Rating System

N – Not worth the popcorn let alone the ticket price

R – Rush to your nearest box office.  A must-see movie.

G- Generally awful, although some parts you need to stay awake for

PG-65- Grandparental discretion advised

Knowing

Rating: N

         Back in the late 1950s, a lot of Boomers like Lucinda Embry were in elementary school, and, in the opening scene of “Knowing,” students in Lexington, Massachusetts are asked to draw the future for a time capsule.  Most of the kids grab their crayons to create space ships or flying cars.  But weird Lucinda jots down a long list of seemingly random numbers, and when she doesn’t finish on time, wanders down to the basement to scratch out more on a door until her fingers bleed.

        If only a professional guidance counselor would’ve been called in and her work relegated to an old filing cabinet, then the movie would’ve let everyone out early and we could’ve found a better way to spend the next hour and fifty minutes.

Instead, we get weird Nicolas Cage fifty years later, playing an MIT professor who lives in a spooky house straight from a Scooby Doo cartoon.  As fate (and Summit Entertainment) would have it, the time capsule is opened and Cage starts running Lucinda’s numbers. What he finds are dates for disasters past and future. A plane crashes, subway trains jump their rails, a forest fire erupts and someone cuts in front of him in traffic.

          True to his screen tradition, Nicolas over acts. “Nick! NICK!” we want to shout from our multiplex seats.  “Calm the hell down! You don’t have to start whacking things with a baseball bat or making frantic 911 calls.  It’s not the end of the world.” 

          But, of course, it is.  It’s just that wild-eyed Nicolas, wearing old jeans and a new hairpiece, handles it so poorly ... as do screenwriter Ryne Douglas Pearson and director Alex Proyas.  How are we to decipher such a cinematic disaster as this?  And why would Cage and his agent accept a script with lines like “I can see their faces …    burning…..”? Not even an MIT professor can answer this.

       My advice for this movie:  You’re better off NOT knowing.

Advisory: contains simple-minded seniors, offensive plot twists and disturbing images of a flaming moose and other woodland creatures.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Rating: PG-65

            Whoa!  I knew Brad Pitt might be a bit worn down, trying to keep up with a  woman like Angelina and all those kids, but in the first fifty minutes of  “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” he looks really B-A-D. Only a few years ago he was storming the beaches of Troy looking like a Greek god.

          But then I figured out he’s aging backwards, something Boomers keep trying to do with skin screams, hair transplants, Lasik surgery and chemical peels.  Brad …er, Benjamin does it effortlessly, without the help of any of these.  But there’s a price to pay. He was born in New Orleans in 1918 looking like a shar-pei, one of those wrinkled Chinese pups, and spends his early years dealing with infirmities.

           He makes a friend in Daisy, an older-yet-younger-looking girl while the younger-yet-actually- older Benjamin is  ….  I know, it’s confusing.  Here’s the question. If we live long enough to be an octogenarian, does it really matter what direction we age? Does it matter when we get acne, when we first use a fake ID to buy beer or which war we fight in (WWII or Vietnam)?  I guess it does. Not because of Medicare or Social Security – although it would be cool to collect that stuff up front. No, not that.  It’s the relationships. Screenwriter Eric Roth shows how heartbreaking it can be – all because of age.

             This is demonstrated when Benjamin’s father abandons him, embarrassed by a geezer infant.  Then again when Benjamin must make a painful decision about his relationship with the love of his life (played by Kate Blanchett).   He’s growing younger and eventually he’ll require toilet training.  Roth, by the way, wrote Forrest Gump, so if that movie was like a box of chocolates, this one is like – I don’t know – a pineapple upside down cake?

             I plan to rent this move and watch it in reverse.  Maybe then it will turn out better. Kurt Vonnegut used to watch war movies backwards so that the bombs would go back into the planes, and the soldiers would shed their uniforms and return to their hometowns as fresh-faced kids.

             However, I suspect that half way through this one Benjamin will still be middle age crazy, and, at both ends of the DVD he’ll be wetting his pants.  So, I’m confused.  Go see this movie yourself and get back to me.  I’ll be right here, stuck in my normal, boring aging  pattern.

e Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Rati