Atrocious movie, unexplicably hailed as a masterpiece by numerous critics. Too long, very boring and completely pointless. It has a few good set pieces (like the naval battle between a Yankee tugboat and a Nazi U-boat), but otherwise it just baffles the mind. Why would anybody, and especially David Fincher (who made such great films as "Seven", "Fight Club" and "Zodiak"), think that a story of a man who ages in reverse (he is born an old man and dies as an infant) would be interesting in itself ? Well, it isn't, and the film offers little else (aside from that naval battle) to compensate for the utter triviality of its main premise. John Podhoretz rightly demolishes the film in this Weekly Standard review. Choice bits: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a failure for two reasons: It's preachy, and it's stupid (...) There are no conversations in this movie, just one character depositing dubious pearls of wisdom into the ear canal of another; and since they're neither wise nor especially pearl-like, they grow extraordinarily tiresome."
January 1, 2008
The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button (2008) *
Atrocious movie, unexplicably hailed as a masterpiece by numerous critics. Too long, very boring and completely pointless. It has a few good set pieces (like the naval battle between a Yankee tugboat and a Nazi U-boat), but otherwise it just baffles the mind. Why would anybody, and especially David Fincher (who made such great films as "Seven", "Fight Club" and "Zodiak"), think that a story of a man who ages in reverse (he is born an old man and dies as an infant) would be interesting in itself ? Well, it isn't, and the film offers little else (aside from that naval battle) to compensate for the utter triviality of its main premise. John Podhoretz rightly demolishes the film in this Weekly Standard review. Choice bits: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a failure for two reasons: It's preachy, and it's stupid (...) There are no conversations in this movie, just one character depositing dubious pearls of wisdom into the ear canal of another; and since they're neither wise nor especially pearl-like, they grow extraordinarily tiresome."
