Benjamin Button's Loooooooong Journey

NavyGuy and I have seen five movies in the past two and a half weeks. Not a record for us, but a good effort :) I will warn you now:

SPOILERS A'COMIN!!!

If you want a real "review" of a movie, check out an actual film critic. My posts about movies are not going to hold back (that way, if you don't have time to actually see the movie, you'll know what people are talking about at the next cocktail party, or have the right answers to a Trivial Pursuit game!). If you'd rather not know the salient details of a film, stop reading now.

That was your last warning!

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett
If you're going to this film just to see hot Brad Pitt - don't. Also don't go if you can't sit for three hours without going to the bathroom. The premise of the movie is that Brad's character (Benjamin Button) is born as an old man and "ages" backwards; so by the end of the film, he's very young. It's the story of his life's adventures, including an affair with the wife of an English diplomat, time spent on a tugboat during World War II, and his eventually relationship with Daisy (Blanchett), the girl/woman who had various encounters with him his entire life. Cate B., is great as always, and Brad isn't terrible, but the biggest drawback to the movie is really the length. NavyGuy put it best when he explained, "It's an hour and a half story that got dragged out into three hours."

The most interesting part for me was the last half an hour when Daisy is quite old, and comes back to take care of Benjamin, who has "grown" to a small child. The biggest question or issue in the film is when Benjamin decides to leave Daisy (they got together when they both reached their mid-30s), rather than force her to take care of him as he gets younger; since they only have a few years when they're the same "age," they share that time, and then reluctantly move on with their lives. Daisy marries, raises the daughter she had with Button, and it's never clear whether she is happy with the choice that Button made to leave. Overall, I'd say this is definitely a rental; it's going to win tons of technical awards for the makeup/CGI aging process, but three hours is too long to spend in a movie theater chair.

Stay tuned! Up next is Doubt.