Eastman spilled the beans to Film School Rejects over the weekend that James Cameron, Zack Snyder, Gore Verbinski and David Fincher have signed on to the long-awaited anthology movie spun out of the long-running comic magazine:

I've got breaking news that Fincher and James Cameron are going to be Co-Executive Producers on the film. Fincher will direct one. Cameron will direct one. Zack Snyder is going to direct one and Gore Verbinski is going to. Mark Osborne and Jack Black from Tenacious D are going to do a comedy segment for the film. Three other directors have agreed but we haven't signed them, but they're equally as jaw-dropping. So we're on cloud nine to be working with such an amazing amount of talent.

That's an amazing collection of talent, but we're worried about the fact that there will be another three directors added to the five listed; just how long is this movie going to be? Or, more depressingly, is each segment going to be incredibly short?

‘Heavy Metal' Adds Cameron, Verbinksi, Snyder as Directors [Film School Rejects]

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Italian postal worker Adriana Pichini has filed papers that David Fincher's successful Brad Pitt vehicle - "inspired by" but not based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1921 short story of the same name, and written by Eric Roth - is actually based upon "Il ritorno di Arthur all'innocenza," an unpublished short story she wrote in 1994 that was sent to US publishers. Pichini's lawyer, Gianni Massaro, said that he's unsure at this point if the author will seek financial damages from Fincher, Roth, and the movie's producers:

At this point it's still a matter of principle... What happens next will depend on what the judge rules.

Currently, the case rests with a judge who will watch the movie and read the short story before deciding whether there are enough similarities to allow a court case to move forward. The movie has not been released in Italy yet - it's due out on February 13th - but there is no set date for the judge's ruling.

Curious case against 'Button' in Italy [Hollywood Reporter]

Okay, not literally. Literally, Benjamin Button is about a guy who's born old and ages backwards, until he reaches childhood and then dies. But in a larger sense, David Fincher's movie is about deja vu. It feels very much like a dozen other movies you've seen before. And it seems to be saying that familiarity is underrated and nostalgia is renewal, by looking at the life of someone whose past is always in front of him.

In particular, Benjamin Button will remind you a lot of Forrest Gump, another literary adaptation by the same screenwriter, Eric Roth. It's got the same sort of heartwarming, quirky feeling, and the protagonist lives through a nice selection of big historical moments. (Although he doesn't meet any famous personages.) Pretty much every situation that Benjamin Button gets himself into will feel cozily familiar, and most of the characters he meets are ones you've seen before. But because he's living backwards, he outlives people who seem to be his age or younger. And the movie seems to be saying, "Take another look at these familiar situations and archetypes, because they won't last forever, and you'll miss them when they're gone."

Here's the story, in a nutshell: Benjamin Button is born old, and his father abandons him. He's rescued by Queenie, a good-hearted African American woman, who devotes herself to him. Luckily, she works in an old-people's home, where he fits right in with the cast of quirky characters. (One of these characters has a running gag that's jaw-snappingly funny.) He meets a little girl, Daisy, and they become playmates. Later, he goes off to sea on a tugboat, and then fights in World War II. And sleeps with Tilda Swinton. Then he comes home and courts Daisy, who's too busy being a fancy dancer. They finally get together, and are rapturously happy, but Benjamin worries his impending youth will ruin everything. (It does.)

There's also a frame story, where Daisy is on her death bed (as Hurricane Katrina looms) and she gets her daughter to read Benjamin's memoir to her. That stuff is like what I imagine The Notebook would be like.

There's nothing wrong with any of it, and it's all quite skillfully executed. Except that Cate Blanchett, as Daisy, and Brad Pitt, as Benjamin, have very little chemistry, and Pitt's performance in general is somewhere between understated and vacant. (I really only like Pitt when he's doing manic nutjob, to be honest.) But apart from that problem, the performances are all great, and some of them are terrific. Tilda Swinton is never anything but amazing, for example.

The movie is three hours long, and there are a few sequences that feel beyond padded. (In one sequence, in particular, the narrator drones that if A, B, C, or D had happened differently, then E wouldn't have happened. But A, B, C, and D did actually happen the way they did, so E happened as well. I felt like I was being spoon-fed by an arthritic.) To some extent, the movie's slowness is a function of its mission: to show us that time is passing, that as Benjamin Button sheds his years, he's still racing towards a grave like the rest of us.

That's in a sense what Benjamin Button is about — paradoxically, by dealing with a character who miraculously won't get old, it aims to make us think about the fact that we will. And by separating aging from death, it reinforces once again that death is universal. All of those heartwarming characters we meet in the course of the movie end up dying, and we linger over their deaths. There's even a gratuitous black preacher who drops dead right after meeting Benjamin.

I always think, when reviewing a non-genre film like Button for io9, it's important to focus on its genre elements and how they're functioning in the story. In Button, the main character's mutant superpower functions as a metaphor for the way the past gets more and more important as you get older. Especially with the framing story, where we see the old Daisy reliving her life with Benjamin on her death bed, the point is driven home that love, and death, make time travelers of all of us as our future shrinks away.

The movie is a triumph of makeup and special effects, by the way. The whole business of making Brad up as an old man, and superimposing his features onto various other people's bodies, is weirdly convincing.

Major spoiler alert: The thing that really turned me off this movie, once and for all, is when Benjamin decides to ditch Daisy after knocking her up. At this point, they're both about 40, and he's courted her for two decades. Now that he finally has her, he suddenly freaks out about the fact that they're "meeting in the middle" and he's doomed to keep getting younger. "I don't want you to have to raise us both," he tells Daisy, referring to her baby and him. But it literally makes no sense to me — why can't he stick around until the baby and he are both roughly 20 years old biologically? Or if I'm doing my math wrong, at the very worst, he would appear 16 or 17 when Daisy was 18 or 19. Again, still not seeing why Benjamin can't help raise his kid.

It feels like the movie has some kind of weird pro-deadbeat dad agenda. Benjamin's own father abandons him, and then later they meet up and gradually become friends. They bond, and we're meant to forgive the dad for being completely absent. And in the case of Benjamin, after he abandons Daisy and goes off to India to "find himself," he selfishly comes back when his daughter is grown and he appears to be a young adult. Then he hangs around New Orleans (Daisy's hometown) and eventually she's stuck nursing him after he's turned into a senile infant. So even though he ran away, she still takes care of him in his old/young age.

It didn't feel like much of a love story to me, but maybe I'm too cynical.

I'm afraid I didn't like Button very much, but you may like it just fine. It has a 76 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, and I'm sure it'll do great at the box office. It's very Oscar-ish, too. I'd say, if you liked Forrest Gump, you might like this, although it's not quite as good.

How Old Are You?

Under The Table

When Ben And What's-Her-Face Were The Same Age

The 26-Year-Old 50-year-Old

"I've Never Had A Woman"

Daisy's Back

LIttle Old Man Pitt

One Ugly Baby

The Miracle Baby

Check out all the hot steamy Brad Pitt lovin' that's going on. Benjamin Button's will be out on December 25.

Warner Bros. has posted Alexander Desplat's entire score for Benjamin Button up on the movie's "For Your Consideration" page. If you thought the music from the trailer was beautiful wait until you listen to all 23 tracks composed by the magnificent Desplat The film hits theaters on December 25th. [BadTaste via Slashfilm]

I can't remember the last time I heard someone call a movie "magic" and "life-affirming" but according to Variety's write-up, that's what Fincher is delivering. Then again I don't really trust anyone who would use the word "magic" and isn't talking about Wizards. Here's a little part of the review:

It's magic realism propelled by extraordinary filmmaking technology but it's not remotely what I'd call cold. It creates a world of oddities and wonderful, off-kilter characters but the whole piece is anchored by a decades long relationship that gets strained, frayed, breaks and rebuilds into something profound and moving.

The achievement is big and bold and ambitious and life-affirming, but the sentimentality is always toughened by the continual sense of loss and deep sadness at the transitory nature of the human condition. If it sounds like an art movie, it absolutely is, but it's a four quadrant art film!...

Whole bunch of Oscar noms across the board in all the major and tech categories, would seem almost certain noms for Pitt and Blanchett, Fincher, Roth, Dp, editor, etc etc. There are so many supporting roles that it will be hard to sort out noms in those categories, but if I had to call out one, it would be Jason Flemyng as Benjamin's father, as he really adds great gravity and humanity to this key role.

Hey maybe Fincher can make a believer out of me, but as of right now I can't see this film as anything more than a good looking holiday flick to see with the family. But I hope I'm wrong and I leave the theater affirmed about my life (gag).

Taking on the story of a reverse aging man is no easy task. In an interview with The New York Times director David Fincher discusses the process and, "was it possible to make somebody age, to make a character you could follow from the time he’s four feet tall and 85 years old until the time he’s 25 inches long and 6 months old and dying?"

With patience and some incredible high-tech sculpting and CG work, the special effects team managed to transplant Brad Pitt's aged face right on top of the tiny old man bodies they used through out the film. According to Fincher:

We put our faith in a higher power that we would be able to figure out the performance-capture methodology. [Benjamin] lives on a boat and is a seaman for most of his life. We had these photographs of Andrew Wyeth. We loved the wrinkles in his face and the great compassion and wisdom that his face betrayed. We started with that and did sculptures based on life casts of Brad. We would hollow away material, take mass away from his cheeks, get more skulling around the eyes, do very fine wrinkling, do all this and scan it into a computer.

According the New York Times:

When it came time for Mr. Pitt to record his dialogue, a scanner was used to capture his facial movements. The results of the scan were used to manipulate the 3-D database of his digitally aged face, generating an almost literal “talking head.” “We would take that and put it back in the scene on the shoulders of actors who were cast to play Benjamin at the different ages,” Mr. Fincher said. “All of this would go into a pipeline, and 15 months after that we would be able to look at little Benjamin and know what he would look like when he was 5 years old.

Fincher also went into great detail about how different his movie is from the F. Scott Fitzgerald's original short story. Fincher's movie is a love story, but not just love for one person (although that appears to be a large part of the film) but for those around him as well. I can't wait to see a David Fincher love story told by a backwards aging baby.

Benjamin Button will be released on December 25, 2008.

[NYT]

The 12-issue comic Black Hole centered around teens in the 70s who become mutated and deformed from a sexually transmitted disease that spreads fast and comes from unknown origins. In an interview with MTV, Gaiman revealed why he couldn't work with Fincher:

“Once they got David Fincher on,” Gaiman said, “David explained his process consisted of having over ten drafts, done over and over, and Roger and I were sort of asked if we wanted to, if we were interested in doing that. And we definitely weren’t.”

Gaiman and Avary left the film but left one draft of their script with Fincher. Let's hope he works with it — Gaiman's dreamy writing and Finchers insanity really could have created something interesting on screen out of the brilliant Black Hole source material.

[MTV Splash Page]

Says Fincher:

“It looks like it’s not going to happen. There’s no script and as you know, [star Morgan Freeman’s] not in the best of health right now [after an August car accident]. We’ve been trying to do it but it’s probably not going to happen.”

The veteran actor had been attached to the project in various forms for roughly eight years now. And when previously interviewed, it appeared as if Fincher had been giving the execution of the pic great thought:

“It’s probably technologically within striking distance right now. That was always the thing: You couldn't afford to build these things as sets. It’s just too huge.… I think it’s more along the lines of motion-capture.”

Like the curious beings with their cryptic motives at the helm of the Rama, it now looks like we'll never quite know what really could've come of this long-anticipated movie.

The movie, based on the F. Scott Fitzgerald story, is about an orphaned man/boy who ages backwards. Fincher gives us a traveling slideshow of his Pitted marvels: Button as a brittle old man (shout-out to the makeup artist!); Button weirding-out a woman of ill repute; Button fighting on the frontlines; Button, topless, checking himself out in the mirror; and of course Button looking all strapping as he courts the graceful Blanchett. (Pitt doesn’t exude much here, but then if you saw his exaggerated performance in Burn After Reading, consider this sweet mercy.) It ends gently with a melancholic feeling of certain doom, a nuance hereto unknown to Fincher—which we welcome since he hasn't gone all Notebook on us.

In case you didn’t realize it, Button also has a leg-up in its mini-competition with long-delayed The Time Traveler’s Wife movie about a dude (Eric Bana) who jumps around randomly in time, courting his wife (Rachel McAdams) at different ages. Of course, Pitt comes out a winner either way, since he stars in Button and his Plan B Entertainment is producing the latter. Meanwhile it's looking more and more like we won't be needing a movie based on the lovely, lady-friendly, aging-backwards best-seller The Confessions of Max Tivoli. Or at least anytime soon.

David Fincher screened Benjamin Button footage at the Telluride Film Festival. First Showing said although the footage looked amazing, "Button was confusing and very long. " Calling editing on the clips "disjointed," the critic explained, "The result was quite unimpressive, but I'm left wondering whether it was the editor to blame for this 20 minute cut or whether the film really has problems."

Slashfilm also echoed concern, writing:

The footage I screened tonight was met with disappointment and concern. There are moments of magic and wonder, but interrupted and surrounded by moments which had me questioning, Is this really the best footage he has?

Maybe the mess is to do with Paramount lighting up the infamous Fincher defiance streak by refusing to greenlight his next project, a remake of animated feature Heavy Metal, unless he trimmed that fat on Button.

An interview with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle's co-creator Kevin Eastman at Playlist confirms the big f-off from Fincher to Paramount. Eastman says:

They were at odds with Fincher over another project, ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,’ they wanted him to reduce the running time… and so they said, ‘Until you step up to do what we want you to do with Benjamin, we’re not going to greenlight any other of [your] movies.’ And David said, ‘Fine, fuck you, I’m going to set up [Heavy Metal] somewhere else,’ so we jumped over to Sony and set it up there.

Therein lies the dilemma with Fincher: Tell him how to do his job and he'll tell you where to stick it, and I'm willing to bet he's right most of the time. But the complaints of "dragging" in the new film may mean he should have heeded studio concerns. The critics are being careful not to judge the movie outright, and I say wait until the final cut — because it's Fincher.

We're talking about the man who brought us Fight Club and Seven. Even his worst films are still popcorn-worthy. I think Fincher films are the kind of things you have to see all at once. You can't have a little taste like a clip reel or you're missing out on the full effect. I'm still excited to see the really old baby man that Fincher and Pitt are creating. This film might turn out to surprise us in the end.

Over at Ain't It Cool News, a reviewer who saw an early cut of the film writes:

The special effects and make-up in this film are truly amazing. Brad Pitt’s descent into youth is never once unbelievable; it looks tremendously authentic. The same goes for Blanchett’s aging process . . . [But] the film is somewhere near three hours. By an hour and a half/forty five, the audience was getting restless. I could hear them squirming in their seats in front and behind me. The last hour is ultimately weighed down by a lot of repetition that has to do with the romance between Pitt and Blanchett. The film is truly great up until the final hour where things begin to feel muddled and unnecessary.

I'm intrigued by the premise of a gothic-style love story where one person grows old and another grows young. And I'll watch Blanchette in pretty much anything. Hopefully Fincher will cut down that flabby third act, or at least bring in some alien technology or something to keep us entertained.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Review [via AICN]