Haters and Fincher whiners will cry that we’re picking on ‘Ben Button’ but Awards Daily, Rope Of Silicon and InContention are noting Roger Ebert’s review with the latter asking, ‘Is Button On The Rocks?’
“I can’t help but consider the fact that Ebert’s tastes are typically comparable to the Academy’s. Might this reaction and some of those “it lacks a soul” quips begin to eat away at the armor?” InContention posits.
Ebert himself, writes, “Yes, you say, but Benjamin Button’s story is a fantasy. I realize that. It can invent as much as it pleases. But the film’s admirers speak of how deeply they were touched, what meditations it invoked. I felt instead: Life doesn’t work this way. We are an observer of our passage, and so are others. It has been proposed that one reason people marry is because they desire a witness to their lives. How could we perform that act of love if we were aging in opposite directions?”
Others give it the thumbs up, but still have issue with it like EW’s Lisa Schwarzbaum who gave the movie a A- review, but says the film is “an extravagantly ambitious movie that’s easy to admire but a challenge to love.”
“The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button” opens tomorrow (December 25, Christmas Day) in wide release. It currently has a good, but not amazing, 75% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a lesser 72% rating on Metacritic, both of which aren’t far off our B- grade which is a 70% rating once converted through the alpha four-point grading system. We know some friends and critics who saw it with us that would say we were being far too generous.
