The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Last night I listened to a radio adaptation of an episode of The Twilight Zone. It was an epsiode called "A Piano in the House" and told the story of a cruel drama critic who buys a player piano for his wife's birthday. However it turns out that when the piano plays it forces the person using it to reveal their secret, true selves that they keep hidden from the rest of the world. When the critic decides to use it to humiliate his wife and his friends he soon finds it backfires. I've got the whole of the old 1950s-1960s series of The Twilight Zone on DVD, and the radio adaptation was pretty well done. I really like that show. I remember watching it when I was about thirteen, I would record it from TV where it was on during the early hours of the morning. I remember that one of the best things about it was turning it on and having no idea what it was going to be. I played my new game during the evening, and it was fun. Later on as I was watching TV, I fell asleep on my couch and woke up in the early hours of the morning, with a splitting headache and headed to bed.

When I woke up in the morning the headache had gone. My parents came along to pick me up and we went along to the Cameo cinema with my mum to see a preview of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, directed by David Fincher, and based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The story told of a man named Benjamin Button (played by Brad Pitt) who is born at the end of the First World War with the physical age of someone in their eighties. As time goes on, he grows younger instead of older. It was a really great movie, which was much better than the premise might sound. In fact it is probably one of the best movies that I have seen, certainly the best film I've seen recently. Also it manages to be a film which lasts nearly three hours which just flash by.

After the film my mum and I went along to my parent's house. It was Burns' Night tonight (the annual celebration of Robert Burns, the national poet of Scotland) so we had the traditional haggis and potato. I got back at around quarter to six, and listened to the latest episode of The Man in Black which this week involved a woman in hospital who becomes involved in an experiment into hypnosis, which stris up a dark secret from her past. After that I listened to a reading of The Recognition, a short story by J.G. Ballard, about an English town that is visited by a sinister circus.