The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, round 3.

For a Vanity Fair cover story on Cate Blanchett, Leslie Bennetts "encounters a Hollywood anomaly: a star who doesn't do drama offscreen... and whose latest role, as Brad Pitt’s soulmate in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, has her focused on aging and death." And there's an accompanying slide show.

"Hollywood set its sights on Fitzgerald as early as 1920," writes Susan King. "In the last 88 years, there have been myriad film and TV adaptations of his short stories and novels. Some worked, but many others strayed badly off the mark, perhaps because the novelist's poetic language and singular sensibility are difficult to duplicate on screen."

Updated through 12/31.

Also in the Los Angeles Times,Michael Ordoña talks with Taraji P Henson, who plays Queenie, "the proprietor of a New Orleans seniors home at the end of World War I who takes in an abandoned infant with the physical characteristics of an 80-year-old man."

"If you plan to visit New Orleans within the next few days," notes Joe Leydon, "you might want to pay a visit to The Clover Grill - featured prominently in a key scene in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - before tourists start flocking there in search of Brad Pitt."

Earlier: Robert Davis and rounds 1 and 2.

Update: "When Hollywood [had] the actual, still-living Fitzgerald nestled in its bosom, it may not have been able to overcome its natural aversion to the aura he then had as a washed-up failure - an aversion that Fitzgerald shared, and that may have contributed to his physical deterioration as much as the fast living and his alcoholism." Phil Nugent at Screengrab: "But it still loved his stories about scandal and blighted romance among the rich and the beautiful: it rushed to turn them into movies when they were hot off the presses and then, after his death, was quick to reconceive them as nostalgic odes to a vanished time."

Update, 12/31: The Great Gatsby may well be the "most reliably unfilmable novel of the 20th century," argues Xan Brooks, "if only because it looks so straightforward, so reassuringly high concept when it is actually a fiendish will-o-the-wisp; a deadly honey-trap for all but the shrewdest, most sensitive filmmaker."

Posted by dwhudson at December 29, 2008 7:51 AM