It has come to my attention, via the Rope of Silicon post and SpoutBlog commenter Gould, that there is bad buzz in Telluride surrounding David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I’m in Telluride, and I hadn’t heard this bad buzz––the handful of people I’ve spoken to who saw the show reel either last night or this morning had generally positive things to day, aside from some general skepticism as to what the film’s reported two and a half hour final cut will look and feel and play like.

As I responded to Gould’s comment on this post:

…it’s hard to tell from this reel whether or not the film is going to hold together. I don’t get the sense that he’s going for whimsy or magical realism, but it does seem like a real departure for Fincher. Hopefully the fanboys looking for another Fight Club won’t burn Fincher at the stake for branching out a bit.

Telluride is not like, say, Comic-Con; the crowd doesn’t boo or scream, and most attendees are less likely to walk out of a screening with a firmly settled opinion than they are to spend the rest of the weekend talking it out. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m right and the naysayers are wrong, but I do hope this movie doesn’t get a leg cut off before the picture’s locked thanks to the entire internet jumping to conclusions.