The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Post #1)

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button site, with trailers!

I am quite excited for this film. It is based on a short story by F Scott Fitzgerald and was originally published in 1922.

I have a book full of many of his short stories called 'Before Gatsby' (a rich find on one of my etsy shop excursions!) and it contains this story. Which I have not read, yet. I just discovered that the book is full of wonderful photos of the covers of the magazines his work appeared in. I cannot figure out what she is doing to her neck though.

I am very intrigued by this story and the movie. I love the time period, of course. But it also reflects Scott's and Zelda's obsession with staying young, etc.

More posts to come! The movie opens Christmas Day and has a fantastic cast.

*ETA* As I watched the trailer, I thought 'hmm, looks very 'Young Indiana Jones' to me. The War (I'm assuming WWI, it looks like the trenches), the ballet (one of the best episodes of YI!), and the motorcycle (which is prominent in both Young Indy/Verdun AND in the latest IJ movie). I was searching for info on BB and found this article about David Fincher. His childhood neighbor was George Lucas and he worked for Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic on 'Return of the Jedi'.

Coincidentally, his movie Se7en has come up at least twice in discussion here in the past week and is one of my favorite movies for style. I loved the way the notebooks and photographs were done. Zodiac had some of those artistic elements.

Lucas seems to be slightly obsessed with Hemingway as well, who was close to Fitzgerald. They had an interesting Enneagram 4 type 'push pull' relationship.

Siegfried Sassoon's Dreamer

This is one of my favorite and Sassoon's most well known poems. I heard it for the first time on Young Indiana Jones way back in 1992. I was 14 and needed to understand war. It only took me 15 years! When I've looked for it before on youtube, it has not been there. But today...it was!
I personally think we have so many valuable lessons to learn from WWI.

For context reasons...Indy has joined the Belgian army and is on a break from fighting in the Western Front in the Somme, one of the bloodiest battles of WWI. Even though all the men together are part of the Allies, there is some name calling between the French, Belgian and British armies. A tennis game is held and Indy plays against Sassoon and Graves. And then the game is over and this scene occurs.



Dreamers
Soldiers are citizens of death’s grey land,
Drawing no dividend from time’s to-morrows.
In the great hour of destiny they stand,
Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.
Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win
Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
They think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives.

I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,
And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
And mocked by hopeless longing to regain
Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,
And going to the office in the train.

Charles and Anne de Gaulle

The following deals with an issue close to my and my family's heart: Down Syndrome. Shortly after I learned of Anne de Gaulle , my dad emailed me the same info I had been researching. :)

In light of the recent media frenzy over Sarah Palin and her beautiful son, Trig (who was born with Down Syndrome), I found out that Charles de Gaulle's daughter, Anne, also had it. And she was the LIGHT of his world. While he was normally very reserved, friends, family and colleagues attested to the fact that he became a big, soft hearted dadda around her (my words!). I spent about an hour trying to find a photo of her or them together online and did not come up with anything.

In October 1945, Yvonne de Gaulle bought the Château de Vert-Cœur at Milon-la-Chapelle (Yvelines), where they installed a private hospital for handicapped young girls: the Fondation Anne de Gaulle.

Anne died on 6 February 1948 (20 years old) at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. Upon her death, her father said: "Now, she's like the others." ("Maintenant, elle est comme les autres.")

On 22 August 1962, Charles de Gaulle was the victim of an attempted assassination at Petit-Clamart. He later said that the potentially fatal bullet had been stopped by the frame of the photograph of Anne that he always carried with him, placed this particular day on the rear shelf of his car. When he died in 1970, he was buried in the cemetery of Colombey beside his beloved daughter. (The last three sections are from wikipedia, though I researched it and it seems to be true according to other sources as well.)

Up until the past week or so, I knew only the basics about him. But wow, he was kind of hilarious;). Just declaring himself head of France, how he tried to boost morales in WWII...He was captured in WWI at Verdun and attempted to escape about 8 times. Since he was about 6.5 ft tall, he was very easy to recapture. Winston Churchill remarked about his looks 'he has hips like a woman and a head like a pineapple'. I giggle every time I think about the pineapple statement!

And um...Indiana Jones was in a German prison with de Gaulle too:). This is just a short bit from that episode but it's funny how de Gaulle figures out that Indy is really American. Indy joined the Belgian Army since he was underage, and then right before his capture, had stolen French uniforms. One of the beautiful things about Young Indy coming out on DVD is the extensive historical shows that George Lucas had put together. This particular episode, Trenches of Hell, has fantastic essays on deGaulle, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon (who Indy meets in the episode before he is captured), and the Somme. I blame George Lucas completely for me being a history and WWI nut:P. Although I think that was his intention;).