Double Feature! Burn After Reading / The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

I was interrupted in the middle of reviewing Burn After Reading to get a chance to watch The Curious Case of Benjamin Button for free. Turns out a friend of a friend happens to be on the Academy and had a copy "for your consideration." Ain't that phrase too familiar, you pirates.

Halfway through it, I realized Brad Pitt and Tilda Swinton were in both, so I felt like lumping the two reviews in one. And I can summarize my thoughts of both with a quote from Burn After Reading:

"With all due respect, but what the fuck are you talking about?"

1) Burn After Reading

Barely 3 minutes in and John Malkovich hits a home run. This follows in the same vein of cult classic The Big Lebowski (a personal favorite), but BAR lacks the distinctive moments that made Lebowski completely memorable. I mean, he peed on the Dude's rug.

Not to say it was a terrible movie. It was very entertaining, particularly because of every single actor's complete transition into their character. This makes for some very awesome subtle humor, and it was mostly at those points I started cracking up, rather than the obviously jokey parts. Come to think of it, I don't remember if there were many obviously jokey parts. And that's the way I like it.

Thoughts: pretend it's an episode of the Office, except everyone's backstabbing each other.

2) The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

First thoughts: holy crap, this movie felt long. The length looks to be its biggest bite in the ass, clocking in at 2hr40min. And it's not like the pace varies too much. It takes a painfully long time to set up the wrapper story (think: characters in the present reminiscing so that you can conveniently skip parts of the main character's story). Iseewhatyoudidthere, Mr. Fincher. It's supposed to make Benjamin Button seem all the more mystical. But goddamn if it doesn't take a long time getting there, because I don't really care about the hardly intelligible old lady or her daughter. I just wanna see a wrinkly old guy do childish things.

And I wasn't disappointed here. Makeup/costumes/set design/cinematography deserve all kinds of credit here for really selling the gradual un-aging of Benjamin Button and the look of each decade. Despite using several actors for the extreme ages, you gotta hand it to Makeup for making 40-odd-year-old Brad Pitt eventually look 20.

I don't wanna ruin/spoil too much, so here are my main thoughts: technically excellent, had a workable story and good characters (heyo, drunken Irish seacaptain), but the underwhelming ending feels like the past 3 hours was all for naught. So much for it being as "absorbing" as people praise it to be.

Recommend you watch Lola Rennt (German) + Big Fish + Forrest Gump if you can't sit through the first half hour.