Hhhhhhmmmmmm. I am on a mission to watch most of the Oscar films; so, high expectations have been set.
The thing with hype is that you expect more than you should. A perfect story builds and gets woven in your mind and when you see what is really being offered, your mind’s knitting is always better. This is the case. This is always the case. And it is the case with Benjamin.
A man that is born old and ages in the opposite direction. This premise in itself should give loads of opportunity for fantastic philosophy and ideas. And I experimented with these ideas and wondered what fantasies the movie would take me to.
Alas, I was bogged down by stupid detail that just did not make sense to me in my own little mind.
On the movie itself I would like to say, that this was probably made for Brad Pitt. For him to make his mark before time took a toll on his fans, on his looks on his career. This is probably a career highlight for Mr Pitt as he did get THE Oscar nod. Who the hell else could play a gorgeous 20/21st century Adonis? What would stupid movies like Legends of the Fall and Meet Joe Black be without Mr Pitt?
The guy has a place in history, just like Marlon Brando and Paul Newman, he is it, and does not need to work too hard to get my own personal nod. So long as he plays pretty. So you can probably imagine that the suedo old guys he played in Babel was very confusing for me.
Back to the Benjamin Button, the short and nasty is that, I was not moved, I really, really did not like Cate Blanchette in this. That American accent that she thinks she’s got to a T is really really irritating.
That was the first barrier, the second was that, at the back of my own small mind I was, really, through out the movie, playing out scenes of when this script was pitched to the Hollywood execs. So the creatives had the idea to have a guy that ages backward, great, lovely. But no, we need to have more fillers around the story, how about a war, oh yeah, the WW2 we could reference that. And oh, how about black people, yeah we need black people. New Orleans! and we can play out a bit of the foreboding before Katrina hit, cool. Mind you we cannot have And Oh, we need a story that weaves a thread through the movie, my cousin was hit by lightning once why don’t we use that?. Cool, we can say seven times and bring that in the movie every time we think the audience is starting to get bored. Just for a wake up laugh you? And oh, lets just disregard logic as well. I mean if the guy had to start from old age, the fact that you absorb most things when you are young is totally irrelevant. The fact that one’s brain should match one’s age is stupid, we are going to say, as you get older, you get more stupid, in Benjamin, as you get older you get less interesting because we can’t really show your torso so we are going to make you dumb.!
Okay, enough, that was an irrational rant. But that was an irrational movie. It was! The fact that it got to Oscar level is just sad.
No spoons!
