In the eighties we pretty much plagiarised the crap out of everything JRR Tolkien ever wrote.

Well, we say “plagiarised” loosely. We certainly stole most of his characters, themes and settings, but we made them better by including several direct references to Samuel L Jackson (Frodo keeps babbling about Sam’s short role in Spenser: For Hire).

Our books were awesome – and Peter Jackson somehow thought so too – because he stole the whole thing and turned it into a fairly popular Hollywood franchise. Minus all the S. Jackson references.

Kind of reminds us of current accusatory Benjamin Button goings-on, actually.

If you ask us the most curious thing about Benjamin Button is how he died without fully reentering his mother’s womb. We think we can all agree that for full closure – a scene like that would have definitely been necessary. The fact that said mother’s womb had already been decomposing for eighty-something years by that point would only have made things more interesting.

We like all our Brad Pitt flicks infused with a touch of zombie vagina. Had Edward Zwick thought of this, Legends of the Fall would have been far more interesting. Please note the intentional emphasis on the word far.

But Zwick has never thought outside the zombie-box. Neither has Pitt. And neither has Adriana Pichini, for that matter. She’s an Italian writer who claims her short story ‘Arthur’s Return to Innocence’ got ripped off and smeared all over the Benjamin Button script – or as All Headline News puts it:

“Adriana Pichini, an office worker by profession, alleges in a lawsuit she filed on Friday that the Brad Pitt-starrer flick is based on her short story “Il ritorno di Arthur all’innocenza” (“Arthur’s Return to Innocence”). She copyrighted her story in Italy and sent it to U.S. publishers, although it didn’t get printed.

“Her lawyer, Gianni Massaro, said a file was opened with the Rome Tribunal Court, which would mean a judge will watch the film and read the story to determine if there are enough similarities to warrant an investigation.”

Some obvious plot-points that probably exist in both stories include the bit about Brad Pitt aging backwards, the bit where Brad Pitt kills lots of ocean-going Japanese, and the part where Brad Pitt eventually has to make love to a giant hamster as a means of atoning for a backwards-life full of strange misdeeds.

It’s a good movie, really. If you haven’t seen it you should.

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