I’ve just fallen down a flight of stairs. My fault for wearing socks on waxed wood floors and not paying attention. I hurt my right ankle, my right butt cheek, my left wrist. Nothing seems to be broken but I’m aching all over.

The reason for being distracted? The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

To digress a bit, we’re hitting Oscar season. And that means that the studios are sending out DVD screeners of the films they hope to see nominated. And some of those DVDs end up in the “wrong” hands and from there end up on the internet. So far I’ve managed to find Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, part 1 of Soderburgh’s presumably epic biography of Che, The Wrestler and Bill Maher’s Religulous. More are sure to follow. There is no doubt that I’d prefer to see these on a big screen, but while all have opened in the US, none have yet played in HK and perhaps some of these never will.

So, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Based on, more more correctly inspired by a 25 page short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, CCBB runs almost 2 hours and 40 minutes. It’s directed by David Fincher (Zodiac, Seven, Fight Club) and I’m increasingly convinced that Fincher is one of our greatest directors. In no small part because he’s taken something so potentially trifling and meaningless and made it into a movie that you can’t stop watching, even as you’re left wondering at the end what it actually means.

The story is pure fantasy. In 1918, Benjamin Button is born as a 70 year old man. It’s not a spoiler to tell you that as the movie progresses, he gets younger and younger until eventually, a baby, he dies. Would you be surprised to learn that screenwriter Eric Roth also wrote Forrest Gump?

But Button, played by Brad Pitt, is no Gump. Apart from this one medical oddity, which is never explained, he lives a resolutely ordinary life. He does no great deeds, he crosses paths with no famous people. He has one great romance in his life, with Daisy, played by Cate Blanchett. And while people are talking about an Oscar for Pitt, if any actor should get one for this film, it’s clearly Blanchett. (Tilda Swinton is also quite memorable, as always.)

Blanchett is an old woman in her 80s, lying in a hospital bed in New Orleans as Katrina approaches. Just as we watch Button un-age from 70s down to a baby, we follow her from 5 years old until her deathbed. She asks her daughter to read from a diary that she’s brought to the hospital, and from there Button’s tale unfolds. It’s the improbable and incredibly romantic relationship between Benjamin and Daisy that forms the emotional center of the film.

When it’s all over, I’m left thinking, okay, it’s a metaphor, but a metaphor for what? It’s a fable with a moral, but what’s the moral? I honestly don’t know. It’s epic and it’s intimate at the same time; it rarely felt overlong or forced or boring; the special effects are groundbreaking; it’s going to keep me thinking about it and I expect it to reveal itself further with more viewings.
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Religulous, Bill Maher’s attempt to attack organized religion, directed by Larry Charles (director of Borat) left me cold. I don’t disagree with anything Maher says, I just don’t like his approach to it. He rarely sits down with anyone who are prepared to conduct an actual debate with him, mostly a collection of frauds and charlatans – and if some preacher declares himself to be the actual Second Coming, in what way does that discredit the religion as a whole? What does he hope to gain by debating the finer points of Christianity with truck drivers at some tiny road side church (who treat him with far more respect that many others in the film)? He hits us over the head repeatedly with his thesis that the tenets of religions are illogical and that a lot of bad things have been done in their name. He attacks Christianity, Islam and, to a lesser extent, Judaism, almost completely ignoring Hinduism and Buddhism. But he doesn’t seem to have anywhere to go after that except to say that nuclear war and pollution may destroy the planet and in the end, he’s just preaching to the converted.