Short Reviews #33 

Short Reviews #33
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
starstarstarstar _empty

Who doesn’t love David Fincher? This is the man who gave us such cinematic gems as Fight Club, Se7en and Zodiac. He’s one of those directors who is so meticulous with every frame that he’s probably the best visual director working in Hollywood today. With the Curious Case of Benjamin Button he further cements that status. So what happens when he’s paired with a script that doesn’t slant towards the darker side of human nature? Can he give us a comfortably paced, relatively up-beat narrative? Well he certainly tries but ultimately doesn’t really breathe new life into the genre. TCCOBB reminded me a lot of Tim Burton’s Big Fish and whereas Burton managed to cross that divide of light and dark relatively successfully, Fincher doesn’t quite resonate with as much emphasis. It’s not entirely his fault, some of it comes down to the screenplay, here written by Eric Roth (who wrote Forrest Gump) but it is Fincher’s decision of how long a scene can go for, what to cut out, etc… He really needed to cut a good 30 minutes or so out of this one for it to reach its fullest emotional potential. The acting is solid (albeit not a great deal of chemistry between Blanchett and Pitt), the narrative is fairly intriguing and of course, it’s gorgeous to look at. But you’ll definitely want a trim here and there to avoid feeling your head to fall to one side of your cinema chair.

Read more

 
 
2
 
Thursday, January 1 2009
 
Film General
 

Burn After Reading Reviews 

Hrmmmm the new Coen Bros film gets 48/100 on Metacritic.com but 73% on Rotten Tomatoes. Guess I’ll have to see this one for myself to judge.

 
 
2
 
Tuesday, September 9 2008
 
Asides