Blue Valentine

Blue Valentine, pretty small town girl meets nutter with a ukulele and he falls in love, whilst she marries him for convenience... kind of. Happens all the time, just without the ukulele. This nutter though, does appear to quite charming. Well I liked him, at first.

What follows is a kind of a weighty relationship study. Several years Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy’s (Michelle Williams) marriage is failing. They both know its failing but they just haven't quite reached the endpoint yet. He seems to want it to continue, she doesn’t.



The story of everything falling apart is told in parallel with the story of them/him falling in love. See I’m not convinced she ever loved him. We see how they met and how they fell for each other. In his case at first sight. In her case after he stalked her on the bus with a ukulele with lines like ‘In my experience, the prettier a girl is, the more nuts she is, which makes you insane’. She seems amused and sort of flattered that he can ‘compliment and insult somebody at the same time, in equal measure’.

He’s more nuts than she is though. Later he strums said ukulele in a shop doorway whilst warbling eccentrically the song ‘You Always Hurt the Ones You Love’, which should have been a warning to both of them, but it works, he pulls the girl and gets into her knickers. Which is impressively quick work until we find out that she’s had 'about' 25 partners from the age of 13.



Dean doesn’t know this though, so it comes as a bit of a shock to him when she almost instantly announces that she’s pregnant. Not that it’s his of course but courtesy of the guy she’s been hanging around with before Dean.

When she goes for an abortion and we learn about her promiscuity, we wonder why it’s taken her so long to get caught out? It’s an abortion she finds she can’t go through with and aborts the procedure part way through. Luckily for her Saint Dean is all too willing to devote his life to the gorgeous girl he’s just met and her unborn child, even after getting beat up by the biological father. So he marries her and raises her daughter as she’s his own.



Back in the present, we see their relationship deteriorate further. Cindy is stressed out, overworked and claims to be raising her husband along with her daughter. He meanwhile still appears to be infatuated with her and puts up with more rejection than most people could stomach but for her, it’s clearly already all over. Cindy notes early on that her parents very quickly fell out of love with each and wondered how anyone can trust their feelings when they can just disappear like that? It’s like she was waiting for it to happen.

Yet he still tries to breathe life back in to their relationship with a perhaps ill advised and ill timed trip away to a motel for a night. She's not keen, not keen at all. Especially when it turns out the room they book is a futuristic themed room that looks like the inside of Dr. Who’s Tardis or as Dean describes it a ‘robot's vagina’. Perhaps romance died then.



Perhaps because I'm a man I look at Dean and wonder what it is that he did wrong. I felt sorry for him; on the surface he's done a lot for her but now she seemed to be out of gratitude and now more narked about what he hadn't done. Get a better job for instance. Although probably just so that she could afford to go back to medical school.

True, somewhere along the way, his character has changed. The nice guy started to smoke too much, drink way too much and become very short tempered. Here lies the problem with the film. Just when did this character change occur? When did their relationship suddenly go bad? There seemed to be a bit missing in the middle between the past and the present, a big bit.

Dean say early on about girls in general that 'they spend their whole life looking for Prince Charming and then they marry the guy who's got a good job and is going to stick around'. So perhaps he knew it wasn’t going to last. A better observation would have been 'don't marry someone you just met ten minutes ago and who is pregnant by someone else'.

Gosling and Williams are both very good in this, although only Williams got an Oscar nomination yesterday. The film itself, whilst a good watch, is flawed and nothing special, nothing we haven’t seen before, like say in Revolutionary Road. The film itself got a nomination in the now expanded list of ten Best Film nominations but if they’d stuck to the original five of old, I guess it wouldn’t have.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' is very loosely adapted from a short story by F Scott Fitzgerald.

Benjamin Button tells us he was born 'under unusual circumstances'. To be precise he was born a rather ugly and wrinkled baby of eighty odd years old. In the book, he started as a full sized eighty year old, so it's no wonder his mother died in childbirth but the film is done a bit differently and he is baby sized.

In the film version, his father abandons him on the steps of an old folk's home, where he is taken and raised by Queenie, a carer there. At first they think he's going to die but the ravages of old age are gradually shed from his body and he progresses from wheelchair to walking stick and then beyond. As everyone continues to grow older, he grows younger. Brad Pitt plays Button pretty much all the way through with the help of heavy make-up, CGI and having his head electronically placed on other actors bodies.



We follow his life story, from his birth in New Orleans on the day that the First World War ended right through to his death. It is told in my 'favourite' form, that of flashback, and from the deathbed of his truelove, the now elderly Daisy (Cate Blanchett) as Hurricane Katrina rages outside. Daisy's grandmother was a resident at the same home, which is where she first met Benjamin. They remain in contact throughout their lives, seemingly destined to be together, despite the two of them ageing in different directions.

It is read from his diaries by her daughter, Caroline (Julia Ormond). It’s a method I'm not sure I like as it continually breaks up the storyline.

There are also other oddities. The addition of Mr Cake (Monsieur Gateau) and his train station clock that ran backwards in the hope that it would wind back time and undo the death of his Son and others from the battlefields of the Great War. I never grasped why this and its tenuous link to Benjamin's life running backwards was added.

Also, at times the film tries to do too much, like mapping out the sequence of bad luck that led to Daisy's dancing career being ended when she was struck by a Parisian taxi. Then there's the old man who was hit by lightning seven times... a slightly funny diversion but not much more.



Button is lucky he was born in 1918; had he been born in 2009 he would have been all over the papers and labelled as a freak. His life would have been 'I'm Celebrity Get Me Outta Here' hell. Instead, he leaves America working on a tugboat. He visits Russia, where he has an affair with Tilda Swinton, well someone has to I suppose, and he ends up involved in the Second World War.



When he returns, he rediscovers Daisy, now a successful dancer. Yet he turns her down, preferring to wait until he is 'young enough' for her.

After her accident, they eventually end up together and have a child. I think we all worked out long before Caroline did, what her relationship to Benjamin was. She won't remember him though because as he hurtles his way towards short trousers, he walks out of their lives. Knowing that when he becomes Kevin The Teenager, he'll be good for nothing but angst and sulks.



I thought it might end there and that they'd bottle his death as he faded back to zero, but they didn't. In fact, he came back, after a trip around the world, sowing his oats. Teenagers, they're so unreliable. Would Daisy be tempted to have one of the road and see if he was as good aged sixteen, of course she would.

It's all rather sad at the end as Daisy takes charge of the infant Benjamin and nurses him towards death.

The film has been given quite a bit of criticism in reviews but then has also gained a load of Oscar nominations. Realistically I don't see any great acting performances here, but that doesn't seem to matter, although at times the New Orleans accents grate a bit, as a whole it's a very clever film. It's also a long film but it never drags. I loved it.

Button went through much the same plusses and minuses in life as the rest of us, just in the opposite direction. The film tries to show you life from a different perspective. Like all of us, he spent a lifetime trying to figure out how this love thing works and still only just about got there. The message is that age is after all just a number and no matter what that number is, we can choose what we do with our lives but in the end, Button, like all of us, is unable to stop time.