Movies – Page 2 – KEN WHEATON

Wow. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button gets nominated for Best Picture. If this wins, it’s Crash all over again — proof positive that Academy voters are drooling morons. To be clear, Benjamin Button was only mildly annoying — it wasn’t aggresively stupid and bad as Crash was, but it suffered from missing every opportunity to go deeper. And it certainly doesn’t strike me as best picture material. If you’re going to go with special-effects laden movie for the category, why not Dark Knight or Iron Man?

Crash, of course, was much worse — a case where the voters were so easily impressed by supposedly deep themes that they awarded Best Picture to one of the worst films I’ve ever seen, a film so bad that I think someone finally “succeeded” with that 100-chimps-with-100-typewriters experiment. Actually I guess I’m insulting the chimps by comparing them to Paul Haggis.

Be sure to check out The Curious Case of Forrest Gump.

There are worse ways to waste time than staring at Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt for close to three hours, but the beauty of the two stars is about the best thing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has going for it. Too long and too shallow, the movie comes off as a curious amalgam of Forrest Gump meets Titanic (or so says my wife).

I’m a huge fan of Forrest Gump. Hell, I’m a huge fan of sappy story lines, but the problem with Benjamin Button is that it’s all surface. No relationships are explored in depth, no emotional connections made with the characters. Opportunity after opportunity is passed up to explore loss, to probe deeper. Say what you will about Forrest Gump, but I think his relationship with Bubba is fucking touching. When Bubba got killed in the shit, it was all I could do not to cry. And there were times when I wondered if Forrest and Jenny would ever get together.

Continue reading “Benjamin Button vs. the Yellow Lab” →

Category: Movies

The Curious Case of a Stupid Academy (updated)

Benjamin Button vs. the Yellow Lab