lewis began at Telluride, when in a similar tribute audiences saw early footage from the actor's Oscar-winning " There Will Be Blood." Fincher said there's no such intention behind screening the footage of "Benjamin Button."

"It's not about selling the movie -- it's a treat, an appetizer," he said. "It's not a positioning statement, it's not marketing. It's that in the last two years, we have been doing something like this, and, oh, that doesn't look like people trapped in their closet" -- a reference to his thriller "Panic Room," about a mother and daughter hiding from bad guys in a small room.

The British director Boyle landed in Telluride exhausted from racing to finish "Slumdog Millionaire" in London but also relieved that his film about an impoverished Indian teen was going to get the treatment it deserved.

"Slumdog Millionaire," which is populated with some nonprofessional actors and was filmed in Mumbai, stands among the very few movies acquired for American distribution in the last few years by Warner Independent Pictures, the specialized film unit of Warner Bros. But when Warner Bros. closed WIP earlier this year and had to accommodate several New Line movies into its fall schedule when New Line was folded, "Slumdog Millionaire's" prospects looked dim.

Warner Bros. contemplated several different options for the film, including a direct-to-video release or a sale to another distributor. As the studio sorted through the possibilities, invitations to both Telluride and the Toronto International Film Festival stood unaccepted.

"When you hear that Warner Independent Pictures has closed down, you have to be concerned," said Boyle, the director of "28 Days Later," "Millions" and "Trainspotting," among other films. "I'm experienced enough now to know to keep calm, relax and don't panic. I knew it was a good film and that people would want to see it."

That proved to be the case. Fox Searchlight, which has distributed most of Boyle's movies, last week entered into a joint "Slumdog Millionaire" deal with Warner Bros. as the invites to Telluride and Toronto were welcomed. A last-minute addition to the Telluride schedule, "Slumdog Millionaire" had its first public screening Saturday night, and the response inside the sold-out theater could not have been much more enthusiastic. The film arrives in American theaters on Nov. 28.

"It's a very sophisticated audience here, and they don't mind subtitles. In fact, they even laughed at some of them," Boyle said the day after his film's first showing. "Festivals are the great originators of non-processed material. It's where the audience declares, 'This may not fit the strict definitions of what is a big film, but we like it.' It gives the film clout, and it's something the studios pay attention to."

"Slumlord Millionaire" concerns a fictional 18-year-old orphan who uses remembrances of his very difficult life to help answer questions in the Indian version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?"

Given all that his film has been through, Boyle knows that he has been lucky. "The independent film world is clearly in a massive crisis," the director said. "We need some movies to work to get the faith back."

[MacGuffin]

Confirmed: Paramount Feuds with David Fincher Over Benjamin Button
Source: Slash Film

Last week, I screened 20 minutes of clips of scenes from David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. In our first impression article, I expressed my concern and disappointment over the footage shown, partly because I felt some of the short scenes dragged. Note: I haven't seen the entire film - I want to be clear on this..., I only screened 20 minutes of selected scenes. It was good but not great. I wasn't alone, FirstShowing and Jeff Wells also posted articles about the disappointing buzz the footage received at the festival.

In my blog posting, I told you about the rumors of Paramount's vicious fight with Fincher behind the scenes over the running time of the film. We also tried to connect the dots between the departure of Fincher's planned adaption of Heavy Metal and the rumored fight. Now The Playlist has found an interview with Kevin Eastman, creator of the Ninja Turtles and publisher of Heavy Metal, where he finally confirms the rumors:

"We developed it for Paramount in January... And it was time for them to make a decision [about going forward with the project] and they were at odds with Fincher over another project, 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,' [because] they wanted him to reduce the running time... and so they said, 'Until you step up to do what we want you to do with Benjamin, we're not going to greenlight any other of [your] movies.' And David said, 'Fine, fuck you, I'm going to set up [Heavy Metal] somewhere else,' so we jumped over to Sony and set it up there."

Yes, Fincher is a bad ass who won't take crap from anyone - including the studio who has supposedly spent over $150 million on a film aiming for award consideration. I've been told that this is his best and worst quality as a filmmaker.

But what if Paramount is right? I loved Fincher's Zodiac, but I think the theatrical cut could have benefited by losing 20-30 minutes on the back end. (Hey, there will always be a director's cut on DVD) It seems to me that Paramount might believe they are in the same situation with Button. It is worth noting that around the time of the Heavy Metal departure, the film was supposedly just under three hours long. An AICN reader saw a screening of that cut and admitted that "By an hour and a half/forty five, the audience was getting restless."

Anne Thompson's sources claim the film has since been cut to around two and a half hours, which probably meets with Fincher's studio obligations. But is that still too long? Another website reports that the latest cut is around two hours and fourty minutes. I havent seen the film, but the scenes Paramount and Fincher decided to screen at Telluride dragged in parts. I'm hoping the pacing issues will be resolved in the finished movie / in the context of the finished movie, because this film has the potential to be really magical.

[picolas]

trailer 2:

http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/thecuriouscaseofbenjaminbutton/

i don't think i've seen an hd exclusive trailer before. the makeup effects seem kinda distracting but maybe it wears off after a bit... this trailer doesn't feel new. just a dialogue-filled version of the first one. still pretty damned excited.

[Stefen]

God, this looks stunning. I remember years ago when Spike Jonze was supposed to make this with Cruise and I never understood how they could make it work without it being corny. Fincher has pulled it off, it seems.

[MacGuffin]

A Curious Life, From Old Age to Cradle
By DAVE KEHR; New York Times

GROWING old is a subject American movies have largely avoided since the 1980s, when the commercial triumphs of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas made it clear that there was money to be made in never-never land — that world of the adolescent imagination where no one ever matures and death exists only as a punch line. It surely means something that Leo McCarey's 1937 "Make Way for Tomorrow," the most deeply moving Hollywood film about old age, has never been released on DVD in the United States and has not been seen on television in many years.

A rehearsal for "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," with from left, the film's screenwriter Eric Roth; Brad Pitt, who plays Benjamin; Cate Blanchett, who plays Daisy, Benjamin's great love; and the director David Fincher.
But suddenly and unaccountably, here is "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," a big-budget studio film, set to open Christmas Day, whose central theme is human mortality, a theme the film explores using the same special effects technology, now extended into the digital realm, that American movies have used for so long to keep us trapped in perpetual childhood.

Directed by David Fincher and written by Eric Roth, "Benjamin Button" tells the epic story of its title character, played by Brad Pitt. Benjamin, as he says in his voice-over narration, "was born under unusual circumstances" on Nov. 11, 1918, the last day of World War I. As the doctor attending him describes the strange little creature, "He has all the deterioration, the infirmities, not of a newborn, but of a man well in his 80s on the way to his grave."

But Benjamin doesn't die. Instead, abandoned by his wealthy father and taken in by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), an African-American attendant at a New Orleans home for the elderly, he begins to age in reverse. By 7, he looks like a little old man in a wheelchair, peering out at the world through thick glasses. Thanks to the film's deft use of computer-generated imagery — so deft and so sophisticated that, after a few minutes, it no longer seems remarkable — those eyes are recognizably those of Mr. Pitt, and they continue to be as Benjamin moves through all the stages of his life.

As a child in the body of a 70-year-old, Benjamin learns to play the piano and makes the acquaintance of the little girl, Daisy Fuller, who will be the love of his life; he seems to be in his 60s when, as a teenager, he goes to work for a tugboat captain (Jared Harris) and learns about drinking and sex; he's a young man in his 50s when he travels to Murmansk, Russia, and has his first great affair, with the world-weary wife (Tilda Swinton) of the British trade delegate; and he is a handsome 40-year-old when he meets Daisy again, now played by Cate Blanchett as an ambitious dancer in her 20s, all fired up by George Balanchine and Agnes de Mille. As he grows younger, she grows older: for a golden moment, they meet in the middle. But time, obstinately, does not stand still.

"Benjamin Button" is based on a 9,000-word short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, first published in 1922, that had been a long-unrealized Hollywood project. When the producer Ray Stark owned the property in the 1980s, he commissioned a screenplay by Robin Swicord (she adapted the 1994 "Little Women") and took it to a number of directors, among them Mr. Spielberg and a young David Fincher, then working as a special-effects technician at Mr. Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic.

"I don't remember if Spielberg was involved, or about to be involved, or maybe he had already abandoned it at that point," said Mr. Fincher, 46. "It may have been a fact-finding mission to see if it were possible. I read it, and I thought it was beautiful, but ultimately I thought it was a love story with a capital L, and I was more interested in other things." Among those other things were, as it turned out, some of the most grimly intense films of the last decade: "Se7en" (1995), "Fight Club" (1999), "Panic Room" (2002) and "Zodiac" (2007).

"Benjamin Button" continued to make the rounds, but now as a screenplay essentially written from scratch by Eric Roth, an Oscar winner for the 1994 "Forrest Gump." More directors came and went — including Mr. Fincher's close friend Spike Jonze — before the project landed again on Mr. Fincher's desk, this time presented by the producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall.

"Kathy and Frank wanted to know out of the gate if I thought it was technically feasible," Mr. Fincher said. "Was it possible to make somebody age, to make a character you could follow from the time he's four feet tall and 85 years old until the time he's 25 inches long and 6 months old and dying? And I said — not flippantly, but just because that's what I'd been taught in my early years of working at I.L.M. — I was, 'Oh, yeah, anything you can think of, you can do.' And we went on to talk about everything else that was important about this movie other than how we were going to accomplish it technically. There was one full hour and a half where we talked about first love and first kisses and first hangovers, and what it was going to be like to follow this person and how we were going to dramatize his plight in relation to all our plights."

With its historical sweep, wide-ranging locations and large cast of supporting players, it was clear that "Benjamin Button" would be expensive. More years passed, even as Paramount worked out a co-production deal with Warner Brothers and Mr. Pitt, who had worked with Mr. Fincher on "Se7en" and "Fight Club," entered the picture. What finally brought the budget within range — around $135 million — were the tax breaks offered by moving the production to New Orleans.

The screenplay, like the story, had been set in Baltimore. "But as soon as I erased 'BALTIMORE' and wrote 'NEW ORLEANS — EXTERIOR — DAY,' " Mr. Roth said, "it took on a whole other life. Because, even prior to the hurricane, New Orleans has such a life and a sound and a smell and everything else associated with it, that it brings a whole other character to the piece."

Mr. Roth's screenplay retained little of either the short story or Ms. Swicord's work. "All that's left is the central idea, maybe a name or two," he said. "Robin thought of calling the girl 'Daisy' as a tribute to Fitzgerald and 'The Great Gatsby.' The Queenie character was a slight semblance of the nanny he had in the short story. Fitzgerald had the father, but he also had the mother stay alive, which we don't."

Queenie became pivotal. "In the short story, Queenie was just a nanny," said Ms. Henson, who plays the role. "But when Eric Roth adapted the story into a screenplay, he made Queenie the surrogate mother. To me, that one moment where she tells Benjamin that people are going to judge you by the way you look sometimes, they're not quite going to know how to receive you — that's an African-American woman raising an African-American child; that's a conversation I've had with my son several times."

"That's actually my favorite, most endearing moment in the movie," she said.

Another major invention is the framing story, in which Daisy's daughter, Caroline (Julia Ormond), reads aloud from Benjamin's diary to her elderly mother, who is dying in a New Orleans hospital as Hurricane Katrina beats on the windows with growing intensity.

"I wanted to tell the story through somebody else's eyes," Mr. Roth, 63, said. "It might have had something to do with my mother lying in her hospital bed, although she was at home, wondering if there had been a story to tell that would have helped define her, something from her life that I might not have known about. I took a number of things from her passing, and the work continued through my father's passing.

"My father, I remember, when he was a little confused, said: 'Time has just slipped out of me. Someone will have to come and clean it up,' which was pretty great," Mr. Roth said. "But everyone has the same things happen, whether you like it or not. That's why I'm hoping the movie gives people permission to kind of grieve together, in a good way. We're living through the death of our parents and seeing our children get older and have their own lives and become adults. Yet I'm hoping that the movie will resonate with people who are younger, too, that it will speak somehow to a younger generation and let them see what aging is about, even though it may not be foremost on their minds."

And in "Benjamin Button," age is indeed visible, in ways it has never been before in a movie. "We put our faith in a higher power that we would be able to figure out the performance-capture methodology," Mr. Fincher said, referring to the need to create a character who was clearly identifiable as Mr. Pitt while allowing him to age artistically. Benjamin "lives on a boat and is a seaman for most of his life," Mr. Fincher said. "We had these photographs of Andrew Wyeth. We loved the wrinkles in his face and the great compassion and wisdom that his face betrayed. We started with that and did sculptures based on life casts of Brad. We would hollow away material, take mass away from his cheeks, get more skulling around the eyes, do very fine wrinkling, do all this and scan it into a computer."

When it came time for Mr. Pitt to record his dialogue, a scanner was used to capture his facial movements. The results of the scan were used to manipulate the 3-D database of his digitally aged face, generating an almost literal "talking head." "We would take that and put it back in the scene on the shoulders of actors who were cast to play Benjamin at the different ages," Mr. Fincher said. "All of this would go into a pipeline, and 15 months after that we would be able to look at little Benjamin and know what he would look like when he was 5 years old."

Mr. Roth, referring to Mr. Fincher's track record of gritty, often violent films, noted: "People say, 'Well, gee, how does David Fincher do this movie?' It's very different for him. But if someone is artistic, they can have all sorts of various interests, which is true of David Fincher."

Mr. Fincher, of course, has his own perspective, "When I read the Robin Swicord draft, I thought, this is a love story," he said. "But when I read the Eric Roth draft, I thought, this is a love story, but it's really about death, about the total frailty of humanity. He's a character whose entire childhood is defined by the people that die around him and by how comfortable he gets with that. Imagine that you're raised with a bunch of 85-year-olds. They're not sweating the same things teenagers are. And that's where he learns everything.

"I don't know if it's a departure. I think it is. But don't you hope that they all are, in some way? After my dad died and my daughter was born, I had other things, other movies that I wanted to make. It's not a special-effects movie, that's for sure. It ain't spaceships. It's not explosions. It's about people, hopefully."

[w/o horse]

Egyptian theater:

Wednesday, December 10 – 7:30 PM

Sneak Preview! David Fincher In-Person!

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON, 2008, Paramount, 165 min. "I was born under unusual circumstances." And so begins this adaptation from the 1920s story by F. Scott Fitzgerald about a man (Brad Pitt) who is born in his eighties and ages backwards. A man, like any of us, but unable to stop time. We trace his story set in New Orleans from the end of World War I in 1918 into the 21st century, following his journey that is as unusual as any man's life can be. Directed by David Fincher, this is a time traveler's tale of the people (amongst them Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, Elias Koteas) and places he bumps into along the way, the loves he loses and finds, the joys of life and the sadness of death...and what lasts beyond time. (Screened from a digital source.) Discussion following with director David Fincher.

[MacGuffin]

'Button' undone by digital dilemma
Screening of Oscar hopeful goes awry
Source: Variety

"Welcome to digital," wrote producer Frank Marshall in a morning-after email following Thursday night's aborted unveiling of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."

Paramount had sweated every detail Thursday as the studio prepared to screen its long-anticipated Oscar hopeful to a hand-picked audience of press and prominent bizzers at the DGA Theater. Marshall and partner Kathy Kennedy were on hand to introduce the $150 million-plus pic, which they had been nurturing for 18 years.

Par execs were so eager to get the movie in front of guild and Academy members and key press that they weren't willing to wait another week for release prints. In any case, finicky director David Fincher preferred to showcase his technologically ambitious digital movie -- which deploys complex visual effects to make Brad Pitt age backward -- with a digital projector. The two trial runs during the day had gone smoothly.

But "Benjamin Button" became the latest Oscar-season victim of digital gremlins.

The picture had a peculiar green tint, and in the audience, d.p. Claudio Miranda got a sinking feeling. "Initially I thought there was something wrong with my eyes for a second. I was rubbing them," he told Daily Variety, "I said 'no way.' "

He dashed to the projection booth, and a few minutes later brought the lights up and stopped the screening. "We like green but not that much," he apologized to the packed house. "The movie's not supposed to look like that."

After several abortive attempts at addressing the absence of magenta, the screening was canceled. "On the right setting it was wrong and on the wrong setting it was right," explained Marshall, who apologized to various invitees gathered in the lobby for an impromptu party, helping themselves liberally to the planned post-show food and drink.

"When you shoot a movie digitally," Kennedy told Daily Variety later, "you're dependent on those projectors being calibrated perfectly and everything working perfectly. Even the condition of the screen is important."

Marshall added, "This is a modern-day version of the film breaking, but you can't paste it back together and keep going."

Across town at the ArcLight, another digital screening for Screen Actors Guild members went off without a hitch.

The chagrined publicists and filmmakers hastily scheduled a slew of screenings beginning Saturday at noon to accommodate those who missed the film Thursday.

Everyone pointed to the digital projection system, which Par rented for the occasion, as Thursday night's culprit.

Of course screening glitches are nothing new; broken film, busted projector bulbs and switched or missing reels have long plagued screenings. One publicist recalls with horror an unspooling of "Six Weeks" in which the second reel turned into a rabid killer dog movie. The 2006 Toronto Film Fest world premiere of "Borat" broke down and was canceled.

But pristine and perfect digital was supposed to solve all that.

An October digital screening at the Landmark of Steven Soderbergh's Spanish-language "Che" took cinema verite to a new level as it played without subtitles for 15 minutes before the lights went up and everyone was sent home. A few weeks later at the Wilshire Screening Room, subtitles from "Che" spilled over the opening minutes of "Doubt"; the problem was quickly fixed. A Miramax spokesman said the digital projector had not been "properly vetted" after the previous screening of "Che."

"Doubt" writer-helmer John Patrick Shanley laughed when told about the glitch, and recalled sitting through the entire premiere of "Joe vs. the Volcano" with the movie out of focus. "You just feel terrible," he said. "You work so hard and here are people getting their first exposure to the movie. Maybe their only exposure."

These recent problems raise questions about screening room hardware and projection-room expertise in operating new d-cinema projectors.

When Kennedy welcomed the Saturday noontime aud at the far grander Paramount Studio Theater, she quipped that it was like being "upgraded to first class." The pic proceeded with notably better color.

Afterward Kennedy and Miranda agreed that the Par venue was better for "Benjamin Button" anyway.

"Most cinemas are like this one," said Miranda. The digital projector "lives there. This one is flawless."

Aside from the DGA snafu, Par found one upside to digital screenings this season. At a Nov. 16 screening of "Revolutionary Road" at the Raleigh Pickford screening room, a woman became ill during the pic's final scene. When the audience yelled to turn on the lights, the projectionist halted the film, and an ambulance took the woman away.

After rewinding a few minutes, the movie resumed, so the audience could get the full impact of the climax. That would have been impractical with a film print.

[MacGuffin]

International Trailer

[Sleepless]

As awesome as this film looks, and as excited as I am about it... I'm kinda fed up of it already.