The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

This is not a movie that I would normally see by myself, left to my own volition, on Christmas day. Left to my own devices on Christmas day, staring down the barrel of a reality celebrating the birth of Christ with a little but a graffitied-upon home, three goddamn cats and no Coffee-Mate, I am sure things would have ended up like this.

However, I was asked to go with my good friends Pinback and savvyraven, and I can say, quite categorically, that I had a wonderful time. It’s just that I would describe the movies that I do choose to actively leave the house for, on my own, as possessing one of the following qualities:

1) A comic book character

2) A character that, at some point, takes up a chainsaw or a glove with a bunch of knives in it, and runs after the other characters

3) #2, except in outer space.

So, this was gonna be a departure for me. I didn’t know that the director of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button had also made Se7en, Fight Club and Zodiac, although if I had been told that beforehand, I would have recoginized the essential truth in it: they have certain qualities that I enjoyed in all of them, and I’m all right with saying that David Fincher makes good movies. I know, welcome to like 2001, but still, a man can possess trivia about Arkanoid or cinema in his life, rarely both, so please cut me some slack.

TCCoBB is a movie that I believe benefits from knowing nothing about, before entering the theatre. It was a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I’ve only read The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald, and I am pretty sure that none of the characters in this movie appear there, so if you’re like me, and only did the bare minimum in high school English, you’re safe. If F.Scott believes in a Stephen King-like principle of a shared fictional universe, well, fuck me. I only knew that the story chronicles the life of a man — Benjamin – from his physical age 90, and down. So yeah, he gets younger as the movie goes on.

I am going to assume that the book actually had a plot. The movie really doesn’t, and I totally don’t normally enjoy flicks like that — The Royal Tenenbaums, Forrest Gump, whatever. Even There Will Be Blood is pushing it for me. This one was well made, with a minimum of jogging retards, and Ben Stiller in a jogging suit, so Benjamin Button gets high marks there. I would like to comment on its length. When we got out of TCCoBB, we found ourselves in a world we could not have predicted. The cash in our wallets were only worth pennies, thanks to years of inflation. Mars had been completely colonized – not by humans, we had been there and left, but rather, by dogs. And if the three of us seemed like we were closer in friendship, for having endured this lengthy film, it wasn’t an illusion: the Universe had expanded as far as it was going to go while we were in there, and had begun the process of called the Big Crunch.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a little long, I’d say.

The last bit I will leave you with is this: as the credits on the movie rolled, we gathered our coats and cups, and stood up, giving our legs some circulation. We heard a small boy’s voice one row back. He said, God bless him, “Was that a true story?”

And I know you “had to be there” to make that anecdote work, if there is even the hint that someone over the age of 5 came up with it, it is horribly unfunny and an example of someone trying to hard, but I knew, while dissolving into an embarrassing giggle, that I would never say anything as unexpected and funny in my life. Bless that kid. I also realized I really should abandon reviewing movies, since I’m never going to top that line. Back to shitty game reviews (I’ll let “shitty” modify either word that comes after it, depending on what you think of my writing and video games) for me.

It’s been fun, I’ll watch movies without commentary, everyone be excellent to one another, and party on.

*** out of 5.