[扫雷]curious case of benjamin button

[Knowing]

难看死了。千万别看，还特长，三个多钟头。一堆没关系的内容堆在一起。
哎，笑嘻嘻，尤其是你，小布在里面扮演二十多，十七八的时候，化装惨不忍睹。

[笑嘻嘻]

呼唤新帅哥的出现。
我已经对他失望了，犹豫半天，都去看了twilight 也没看他。

[笑嘻嘻]

还有两个影讯，1）我看到angels and demons 的预告片了，音乐跟达芬奇码一模一样，所以一听就听出来了，当然还是丑陋的tom hanks 演的。2）国内电影《即日启程》还不错。没有任何

[qingfen]

哎呀，我也上当了。看了一个钟头决定放弃。

[gigi]

Benjamin Button µÄ¹Êʱ»ÖØд¹ýºÃ¼¸´Î¡£Andrew Sean Greer дµÄ¡°Confessions of Max Tivoli¡± °Ñ¹ÊÊ·ÅÔÚÊ®¾ÅÊÀ¼ÍÄ©µÄÈý·ªÊУ¬ºÜºÃ¿´¡£

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/0 ... rentPage=1

F. Scott Fitzgerald published a story, ¡°The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,¡± on the theme in 1922. Including it in his collection ¡°Tales of the Jazz Age,¡± he noted in a foreword:

This story was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain¡¯s to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end. By trying the experiment upon only one man in a perfectly normal world I have scarcely given his idea a fair trial. Several weeks after completing it, I discovered an almost identical plot in Samuel Butler¡¯s ¡°Note-books.¡±

It perhaps says something about Fitzgerald¡¯s psychology that the story¡¯s opening sections, with Button as an old man, come across as coarse and brittle farce, whereas the end, in which the hero regresses into infancy, feels seductively plausible:

Through the noons and nights he breathed and over him there were soft mumblings and murmurings that he scarcely heard, and faintly differentiated smells, and light and darkness.

Then it was all dark, and his white crib and the dim faces that moved above him, and the warm sweet aroma of the milk, faded out altogether from his mind.

Though not one of Fitzgerald¡¯s best, the story was reprised eighty years later by Gabriel Brownstein, in his story collection ¡°The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W¡± (2002). The title story, a fantastic riff upon a fantasy, almost duplicates Fitzgerald¡¯s for a few sentences but goes off weirdly in its own directions. Button, born ancient in 1912, masquerades in ¡°shtetl drag¡± as a jazz pianist ¡°known variously as the Hey-Hey Hebrew, the Jitterbug Jew, and the Kokomotion Kike¡± during the late twenties, and reappears in the seventies as a barefoot hippie living, with his aged mother, in the same West Side apartment building occupied by the adolescent narrator. Benjamin Button¡¯s parents are a Southern woman and a ¡°merchant banker¡± who is trying to suppress his Jewish, East Side origins, as the grandson of a rabbi. A great deal of new baggage is thus loaded upon the tenuous figure of Button, and he sinks beneath it, as Fitzgerald¡¯s ending returns in starker, more structuralist terms:

Soon, he could not tell day from night, pain from want, and finally presence from absence. Long after he ceased to feel the movement of time, he faded completely from its progress.

Two years later in this progress, an entire novel, resplendently poetic and loftily sorrowing, ¡°The Confessions of Max Tivoli,¡± by Andrew Sean Greer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $23), has appeared. The name Benjamin Button is retired, but the thought-experiment remains. This time, the man at the end of his life is born in 1871, in San Francisco, of a Southern woman and a self-invented entrepreneur, not Jewish but Danish, who has changed his name from Asgar Van Daler to Tivoli, in honor of the Copenhagen park he remembers. Young-old Max¡¯s early memories are richly entwined with the animal wonders of San Francisco¡¯s Woodward¡¯s Gardens, one of the many lost local sights that Greer revives, with an eerie sensory omniscience, from the dry pages of research. He is one of numerous young-old contemporary fiction writers¡ªMark Helprin, Thomas Mallon, Caleb Carr, Alice Munro, Andrea Barrett, with E. L. Doctorow as godfather¡ªto whom time past is an open book, a theme park in which they wander with a child¡¯s delight in gaudiness and violence. What Henry James, himself now part of the past and available as a theme-park exhibit, breathlessly called the ¡°palpable present intimate that throbs responsive¡± is pointedly neglected in favor of what he called ¡°mere escamotage . . . the little facts that can be got from pictures and documents, relics and prints.¡± All fiction, insofar as it derives from the writer¡¯s memories, is historical in a sense; but a reader who has hearkened to Henry James enters guardedly ingeniously reconstructed worlds that ceased to exist before the author was born. A circumstantiality assembled of little documentary facts can feel flimsy, offering less resistance to enchantment than an unsifted environment clumsily pressing all around us.

That said, ¡°The Confessions of Max Tivoli¡± is enchanting, in the perfumed, dandified style of disenchantment brought to grandeur by Proust and Nabokov. ¡°Love . . . ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come,¡± runs the novel¡¯s epigraph, from Proust, and Greer¡¯s opening sentence reads, ¡°We are each the love of someone¡¯s life.¡± The general fate of misdirected, unarrived love, then, merges with the singular case of Max Tivoli, who begins with the innocent mind of a child in an old man¡¯s body, and, after a brief and blissful intersection, in 1906, of his inner age with his physical age, ends with a man¡¯s mournful wisdom in a child¡¯s body. Max differs from Benjamin Button in that Button begins with a fully stocked old brain and ends with a newborn¡¯s tabula rasa; whereas Max learns as he goes, as do those of us not condemned to age in reverse. Sex, for example, comes upon him when he has the able body of a fifty-
three-year-old and the inexperience of an exceptionally chaste seventeen-year-old. His lover, the downstairs tenant Mrs. Levy, is ardent enough for two, crooning to him as they copulate in a bed of phlox, ¡°You¡¯re a good man, Max, don¡¯t worry, you haven¡¯t touched a woman in a while, have you? Max, you good, good man.¡± However, it is not the mother Max loves but the daughter, fourteen-year-old Alice, upon whom he spies with the ornate prurience of Humbert Humbert yearning for Lolita. Max (whose memoirs are written for Alice eventually to read) glimpses her one night looking for something in their shared back garden:

I could see through the neck of your loose cotton chemise a pink landscape of skin. You turned and writhed in your cloud and I turned and writhed in mine. I saw your legs stretching and tensing as you hunted and jerked your body in hope; women¡¯s pantaloons were devious things in those days, split down the crotch with overlapping fabric, and once you shifted just carelessly enough to allow the veil to part and I glimpsed the vulnerable blue veins of your thighs. . . . I hope you¡¯ll find it flattering, now that you are old as well, to think of me in bed, staring at my memory like a French postcard, watching the starlight trickle into the darkness of your clothes.

[putaopi]

我发现笑嘻嘻看了Twilight, 怎么样啊？要是好看我赶紧去，否则都快下线了。

[karen]

我去看了Benjamin Button，觉得挺好看的呀。 是部细水长流美丽的爱情片，没啥大起大落但耐看。 出来后我看了表才知道这片接近三小时，坐在里面好象掉进另个世界里真没觉的片子长。 Cate Blanchett舞娘角色很养眼，布摔哥演十几岁小子的镜头的确是太强求了，但壮年时代骑摩托车那几个镜头还是不错的。

[笑嘻嘻]

Twilight 结构松散，人物没有性格，没有人物冲突，所以也没有扣人心弦的情节，纯粹表现出了作者是一个青少年。潜在背景跟这几年中文网上少女文学一个路子，一个各方面都平平的女孩，没有一般这个年龄段女孩子的叽叽喳喳的蠢，就突然被一个天人一样从来不理人的男孩挣扎半天给爱上了，可见这个反塔希全世界通行。但我认为是值得票价的，并且虽然头半个小时情节松散到我不能专心，后面我都专心致志地看下去。因为她非常准确并真诚地描写了少年人的心理世界一些我们长大了以后就忘记了东西，从前我看的所有青少年电影都一比较就是成年人写的。成年人只记得了一些事件，自己的得意或失意。从来没有人描绘过少年人刚开始有自我意识，世界显得有多神秘广大未知，而自己是很特殊的。这种特殊表现在自己虽然在人群中不显眼，但是却是有超能力。隐藏这种超能力是为了保护我们的秘密。（哈利伯特开头有点这个意思，马上就全部进入到一个人人都会魔法的世界，人人都会的世界就跟人人都不会的世界不就是一样的嘛。）蜘蛛侠有点这个意思，但说不清为什么没有这个强烈，大概是因为蜘蛛侠的情节紧凑主要还是一个故事片。基本上少年人的世界就是这个想法和无条件的爱，其他事情不存在，这个好像还挺真实的。
我的总结是值得票价，既不推荐也不反对。

[StarryNight]

重了

[StarryNight]

作者也不年轻了

Stephenie Meyer (née Morgan, born December 24, 1973)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephenie_Meyer

Just my personal opinion It was so bad I couldn't stop rolling my eyes.

[putaopi]

我的总结是值得票价，既不推荐也不反对。

谢谢笑嘻嘻的详细解释，这么说来是可看可不看的。我倒没有什么期待，想看的就是个反塔西，还要有俊男美女养眼最好。