clocking in...

This is sooo sooo cool...
(its a clock)
(from here)

Places I'd love to inhabit...

This place looks wonderful, would probably make a great secret headquarters.....
(more pictures here)

The tedious case of Benjamin Button...

Against my better judgement I went to see The Curious case of Benjamin Button last night. My initial feeling was 'that's 3 hours of my life I'm not getting back'....

ok, I'm sure that technically it was very very clever... Brad looks very old, Brad looks a bit younger, Brad looks like Brad, Brad looks like a teenager etc....

I'm assuming that the fools who reviewed the movie were so amazed by what can be done with makeup and computers that they forgot that the movie was tedious and THREE HOURS LONG.

Ok, so Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swindon were both pretty good. But the whole film still felt like Forrest Gump... a 3 hour long Forrest Gump....which occasionally wanted to be Amelie. (and failed pretty badly).

It didn't help that while Brad did try acting pretty well, the writers had decided that not only did Benjamin curiosuly get younger instead of older but that he was also dumber than Forrest... leaving Brad alternating between looking at people charmingly and slowly drawling a line of romantic pseudo-philosophy.

And seriously, it was three hours long, and felt like four.... By the time BB was a teenager I just wanted him to dye. Especially as the story was intercut with his wife+daughter many years later (tragically being hit by huricane Katrina). I guess this kind of hit a nerve because the need to have flashbacks to the present was what really pissed me off about 'Saving Private Ryan' and 'Schnindlers List'. Admitidly this time it added a whole extra (if very predictably) layer to the movie (he is, unsurprisingly, her father).

Movie critics should be drowned in their own popcorn and I want my money back....