The curious case of putting the audience to sleep

In case you missed this at the Official Anti-Benjamin Button Club or Defamer, more evidence that you are not crazy and the Academy is. Not hard evidence, but fun to watch anyway.

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Nobody puts baby in a corner

It took New York Post film critic Lou Lumenick all of 6 hours to respond in kind to a sentence in my post yesterday about Benjamin Button where I snarkily took a swipe at him. In a blog post titled "Throwing the Baby Out with Ben Lyons: Guilt by Association", Lumenick writes:

By far the silliest blog post I've read this season -- and there have been many -- is at stopbenlyons.com. Because the widely dissed TV reviewer chose The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as his best film of 2008, this site offers up a "Pro-Button Critical Hall of Shame." It's a list of other critics the author thinks were foolish enough to list Button on their top 10 lists despite Lyons' endorsement. The offenders include my junior colleague Kyle Smith, Pulitizer[sic] Prize-winner Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal, Richard Corliss of Time, three reviewers for the Hollywood Reporter and, oh yeah, yours truly. Our crime? Listing a movie that went on to receive 13 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. The post, which I'm not going to dignify with a link, says the HR gang "have clearly spent too much of the last year smoking out Michael Phelps in their office,'' while my review is blamed on "pent-up emotional issues."

Invoking the finite wisdom of the Academy is always a decisive debating strategy when defending a movie. "It got, like, 13 Oscar nominations. And it totally deserved them! I mean, NO movie has EVER been nominated for an Oscar unless it was, like, totally AWESOME!" Seriously, if you are going to appeal to authority, you might want to appeal to a real authority on film, like Roger Ebert. Oops, did I say Ebert again? Mentioning Roger's name around Lou can make him angry. You wouldn't like him when he's angry. Ask Roger.

I don't have anything against Lou, not even his agreement with Ben on this issue. After all, my Button-free top ten list is otherwise embarrassingly close to Ben Lyons' list. Mrs. StopBenLyons said that Lou sounded pissed and that I got him to stoop to my level--I'm not sure if that is exactly a compliment to me. Actually, I think he sounds more amused with my post than pissed, which I respect. I am surprised, though, that Lou both noticed and responded to my post. Either he is a devoted reader of my blog or he has a "Lou Lumenick" Google Alert. You can take your own guess as to which of these is true.

The curious case of undeserved praise

What would F. Scott Fitzgerald think of his short story being made into a movie?
The picture at the left is from The Official Anti-Benjamin Button Club. The guy who runs the blog clearly has a single minded focus at attacking and ridiculing one very specific corner of pop culture--how could I not love it? This is one of many hilarious jabs at the most over-hyped movie of the year. The blog includes posts on topics such as "Possible plot twists that could have made Benjamin Button a better movie," and "10 Things That Would Be Less Shocking Than Benjamin Button Getting 13 Oscar Nods". Of the comments on the site, my favorite is "The first time I ever wanted to punch a leathery baby was when I saw this movie!"

The one thing I would add to the blog is a Hall of Shame, listing all of the critics who put this thing on their top ten lists. Number one is, of course, Ben Lyons, followed closely by Michael Sragow, of the Baltimore Sun, both of whom called Button the best movie of the year. According to metacritic, they are the only ones, but several major critics included it in their top ten list. Note the prevalence of The Hollywood Reporter--they have clearly spent too much of the last year smoking out Michael Phelps in their office. Coming in second is The New York Post, although that might be explained by Lou Lumenick's pent up emotional issues expressed in his recent assaulting of a recovering Roger Ebert.

The Pro-Button Critical Hall of Shame:

Hollywood Reporter
(Kirk Honeycutt)

Hollywood Reporter
(Stephen Farber)

Hollywood Reporter
(Frank Scheck)

Miami Herald
(Rene Rodriguez)

New York Post
(Lou Lumenick)

New York Post
(Kyle Smith)

ReelViews
(James Berardinelli)

Seattle PI
(William Arnold)

Time Magazine
(Richard Corliss)

Wall Street Journal
(Joe Morgenstern)

The Curious Case of Forest Gump

This weekend, At the Movies played another rerun--the worst 10 films of the year. I have little to add from my last review of this episode, but I cannot help but reiterate the following--did Ben Lyons really put Synecdoche, New York as the third worst film of the year? And does Ben really think that there are only 9 films last year that were worse than Twilight? According to this blog posting, he actually referred to it as a "phenomenal new flick," so I don't think he is beign very honest. But you probably knew that.

Without a new episode of At the Movies to review, I was lucky to catch this on Spike Feresten's Saturday night talk show:



Most of us recognized early on that there were similarities between Gump and Button. I have to say, though, that Feresten makes a pretty devastating case which may even cost the movie the Oscar for Best Picture and Best Screenplay--not that it deserved either in the first place. I missed this video when Feresten showed it the first time around but he showed it again this weekend with a "film critic" to defend it. That would be the only "film critic" in the country (as far as I can tell) who called Button the best movie of the year: Ben Lyons.

Lyons gets schooled by Feresten, who is no Roger Ebert but he clearly has higher standards than Lyons. Here is their first exchange:

Spike: "When you saw this movie for the first time, you said this was your favorite movie of 2008."

Ben: "Yes it was, my favorite movie of 2008."

Spike: "Who paid you to say that?"

Another exchange went like this:

Spike: "You said that films like this don't come along too often."

Ben: "Well, hold on, Forrest Gump came out 15 years ago."

Great comeback, Ben. Later, Spike quizzes Ben by asking him to identify things that happened in which of the movies. The first question is "Which movie had a hurricane in Louisiana" and the answer is "both", which was the answer to all of the questions. He asks a couple more like this, my favorite is the last:

Spike: "Which movie used a feather as a cheap symbolic device?"

Ben: "Well, Benjamin Button used a hummingbird."

Spike: "Which is a collection of feathers."

Now that talk show hosts don't have George Bush to kick around any more, maybe they will go after other public figures who are greatly under-qualified for their jobs--crappy film critics like Ben Lyons.


Watch the entire exchange between Ben Lyons and Spike Feresten here

"My name's Benjamin Button. People call me Benjamin Button."

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett
Rated PG-13
Review by Scott Johnson

Benjamin Button is, at different times, an old man without a past and a young man without a future. What a lonely and confusing way to go through life, so ripe with opportunities for exploring how time and age distort our view of ourselves and how the world views us. It is surprising, then, that the movie does not play up this fact more in the film itself. The young Benjamin in the old man's body seems a bit naive about sex, but the old Benjamin in a young man's body just seems like a young man. This is somebody who has lived an extraordinarily lonely life and I just don't think that we get enough of a sense of that.

In fact, I think a very similar movie, minus a few clever moments, could have easily been made without the the curse of backward aging at all. Perhaps the middle-aged looking man who has an affair with Tilda Swinton could have been a naive teenager--The Reader, anyone? That would have been creepy, you might say--although certainly less creepy than the seven-year-old octogenarian who has a crush on a 5 year old. Or it could have just taken place later in his life.

Button, unfortunately, plays it safe and avoids the creepy tension screaming to burst out of this material. Remember the movie Birth, where a young boy claims to be Nicole Kidman's dead husband--that was a movie that didn't avoid the creepiness and was much the better for it.

It cannot go without saying that the photography is incredible. Pulling off a scene of Brad Pitt as a shriveled up little old man not only makes you wonder how it was filmed but makes you realize that the entire film medium is past the stage of the impossible. If you have enough money, you can put anything on film and make it believable. Better yet, mind-boggling special effects do not have to result in blowing stuff up but can be used to create unique moments of drama. Technically speaking, Button excels in this area and I suspect there are many scenes where we do not even know that it is happening.

One of the problem the movie faces, though, is that it is far too long. The writers must have been trying to give us a sense of the full scope of the man's life, but that means there is far too much meandering and waiting for something to happen. There are quite a few good moments--Pitt's affair with Tilda Swinton, for example, when we first get a sense of Benjamin as a man. But we wait too long for those to occur. In the meantime, the bitter loneliness this character must have faced is not given nearly enough play, especially at the end.

The film was written by Eric Roth, who also wrote Forrest Gump, a very similar film in many ways. This movie has less to say about history than Gump--which is fortunate--but Forrest lived through extraordinary events that he could not comprehend. It made sense that he was somewhat unaffected and just wanted to find Jenny, but it makes less sense here. Benjamin is a man of ordinary intellect and ought to learn great things out of life, but he floats through history just like Forrest.

Other elements of the earlier film seem to be echoed in in the current one--instead of Lieutenant Dan, we have Captain Mike. Instead of the feather floating through the wind (like Forrest), we get a hummingbird who appears after the death of a man with a hummingbird tattoo--and then again later. Huh? There is also something about a clock that goes backward, for no apparent reason, unless of course you did not realize that Benjamin was aging backward, which you did.

The movie itself is narrated by a character on her death bed in modern day New Orleans--just before Hurricane Katrina hits, of course. Why? "It's symbolic," the writer might say. But it is not really subtle and does not appear to shed any light on the story or the characters--other than to reinforce that a simplistic approach was taken instead of providing deeper insights into our lives and the passage of time.

These are some of the more annoying aspects and I don't want to dwell on them too much or make the film appear utterly worthless. Much of it is worthwhile--the performances are all well done and there are some fine moments. I think a very touching two hour movie could have been made out of this material--approaching Benjamin's life with broader brush strokes, showing how fleeting and momentary our lives are.

Some of that material finds its way here, but there is just not enough to justify the film's length.