My wife and I saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Britten Button last night. I guess I will have to call it a good movie, since it was quite thought provoking, and provoking thought should be at least one of the reasons for doing things like making movies.
The thing that really struck me, however, was the great amount of personal anxiety that was generated by the hours-before-Katrina setting of the hospital scenes. That combination of a hospital and approaching Katrina brings some very specific thoughts to people that followed the news around here in the year and some change after the storm. Fortunately, the movie didn’t go there, but I didn’t know it wasn’t going to go there until right at the end. Seeing the clips of familiar weather forecasters on the air in pre-K prediction mode was also very unnerving, since we know what eventually happened.
I thought the payoff of all this, the scene with the clock in the warehouse, was very effective, but I didn’t think I would still react so viscerally to the set up.