Today Laura and Charles came over to watch movies. We began with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (dir. David Fincher, 2008). I thought it was pretty good, though I sort of questioned the logistics of Button's curious case. I guess there will be some spoilers here and, if you haven't seen the movie, then you ought not read the next paragraph okay? Okay.

So the deal is that Button is aging backwards. He's born old and dies young. He is born a wrinkled, aged, and decrepit infant-sized tot. This makes sense as he has to fit through his mother's birth canal. Subsequent scenes show him growing up, looking an old man in his nineties, but short in stature for several years more. Blah blah blah, the story progresses, and as Button reaches old age he regresses to a proper-sized infant. I just felt that, as he already grew up to full size in his early years, that by the end of his life he should have been a six-foot tall baby. It would have been terrifying and I think he should have resembled the Newborn from Alien Resurrection (perhaps proper, as director Fincher helmed Alien3). Oh well.

It was as the end credits began to roll that Charles received the text message from CNN's Twitter informing us of Michael Jackson's passing. We investigated on the Internet to find out for certain and Laura departed us shortly after. It's hard to lose someone whose art you're a fan of. How would I react if Regina Spektor or Amanda Palmer were to suddenly cease to live? It would be a bad day for me, to be certain.

Charles and I did do some haikus on Benjamin Button once we returned to the basement. Laura turned hers in two days later.






We couldn't really decide what to do next so Chuck and I deliberated over movies and picked Transformers (dir. Michael Bay, 2007). It's a movie that's surprisingly good for a Bay film, but neither of us enjoyed it as much as we had two years ago. We walked out of that theater in July 2007 full of praise and astonishment. It's not to say that the movie is now suddenly bad or anything -- it's still a pretty good movie -- but it just didn't seem to click as it once had.

In any event, I was unable to generate any personal excitement over the sequel, even before the reviews began coming in. Here's some haikus in which I rehash an old joke.