Film (and Theater!) Review

That's right, I said a theater review, absolutely foreign territory for me.
But first, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the movie I saw with Sara on my first-ever Christmas Day away from any family and in NYC. First, the 6:00 showing sold out completely and only through dumb luck did I bump into a guy willing to unload two tickets for $20 (that's a $5 discount) because his friend "got sick." So that won me the privilege of not waiting in the ticket line but waiting at the end of a massive entrance line. Evidently lots and lots of people wanted to see this film. We were only going because it was playing at the closest theater at the right time.
I read a book a few years ago called The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which features as its protagonist a man born to an old body who then gets younger as he ages. Perhaps for this reason I wasn't as enthralled by the story as I may otherwise have been, seeing as how that is a very interesting and specific plot. But I was very underwhelmed by this film. The people involved are all proficient enough and the film is attractive enough, but in my opinion it's definitely not worth its 165 minutes and whatever it cost to make. The reason for this is the story and the inattention to detail.
Maybe the producers thought that the simple aging story was fascinating enough and chose not to accentuate it. Maybe they were worried about adding to the length. Maybe they just failed miserably. In the above referenced book, a central struggle is that of the character pining after a woman his age but not his appearance. There is the constant disconnect between a young soul inside an old body (and later, to a lesser extent, an old soul in a young body). This is emotionally compelling. In the film, the character seems usually to be born simply an old man in both soul and body. When he falls in love with the girl, we don't appreciate any of the tragedy of his condition. Instead the whole film seems to be a mere succession of events that ends up being almost boring. Also, in the book, since the character lives backward, he is necessarily aware of exactly when he will die, which gives much space for the author to consider the devastating human effect such knowledge causes. The film never mentions this and actually is forced to spend almost no time covering the end of Benjamin's life because they've already decided that he will recede into infancy and therefore have no ability to complexly think about his own existence.
The other serious issue I had with the film was it very loose attention to details, specifically plot details. I've already mentioned that the film starts with a baby with a frail old man's body. They don't consistently show us whether his soul is old or young. We see him desiring to play with kids and zealously listening to a bedtime story, but he's otherwise always playing the part of an old man unfazed by the world around him (you can almost conspiratorily wonder whether the filmmakers realized their "young" Benjamin was too blandly old and so forced in a couple of anecdotes). Getting back to my point, since the baby grows like a normal person, only reversing in appearance, you would then expect the small baby that looks like an old man to end his life as a near-fully-grown old man that looks like a baby. Instead, what we get is a progressively younger Benjamin who decreases in size back to an infant. This might seem hard to follow or like a small detail, but it bothered me and it's not the only example. There were somewhat liberal references to Benjamin's age and/or the date, so simple math would allow you to fill in the gaps. More often than not, they didn't match up. Again, I know this film is just a fantasy tale, and you're supposed to give allowances, but these transgressions were too much for me.
Before I finish telling about how I didn't like this film and how it's only average at best, I will mention that there is a very nice emotional scene at the end when Cate Blanchett is holding the dying baby Benjamin and she says how he gave her knowing look. Those moments of connected emotion were unfortunately far too rare.

Now, the moment you've been waiting for: the review of "Pal Joey" (I'm not even sure if I'm supposed to quote or italicize that), my first ever Broadway show (yeah, I succeeded in living in this city for 5.5 years without seeing one). Actually, I don't have much of an idea what I'm talking about regarding theater, and my response to the show was similarly sparse, so I won't say much. Sorry.
For some reason, I wasn't completely prepared for how long it was. Start to finish, including the intermission, it was 2.5 hours. The chairs appeared cushioned enough (you don't sit in a reclinable movie-theater style chair at these theaters, but instead a simple stationary chair), but were far too close together and ended up being the source of quite a bit of discomfort. The show itself wasn't boring, but still I was counting down the songs during act two on account of the chairs. The theater was also extremely hot and almost foggy. I'm not sure where the mustiness came from but it was another unexpectedly uncomfortable twist.
As for the show itself, I think it would not be classified with your stereotypical Broadway shows, because it had a somewhat compelling story that moved forward more through plot than through song. None of the songs were very memorable for me, though few were painful either. I was able to bear them without struggle, though during the intermission, I made a point of counting the upcoming songs in the program so I knew how to pace myself through act two's 12 numbers (act one contained 13 songs).
Not being a lavish song-and-dance show, the dances didn't really inspire much comment. They were certainly entertaining. Actually, that's a good simple word to use about the whole production: entertaining. I guess that's as high a compliment as a Broadway show usually requires. Also, I'm not sure if it was due to the subject matter of "Pal Joey" or if it's common to all Broadway, but I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of dancer ogling that is possible, and at nicely consistent intervals.
I agree with Sara's assessment of the actors: Stockard Channing is a fine stage performer but her singing is distractingly sub-par. There was one song where she was forced to alternate verses with another actor, and her inabilites were put on unfortunate display. The male lead was actually a late fill-in because the "name" guy (oddly I can't remember his name) was forced to leave at the last minute. He was extremely competent on all fronts. From my perch in the rear mezzanine, he appeared young too, so maybe he'll get around a bit in the future. The third large part was played by Martha Plimpton, whom most people my age know primarily for her work in Goonies. She was right in her element here, which is a definite compliment as her part was that of a nightclub singer, so any inadequacies would be terribly glaring.
To wrap this up: no, I don't think I'd return by my own motivation to Broadway for a musical after having seen this one. I have other motivations now though, and the sheer joy Sara derived from this experience, coupled with what I can best describe as ambivalently pleasant acceptance of the medium, will surely lead to more appearances.

Still, for my gameness, she owes me a little now. (Which is odd, because she claimed that I owed her a movie after the discomfort that attended her viewing of The Wrestler, which was my pick and something she would never have seen alone. (Disclaimer--she thought The Wrestler was great too, just a little to hard to watch.) So she was going to get to choose any movie for us to jointly see in the theater regardless of my tastes and I'd be forced to go, except her everlasting girl-ness took over and she decided to force me to watch two movies on TV instead. I lost about 2 hours from my life in this deal, but gained $25. No, my life is not worth more than $12.50/hr, so I call this a win. Anyway, the two movies ended up being White Christmas, which I didn't even watch all of, and Love, Actually. I won't waste too many keystrokes on it, but I just want to say what a truly horrible movie the latter is. I was fully expecting chick-flick crap, but this thing was so bad I was laughing at it. It was so bad I googled the people involved in making it and can you believe my astonishment to learn that its writer/director is fairly well-respected. Unbelievable.)