The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button

[New Feeling]

they stole my idea of illustrating chance & fate though. i hate when they do that.

pretty sure Run Lola Run and Femme Fatale have already illustrated this point, among others I'm sure, and more gracefully than the scene in Benjamin Button.  In fact I thought that scene was completely fucked, since, suddenly, Benjamin relates his imagination as if it's fact, casting a cloud of doubt over the entirety of his story.   

[Pozer]

i don't know about it being completely f-d. even though he is giving a play by play, it comes off as metaphoric more so than stated fact.

the CCBB montage was almost an exact replica of one i'd constructed save for mine being told in a straight forward matter and w/out narration and the dancer being a stripper and the taxi cab being a pickup truck and her fate being a blessing.

my scene was kinda completely f-d though.     

[Gamblour.]

This movie was sadly a load of horseshit. Eric Roth should never pick up a fucking pen again, what a lazy writer. This was so just Forrest Gump rehashed I couldn't stand it. And maybe it could be forgiven if the character of Benjamin Button wasn't so damned unbelievably hollow and mundane. Fincher himself said it, an extraordinary man in mundane circumstances. No shit. There are so many missteps and I blame the script, which is not a scapegoat. But I also blame Fincher and co. for not having the clarity to edit the hell out of this bloated bastard. This is one my least favorite movies this year.

[brockly]

wtf?? this movie was baaaaadd

i have nothing more to say.

[MacGuffin]

Fincher gives fans an earful
'Benjamin' director pays visit to Lincoln Center
Source: Variety

What about a sequel to "Se7en," David Fincher?

"I would be less interested in that than I would in having cigarettes put out in my eyes," the director confided to an inquisitive fan at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's "Curious Case of Benjamin Button" talkback.

Fincher kept up a steady stream of wisecracks at the Q&A with the Society's Associate Director of Programming, Kent Jones, as the topics ranged from movies that influenced him ("Days of Heaven") to what "Button" has in common with other Fincher films like "Zodiac" ("They're both about the passing of time," observed Jones. "Yes," Fincher said, "but this one has a higher body count").

Jones and some of the other audience questioners also prompted Fincher to talk about the movie's lengthy gestation. "Any time anyone says, 'Can it be done?' the answer is, 'Pretty much, yeah,'" Fincher opined. The trouble, he explained, was that in trying to create the reverse aging effects in "Button" -- processes the filmmakers had to invent for the movie -- "we made $3.5 million worth of mistakes. When you've got it figured out, you can send out for the stuff like pizza."

The Q & A was intercut with DVD extra-type shorts that delineated the process a little more clearly. During one segment, animators took footage of Pitt's face, subtracted weight from it until his jowls sagged, thinned his hair, and used it to replace the head of actor Peter Donald Badalamenti, a little person who plays Pitt's character early in his life (when he appears very old). "So you see," said Fincher when he returned, "you just do that!"

The movie also had an enormous script that had to be cut by 40 pages "before we came in looking like lunatics." Fincher characterized the back and forth: "'That's a phone book.' 'No, it's the movie we want to make!'"

Ultimately, the troubled production also had to change from its original Baltimore location to New Orleans, a switch Fincher said he resisted initially but found fascinating once he got to Louisiana. "We got a different kind of extra there. Nobody had Nose #8, like you get in LA. When we were shooting the newsroom scenes in'Zodiac,' I remember turning to the first assistant director and saying, 'All the women who work here are stacked.' There weren't that many breast implants in all of California in 1969!"

Even though Jones noted the same meticulous sensibility that informed "Zodiac" and "Fight Club" to "Benjamin Button," the new film, Fincher acknowledged, was a departure, and he was glad to be making it. "I keep trying to get out from under my own shadow," he said. "I don't want to do the same shit over and over." Not even for, say, "Ei8ht."

[Stefen]

It could have been perfect.

I can appreciate it for it's technical marvel, but it really laid the saccharine on too thick. You're supposed to care about these characters on your own, not because they're being forced down your throat. The parallels between this and Forrest Gump are nauseating. The different characters coming and going through Benjamin's life and leaving an impression. Happened in Forrest Gump. Then the stupid hummingbird metaphor bullshit was the exact same as that feather crap in Forrest Gump. It makes you roll your eyes.

David Fincher is an amazing visual filmmaker, but he's just not a creative filmmaker. His strength lies in putting pretty pictures on the screen and in this film it almost feels like he doesn't give a shit about the story. It's like he's content letting a professional screenwriter like Eric Roth worry about that stuff. It's really been the same thing throughout his whole career. His movies have never lacked visual flare, but the stories always leave something to be desired. But what he's good at, he's really fucking good at. Although the movie is almost 3 hours long, I never found myself checking my watch and that's because I was never bored of looking at the screen. It's a beautiful fucking movie. Maybe one of the prettiest I've ever seen. It's just way too sappy for it's own good. I almost feel like a big budget works against filmmakers like Fincher. Why be creative and try to figure out a way to make your idea happen when you can just throw money at it and problem solved?

I also hated how Benjamin is almost an idiot savant. I understood it through the beginning, but by the time he reached his forties, he should have been a completely different person, but he was still the wide eyed child fascinated by the world. By the time he's in his 60's, but looking like he's 20, he should have been more than a simple blank stare with the life he's lived. Nitpicking really.

I thought the acting was really great, but even that wasn't enough to elevate this film past the melodramatic bullshit that the script gave them. I've always been on the fence with Pitt. I don't know whether to take him seriously as an actor, or come to terms with the fact that he's the male counterpart to someone like Jessica Biel. After this film, I'm certainly going with the former. I thought he did an excellent job with what he was given. There really wasn't a weak link here. Even Julia Ormond who I hadn't heard from in 10 years was solid. Cate Blanchett is absolutely gorgeous in this.

My problems with this film rests solely on the script. The golden rule to not fucking this film up should have been, "Don't overdo it with the melodramatic bullshit" but Eric Roth did the exact opposite. Maybe in that meeting he wasn't paying attention because he was too busy smelling a flower and he heard it as "lay that shit on as thick as you can!" Whatever it was, he really shouldn't be allowed near anything that isn't going to be aired on the Hallmark channel.

I'll buy it on Blu-Ray to look at, but I am VERY disappointed. I was looking forward to this idea since Spike Jonze and Tom Cruise were attached. The most frustrating part is that it has EVERYTHING else going for it, but that script is just too fucking corny. The early trailers and ad campaign was awesome and I blame that for getting my hopes up so much. Seeing the first trailer for the first time was on par with seeing the Magnolia trailer for the first time for me. That's how big of an impression it left. It just couldn't come together because of that dickhead Eric Roth.

I'll give the script a 1.3/10 and the rest an 8.9/10 for an overall score of something like, um, 4.3/10.

Fuck you Eric Roth.

[Gamblour.]

Has he explained at any of these q and a's or articles why he went with a Katrina throughline?

[modage]

New Orleans was cheaper than Baltimore.  he liked the image at the end of a hummingbird facing 100+mph winds.

[Stefen]

he liked the image at the end of a hummingbird facing 100+mph winds.

Fuck You David Fincher

[MacGuffin]

Has he explained at any of these q and a's or articles why he went with a Katrina throughline?

Both studios wanted to bring down the budget, then at $180 million. That meant considering a shoot in Louisiana, where they could benefit from a tax rebate worth just over $27 million.

"We had money issues," says Cean Chaffin, Fincher's longtime producing partner. "We discussed the rebate in Louisiana and, lucky for us, the location made the movie better." Pitt, she says, "was a big advocate of the switch (to Louisiana). All of us were."

And then disaster struck: Hurricane Katrina devastated Louisiana in August 2005.

"When Katrina hit, we wondered if we could continue to shoot in New Orleans," says Kennedy. "And the city officials called us two or three days after the hurricane and asked us to stay involved. They recognized they needed projects like 'Benjamin Button' to come into the city and create jobs."

Katrina woes inflated the budget by about $3 million, Chaffin says, but they pushed ahead.

[Gamblour.]

Thanks for that guys. The hummingbird anecdote is just more proof that this movie was dumb dumb dumb.

[modage]

[Stefen]

 

[©brad]

totally. where was that 2 months ago..

[Stefen]