Curious Enough.

I finally went to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Maybe a coincidence, that same morning I had a breakfast conversation with a friend about how it's fine for some movies to just entertain. Not all of them have to be extremely artistic and not all of them have to be groundbreaking. Some of them can just entertain. Which is the first thing any movie should do anyway.

In that spirit I went to see Benjamin Button, and I enjoyed it. There's an interesting story (about a man living life from old to young) and there's good acting. Some might say it's a bit long, I agree. But the movie keeps the viewer engaged for the most part.

SPOILER ALERT- If you have not seen the movie, stop reading.

Now there's one thing that the movie is missing. A good ending. Or a better one. It actually has that better ending embedded in the film, except that it's not the ending.
Generally a good ending is based on the fact that the pinnacle of the movie has just happened. After that all you need is a resolution, and that can be as quick as Casablanca or as long as The Return of the King.
I think the ending in this film came when the daughter is reading the postcards Benjamin sent after he left. That was the most emotional part of the film. She's reading the birthday cards and you're seeing the images of him traveling around the world. A good resolution after that could have been when he visits Daisy for the last time, narrated by Daisy herself and finally ending with the fact that they found a boys back pack with a book that had her name on it. And we never see him as a little boy. Actually, that's when the movie lost me, those last 10 minutes of seeing him go younger. We know that, we know he's going to die as a baby, we might as well not seen that and end the movie at the pinnacle. With the boy sequences the audience cools down from that emotional moment. You can even feel it inside the movie theater, the way people react by the end and the feeling in the ambient is not the same as when that emotional moment happens.
A good ending is hard to get, and most movies usually have it in there. It's all about editing or knowing when's a good time to stop.