2

12/29/2008 5:42:30 PM

good movie, but i felt like it ended sort of abruptly. it seems like *spoilers* the end when benjamin becomes a child and cate blanchett is super old felt really rushed or something. i dunno.

12/30/2008 6:15:49 AM

yeah i agree w/ that about the ending.

12/30/2008 11:26:13 AM

I read the short story/novella before seeing the movie, and they both resonated with me in different ways.

The story left me pondering the central theme a bit more: In what ways do we actually grow younger as we age? The tone is more comic/fantastical ... I was glad they incorporated some of that humor into the film.

The movie is much more of a meditation on death/loss than the short story. It dragged on a bit for me, as well, but Fincher got me so invested in the Benjamin's story, I really didn't care.

I recommend both.

12/30/2008 10:01:00 PM

i didn't like this at all. i should have seen slumdog millionaire for the third time instead honestly.

1/1/2009 11:24:19 PM

Good ass fucking movie

Captain Mike reminded me a lot of Lt. Dan

1/2/2009 9:59:29 AM

I didn't like it either and I thought it dragged.

1/2/2009 5:05:26 PM

ok, here's my main problem with this movie.





**Spoilers?**




















EMOTIONAL VACUUM.



Almost every time someone is about to show some emotion, they cut to voiceover or cut to something else entirely.

"hey lets fuck."

"K."

*audience chuckles*

*END SCENE* CUT TO BEACH MONTAGE WITH CAJUN ACCENT VOICEOVER.




Oh, my mother is dead. I am sad. I look ever so slightly forlorn.


Daisy was also incredibly unlikeable.



"I liked tilda swinton so much. Let's have a montage and I will talk about how much I liked her. In voiceover."


































***



Good "ass fucking" movie, indeed. Be prepared to be raped by an emotional void of a movie.

1/2/2009 10:47:24 PM

I really enjoyed this one. I didn't feel there was an emotional vacuum, it just seems like it didn't want to beat you over the head with sadness. There's A LOT of death in movie as it is.

Beautiful cinematography. My only complaint was his 'mom' was almost painfully stereotypical southern black woman.

Reminded me very much of Forrest Gump.

[Edited on January 2, 2009 at 11:06 PM. Reason : .]

1/2/2009 10:57:21 PM

eh I'm not just talking about sadness. I felt there was hardly any emotional payoff, sad/happy/loving/whatever, for anything, ever. I just wasn't feeling it at all.

1/2/2009 11:02:01 PM

Eh, well I got something out of it, the emotional stuff was just more muted IMO.

1/2/2009 11:12:05 PM

^^ Yeah, people might hate me for saying so, but while Brad Pitt has portrayed compelling characters, I have yet to see him deliver a thoroughly compelling performance. (Maybe I just haven't seen the right movies.) The scene where he ...






****SPOILERS****






... doesn't even cry where his mom dies especially threw me; I couldn't help but wonder whether it was due to some shortcoming on Pitt's part as an actor where he couldn't pull crying off realistically, so he didn't try. Granted, since his character grew up around death, you could argue that his mother's death wouldn't affect him all that much, but still, it's his mom.

Quote :

"Daisy was also incredibly unlikeable."

Yeah, that made the framing device with her dying in the hospital pretty problematic. I kind of wished the movie had just begun with Benjamin's voiceover, "I was born under unusual circumstances."

I thought the scenes with Benjamin as an innocent old man were the most emotially satisfying, though ... maybe because they reminded me the most of Gump.

1/3/2009 12:07:19 AM

i really didn't think it was that similar to forrest gump, aside from it being a life story.

1/3/2009 12:11:57 AM

I also agree that Daisy was a very unlikeable character. I thought the first 30-40 minutes of this movie were really good and then it dropped off a bit. I wouldn't say it "dragged" but it definitely didn't end as good as it started.

I thought they went from really old ass Benjamin to middle-age Benjamin really quick. From age 1-17, he still looked old as hell, he goes through a short spell with longer gray hair, and then all of a sudden he looks middle aged, but yet, he's only like 25.

I was disappointed because I had read a lot of things comparing it to Forrest Gump, so I was expecting more historical references/music/clothing/etc to help the audience know just how old he really was compared to how he looked.

What was the point of all the references to the hurricane?



**Spoilers I guess**

I think a better ending would've have been, the daughter reads up to the story where they have a kid, and the black nurse or whoever that was, brings in a young boy (obviously Benjamin) who sits and listens to the story and periodically says stuff like "oh this seems familiar" or whatever and eventually they both realize who the other is. And then the daughter understands why her parents each did what they did (Benjamin leaving so he wouldn't be a burden and Daisy not telling her until she was dying because finding out your dad looks like a 5 year old would probably be pretty traumatic) and there's like an emotional scene at the end where Daisy dies.

Well at least, I thought something like that would happen and it didn't. It just kind of ended, which I thought was disappointing.

1/3/2009 1:20:47 AM

i thought it was an excellent movie, loved the characters and the story...the only parts i wasn't crazy about were the hospital scenes because they always popped up at annoying moments when it would have been better to just continue with benjamin's story.

blanchett with the red hair was stunning and i liked the character of daisy, even though she definitely had some bad qualities. she just had to figure out what she wanted from life.

1/3/2009 1:54:48 AM

Quote :

"I think a better ending would've have been, the daughter reads up to the story where they have a kid, and the black nurse or whoever that was, brings in a young boy (obviously Benjamin) who sits and listens to the story and periodically says stuff like "oh this seems familiar" or whatever and eventually they both realize who the other is. And then the daughter understands why her parents each did what they did (Benjamin leaving so he wouldn't be a burden and Daisy not telling her until she was dying because finding out your dad looks like a 5 year old would probably be pretty traumatic) and there's like an emotional scene at the end where Daisy dies."

that's kinda terrible.

1/3/2009 2:07:08 AM

yeah, wut?

lol

1/3/2009 2:11:05 AM

Quote :

"I think a better ending would've have been WHARBLGARBL "

well then maybe you should have been one of the most acclaimed writers of the 20th century, and then your short story idea could get a movie

i haven't seen the film, but the synopsis i read sounds a lot closer to F. Scott's ending than yours does...

1/3/2009 4:19:21 AM

I feel like I would like this as a short story/novella/whatever far more than I liked this film. And I'm not really one of those BOOK IS BETTER people.

1/3/2009 4:25:17 AM

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/Fitzgerald/jazz/benjamin/benjamin1.htm

1/3/2009 4:33:18 AM

Quote :

"i really didn't think it was that similar to forrest gump, aside from it being a life story. "

Same here.

Forrest Gump was a 100x better movie than this.

This movie seemed more like a kid's movie to me. It was very shallow overall, I thought.

I'm kind of curious to know exactly what things people like IRseriouscat thought were particularly powerful...

1/3/2009 4:56:34 AM

Quote :

"but while Brad Pitt has portrayed compelling characters, I have yet to see him deliver a thoroughly compelling performance."

I read this and thought the same thing...but then Legends of the Fall came to mind. Thought that was a pretty compelling performance.

1/3/2009 10:43:29 AM

hmm, yeah, i guess i need to rent that.

1/3/2009 11:03:00 AM

haha okay so my ending might suck

but I still think the ending seemed like nothing really happened and it was just like... "okay we just gotta make him a kid and end this shit"

1/3/2009 11:15:16 AM

^I honestly thought the ending was pretty perfect. I don't know what else I would do with it. And if you wanted to put more into him being a kid...then the movie would be like 4 hours longs.

1/3/2009 12:11:40 PM

^^did you read the short story?

because you basically just described how the story is supposed to end

granted the details of the story had to change because of the 80 year shift from when fitzgerald wrote it, but the general framework looks, to me at least, to be relatively intact

[Edited on January 3, 2009 at 12:14 PM. Reason : youth is wasted on the young]

1/3/2009 12:13:46 PM

I thought the ending was fine the way it was. The water rushing towards the clock running backwards was a nice touch.

1/3/2009 1:16:47 PM

no I haven't read the short story


I just think it was a very abrupt ending to a pretty thorough movie. If that's how it was in the short story, fine.. I just didn't think it worked well for the movie.

1/3/2009 1:18:53 PM

I enjoyed it, and I liked the ending. I think my mom teared up at this movie .

The only thing I didn't really like was that it was hard to keep track of how old Pitt was supposed to be, both in real age and his reverse age. This was especially annoying when Blanchette saw him for the first time when she was older, I couldn't tell how old she was and why Pitt was having such a problem

1/4/2009 8:49:11 PM

So the similarities to Forest Gump are ridiculous to me. I mean just the characters, the relationship of the characters with the Benjamin, the setting, the plot. I have a hard time saying this movie is a great movie just because how unbelievably similar it is to Forest Gump. Feels almost like a rip off I guess.

But over all it was a good movie. I agree that the attachment between the characters and audience is not nearly as deep as with Forest Gump, although they did a good job of making Bejamin's sickness believable to the audience enough that I never questioned it while watching.

1/6/2009 1:12:16 PM

Must of been a good flick if Biden can't even get a ticket for it.
http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20090105/NEWS02/901050345/1006/NEWS

1/6/2009 1:26:35 PM

^^well its not really a ripoff considering Eric Roth wrote/co-wrote the screenplay for both. But he did use much of the same formula. But as similar as they are i keep them very seperate. These are both great movies.

1/6/2009 1:29:07 PM

i really loved this movie. i got teary in all the right places, and the guy getting struck by lightning was hilarious.

1/11/2009 10:53:01 AM

I enjoyed this as well. Wasn't sure what to think of it going in, but I did enjoy the movie all in all.

Spoiler?



The lightning guy was good comedic relief.
I counted 5 times that he told: Fixing the roof, Getting the mail, Driving in his truck, Walking down the road, and then sitting next to the fence. Did I miss the other 2?

1/26/2009 1:33:05 AM