Unbuttoned

By Steven Zeitchik

You know a movie is carrying a lot of expectations when a projection snafu becomes news. Thursday night's interruption of the highly anticipated "Benjamin Button" screening at the DGA -- in which the screening was stopped a half hour in because of color problems resulting from a digital-projector malfunction -- had some tongues wagging today.

Of course as much as people love to speculate -- and bloggers love to theorize -- the effect of this screening on the movie's ultimate performance, both at the box-office and with awards voters, will be absolutely nil.

The only people it had to be tough for were director David Fincher, who wasn't there, and producers Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy and D.P. Claudio Miranda, who were (Miranda must have had a strange feeling, given how much care was put into the look of the film, when a few people, intending to reassure, said it was all okay because they didn't really notice a big difference). In a way Paramount did its job too well; there were so many tastemakers and so much anticipation at the DGA that the snafu was talked about more than had Par not been as effective.

It's odd to offer a take on the first 30 minutes of a film that's already been completed -- though that didn't stop many in the screening about the reverse-aging epic from offering an impromptu Roger Ebert, or the easy jokes about re-starting the movie from the end -- but we'll say that what we saw looked great. It's mythic and quirky and with all the novelty you want from a premise like that.

And it's worth noting that for all the ink about the screening, compared to other snafus it was modest; we were at that screening of "Borat" in Toronto a few years ago when the projector went out . At 2 a.m. you had Larry Charles and Sacha Baron Cohen (in character) doing an improvised set while Michael Moore tried to fix the projector.

That was surreal. This was just slightly...curious.

Comments

[Lisa M.]

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http://www.thelifeofluxury.com/brad-pitt/

I can't wait for his next movie to come out. It's gonna rock!