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Life isn’t easy for Coraline Jones. Her relationship with her parents is not humbling. They have moved her from the post-economic collapse, poverty-ridden Detroit, to a barren woodland landscape out in Oregon. They’re busy working. They have no time for their daughter. The mother (Teri Hatcher) in particular is short tempered with Coraline (Dakota Fanning), and while the father (John Hodgeman) is congenial enough, he too is under his wife’s strident demands. Coraline can often be temperamental, and she does not see the big picture. When she is shopping for her school uniform with her mom, she wants a pair of vibrant, orange gloves to contrast with the drab outfit. Her mother refuses and Coraline is left miserable. She does not realize that they are shopping for her uniform on the day when school uniforms are on sale for half-price. Yes, her mother yells at her and is impatient, but she is the same way with her husband. She’s trying to get him to focus and keep Coraline out of the way, so that the book they’re writing can be finished and sold. The parents have plagued Coraline in other ways. Through some genetic mix-up Coraline inherited strikingly blue hair, and through a lack of foresight, her parents decided to scramble the vowels in her name. She has to correct every one from saying Caroline. Only the mice seem to pronounce her name properly, but they only communicate through Coraline’s upstairs neighbor, Mr. Bobinsky (Ian McShane), and he believes that they’re pronouncing it incorrectly. The cat gets it right too. Wait. Blue Hair? Communicating mice? Verbose cat? No, Coraline is not a straight domestic drama, concerning poverty amid a dysfunctional family. It’s a 3D, stop-motion, surrealistic extravaganza from that madman of animation, Henry Selick.

At first, everything seems normal. The slow pacing and lilting music in the first third of the film is soothing, as we follow Coraline, bored and lost in her own home. Too many animated films of recent years, particularly ones produced at DreamWorks, are geared toward a constant peak. Those films do not build. It’s high energy and high action, all the time, in a candy-colored palate. Coraline breaks these kid-motivated credentials. The colors are bleak and appropriately reflect Coraline’s condition. The opening scenes are of Coraline walking around the house, counting windows, meeting neighbors, fighting with her parents. Then she finds a portal. It’s a knee-high door, in an empty room of the house. When she opens it there is a long, circular tube that leads to the other end. When Coraline crawls through it, she does not spend fifteen minutes inside the mind of John Malkovich. She is led to an alternate reality, where the atmosphere is brighter, and her parents are nicer. Her father takes on the persona of Bing Crosby, which gives him a silky voice, a smooth demeanor, and the ability to organically burst into song. Her mother becomes Martha Stewart. She cooks, she cleans, she compliments. An added benefit to this universe is that no one ever loses a button, because they’re stitched to every one’s eyes, with no exceptions. humans, mice, toads, and Scottish terriers, all see through four-holed button vision. The adventures in this universe are sizeable. But it is only after things go awry and Coraline begins to fear this alternate existence that we are treated to a true spectacle. As she wanders away from the house, in conversation with the aforementioned cat, the pieces of the universe are removed as if the whole world were a puzzle. What is left is the white, blank expansion of nothingness. As she continues to walk, she returns from whence she came. It’s like the insulated world in Pleasantville, except lonelier and even more artificial. It is here that Coraline realizes that it would be better to live in a world of mistreatment than an isolated existence, where the world does not expand to fulfill the requirements of a curious, growing, young girl. That, and she would have to have buttons for eyes.

An animated film of this caliber can only exceed in the same manner as a live-action film succeeds. It requires the sure-handedness of an auteur at the peak of his or her abilities. At Pixar there is no secret magic formula that makes theirs films unique. They allow a single director with an artistic vision to create the film that he or she wants. Because animation is bounded only by the vision of its director, the films are made uncompromised. These then are true auteur films, and through animation some of the greatest directors have emerged. Andrew Stanton and Brad Bird are the best of the visionaries from Pixar; Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata cultivated the auteur theory applied to animation before them at Studio Ghibli. The director in question here is Henry Selick. Selick’s first two films The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach are often wrongly attributed to director Tim Burton, who served as producer. However, it can be seen through the style of those two films, which continues through Coraline, a director with an individual vision: dark, fantastical, grotesque, and fluid. The characters he creates are often emphasized vertically, like Mr. Bobinsky, who leaps into the air, as if refusing to believe in gravity.

Selick is not a pioneer in the art of stop-motion animation, but its life support. In the Hollywood of yesteryear, masters of stop-motion, such as Ray Harryhausen, were kings, and were needed for the big special effects films of those days. Now CGI is king, and stop-motion has seemed to lose all-purpose. CGI, which is fake, looks real, while stop-motion, which uses real clay figures, looks fake. There is a beauty to stop-motion; it can be quirky and stylized. Selick’s animated work of the colorful and exotic aquatic life in The Life Aquatic, contributed greatly to Wes Anderson’s bizarre, pastel shaded, deadpan universe. He revived stop-motion animation with The Nightmare Before Christmas, and in Coraline, has directed the first 3D Stop-motion animated film. I’m usually averse to 3D. I find the process pointless, the image to be darker and not as sharp, and the glasses to be a nuisance. The new glasses design, a black, plastic frame, presents the image of the national convention of Woody Allen look-a-likes gathering to watch a movie. Of course it will never be one of his movies. 3D seems to be for animation and oversized live action films, like last years cartoonish rendition of Journey to the Center of the Earth. Here, however, I do not necessarily reject the third dimension. I still maintain the process is unnecessary, but at least it did not taint the film as it did for Disney’s Bolt, which was already tainted by cliché character development and an overdose of cuteness. Story and style can sometime win over excess technology.

Unfortunately, the story does not win over enough, as Coraline sails through into the third act and comes to what after the first hour would seem unthinkable: predictability followed by cliché. Coraline, in a series of incidents that has all the complexities of a video game, challenges her alternate reality mother, her “other” mother, to a challenge. If she can find the three sets of eyeballs of the ghosts of three children, and then find her real parents, she can return to her world. Hercules had twelve heroic tasks to prove his might; Coraline has a scavenger hunt. She faces a foe at each location. She beats the boss, collects her prize and moves on to the next level. She could be Super Mario. There are some rather nice visual flourishes at this point, but they’re mostly the blank expanse of a universe in decomposition that we have already seen. The tagged on happy ending is more artificial than the alternate reality. Selick lets the audience off the hook, and allows them to leave the theater thinking everything is all right with the universe, as if we should forget the first hour of the film, the hour we so desperately want to savor.

-Jason Bardin

The Academy Awards was certainly a night to remember. Rare is it that the Academy is brave enough to not only nominate, but also actually present the grand prize to the proper recipients. My favorite of course was Charlie Kaufma n, winning best screenplay. He seemed very humbled and appreciative, thanking the community for embracing a film that is not inherently marketable.

There was a lot of love for Che that night. Soderbergh received Oscars for best director and cinematography. His only thank you for the latter award was to his Red camera, while he seemed to be a little more appreciative to the greater community on receiving the former award, in a surprise upset over Andrew Stanton. Benicio Del Toro walked away as the expected favorite for Che, as did Sally Hawkins for Happy-Go-Lucky.

The most memorable acceptance speech was the funniest. Heath Ledger riffing on front row favorite, and former Joker, Jack Nicholson. Priceless.

My favorite part of the show was the performance of Little Person from Synecdoche, New York. The song beat Bruce Springsteen’s ballad from The Wrestler, which was the presumed favorite.

The rest of the show went more or less as expected. Wall-E picked up best sound mixing, and Samantha Morton went home with best supporting actress. And even though he received every precursor award, Werner Herzog did not fail to entertain, picking up his award for best documentary for his film Encounters at the End of the World.

Unfortunately I fell asleep before they announced best picture, and I have not bothered to look up who won. I’m sure the Academy chose the right film.

-Jason Bardin

The protagonist of any tragedy can suffer as one of two people: the man, or the artist. The vast majority of tragedies subject their lead to the former. I needn’t even list examples of times we’ve watched as a man has hurt or lost something important to him. What makes these moments bearable though is the hero’s ability to channel his suffering into something that exhibits the beauty of humanity. We can watch Omar Sharif in Dr. Zhivago be repeatedly thrust into the mud, because we as observers are constantly being reminded that he is letting out all of his frustration as beautiful poetry. We can watch Roberto Benigni have his life destroyed in Life Is Beautiful, because we know that he still managed to make someone else’s existence less miserable. This redeeming quality is needed for us to truly care about the downtrodden. A single act of beauty can make even the most wretched circumstances watchable, and their protagonists even enviable. So what happens if the characters suffer within their lives, but also fail at creating anything that makes their life meaningful? Is this not the greatest tragedy of all?

As art has transitioned more and more into themes of realism, where an artist’s life ends, and their art begins has become a more and more blurred line. Artists draw on what they see around them, and how they relate to it. This being the case in most movements post new wave, if an artist lives a pathetic existence, shouldn’t their art theoretically be teeming with that same pathetic quality?

Synecdoche, New York starts off as a simple domestic drama. The middle aged, moderately successful theater director, Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) wakes up one fall morning. He has settled into a comfortable existence with his wife, Adele (Catherine Keener) and their daughter, Olive (Sadie Goldstein). Some of the movie’s best dialogue happens between these three characters within the first 25 minutes of the movie. After that Caden is left alone as his wife and daughter become invisible forces that drive seemingly all of Caden’s actions for the remaining 98 minutes of the movie. We watch Caden’s life gradually fall apart from then on. It isn’t in any way more tragic than how any one else’s life gradually deteriorates after they hit forty, but this movie is edited in such a way that the viewer can never quite gauge the passage of time, and it seems as if Caden’s body is gradually succumbing to some terrible, terminal illness. Once one finishes watching the movie, the real weight of this sinks in. All of Caden’s symptoms were that of an illness that the vast majority of us will unavoidably die of: old age.

Caden, due to his strong background in theater, sees a man’s entire existence unfolding in an hour or two. He cannot help but empathize with the characters he constructs, assuming that his entire life is but the same flicker as Willy Loman’s, able to be entirely explained within an hour or two. We watch the last forty or so years of Caden’s life unfold over the course of two hours, and by the end one is struck by the sense that the viewer knows just as much about the lead character as he knows about himself; it is as if the year long time lapses between events wouldn’t have contributed any additional insight into the inner workings of a certain Mr. Caden Cotard.

Within the window of this man’s waning life, virtually every theme that has ever preoccupied the mind of an aging man is explored. We watch Caden struggle in relating to his family, understanding exactly what he wants from a woman, and most importantly, what kind of legacy he wants to leave behind. There are a handful of points when Caden reaches a plateau, a point at which his life is seemingly what he wants, and should need to operate optimally as an artist. Soon after, though, Caden spies something off in the distance that he desires. He is constantly looking for just this something more, and then never quite happy when he attains it. This theme is represented in Caden’s directions to his acting troupe, and his constantly shifting goal in his ongoing project of a theater piece. He tries to better understand his own life by forcing actors to re-enact it in front of him, and by doing this only becomes more and more removed from his own existence.

This movie explores the unfathomably complex question: “what is the purpose of art?” Is it to better understand reality, or is it within itself an escape from reality? Charlie Kaufman explores this theme with more verve than any auter I have ever had the joy to watch. Whereas his earlier works like Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. were incredible commentaries on the nature and purpose of art, this movie goes leaps and bounds further, making its protagonist infinitely more relatable to than any of his previous films, by simply making his existence all the more varied and vague. This of course causes the movie to have many Lynchian, dream-logic-like qualities, which ironically has had the effect of making this movie less accessible to the linearly self-righteous.

Synecdoche is without a doubt, the best movie of the year. It is touching, tragic, and quite simply incredible to see what Kaufman has created. A directorial debut of such epic proportions is only comparable to that of Orson Welles. My only hope is that this incredible film’s tragic snubbing by the public won’t make this the last film for Kaufman in which he has total control. If this is indeed the case, one must watch this film and ask: “In 2075, which early films of the 21st century will be the most revered?”

-Paul Brinnel

I’m not quite sure what the Academy Awards represent. This year in particular they have failed to nominate the films and performances that were truly daring and artistic, and have instead chosen to acknowledge films that lack passion or insight into the human condition. In effect, the academy made an effort this year to nominate films that will not live on in history, and will surely be looked back as one of those years in Academy Awards history where the general public wonders what in the world the academy was thinking, ignoring such films as Synecdoche, New York, which at that time will finally be appreciated as a proper masterpiece, and other films like Happy-Go-Lucky and The Dark Knight, choosing instead static films like The Reader and Frost/Nixon.

Now I will not get upset. The Academy Awards do not really mean anything. There is no best of anything in art. I wish more people, actors in particular, would take a stand against the Awards circuit, like George C. Scott, who refused his Oscar and returned it to the Academy. His honorable declaration was that he did not believe to be in competition with other actors. They should have given him an Oscar for such a proclamation…oh wait. I suppose now, actors in particular, have obligations to promote their film to ensure financial success. The Academy Awards help fuel such lucrative prospects. I suppose if I view the show as one enormous publicity machine, instead of an offering of artistic merit, than the show becomes more enjoyable. Denial helps.

The Academy Awards have been around since 1927. At the first ceremony one of greatest of all silent films, Sunrise, was not given the top prize, which was given to the mightily inferior Wings. Sunrise was given some bullshit award for artistic merriment. The title Wings is now more associated with an 80s television sitcom than an academy award winner for best picture. Sunrise is still remembered and cherished and will live on as one of the truly great artistic achievements in cinema. The Academy got it wrong from the start; I see no reason why they should start awarding merit now.

The Academy Awards began at a pivotal time in film: the birth of sound. The Jazz Singer was awarded a special award at the time. However, there was no award for sound. Today there are two, but they are generally seen as a burden to the viewers, the producer of the show, and the winners whose long journey to the stage is subtracted from time in their speech. I am particularly fond of these two categories, as they award a difficult, thankless job of skill and expertise. However, in keeping with the zeitgeist, I have fitfully ignored those categories.

Anyway, I will now go through the arbitrary process of choosing my preferred winners alongside my predictions of who will actually win. Why do I do this? I suppose it’s because of tradition. I’m still swept up by the aura of this whole damn freak show.

Best Picture

Only two films pass a simple litmus test for this category: Are the films any good? Milk and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button are the only films that have a justifiable reason to be nominated for best picture. They are good films. However, it is fait accompli that Slumdog Millionaire will win this trophy. While that might be fine for now, I believe that a win for Slumdog Millionaire will actually hurt its popularity. Benjamin Button is an under-appreciated, great, and profound film that will become better appreciated, and will be looked back as the film that should have won best picture. Slumdog Millionaire will not be viewed as an independent entity. Just as Robert Redford’s Ordinary People is the film now best known as the one that beat Raging Bull at the Oscars, so will Slumdog Millionaire be known as the film that beat Benjamin Button.

All I can say for The Reader is that Satan is designing a special section in Hell where Harvey Weinstein will be forced to watch The Reader, Chocolate, and Il Postino on a never ending loop. Frost/Nixon, which is here due to another egregious producer, Brian Grazer, is a film made purely out of the notion that it could be a good film. Ron Howard holds no opinions on Nixon. He fails to bring the passion that Oliver Stone brought to Nixon. His film was made without passion or purpose and is dead on the screen. Meanwhile, Milk was written by Dustin Lance Black and directed by Gus Van Sant, two homosexual filmmakers who care a heck of a lot about Harvey Milk. They bring passion and energy to what could have been a standard biography; they embellish with a lust for life mentality to the story of civil rights.

Best Director

It’s rather shocking to see this category match up five for five with best picture. Danny Boyle, director of Slumdog Millionaire, has probably already cleared space on his shelf for that little, naked man. Boyle made the flashiest film, with the most editing and stylized cinematography, which corresponds to him looking like he did the most directing. Meanwhile, Fincher had the hardest challenge in his attempt to tell an epic story, spanning the twentieth century, on a personal scale. Stephan Daldry is back in the race again securing a third nomination for his third film. Based on that unprecedented statistic, one might imagine that he was the hottest director in Hollywood, not some impersonal director whose last two films have been stale, emotionless prestige pictures. And Ron Howard’s a popular guy, I guess. Oh that’s right, he had the daunting task of transitioning the material from the stage to the screen. He failed.

Leading Actor

Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke are the two principal competitors in this category. Penn plays Harvey Milk in Milk, as a gay rights politician who spends most of the film losing elections until he finally breaks through and wins. Rourke plays the affable Randy “The Ram” Robinson in The Wrestler. His fights are all fixed. Both performances are extraordinary. Penn shows a congenial persona not present in his work since his great performance in Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown. Penn becomes Harvey Milk. I can’t say the same for Rourke. Rourke as Randy is both the character and himself. The emotional speeches he gives to Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood are poignant because we know that Rourke is simultaneously repenting for his own selfish arrogance. I think Penn will win his second Academy Award, deservedly, and I predict that he will specifically call out to Mickey Rourke in his acceptance speech. Everyone wins. Almost.

The other three nominess can just enjoy the show. Richard Jenkins gave a wonderfully minimalist performance as a bored, psychologically lost professor in The Visitor. Brad Pitt gives an equally minimalist performance on a grand scale in Benjamin Button. As for Frank Langella, I dearly hope he was well paid.

-Jason Bardin

Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire simultaneously wants to be a profound film about poverty and social degradation in India, while providing the most fun you’ll have at the movies this year. Into what category do I place such an ambitious effort? If it were a Bildungsroman, it would be titled: Slumdog Millionaire: being the urban education, perilous adventures, and romantic entanglements of one Jamal K. Malik, Mumbai born. However, the film is not interested in the development of the this particular young protagonist, and its large ambitions seem to have been replaced, assuming they existed, with a series of sequences that are constructed purely with the aim to manipulate the audience.

Our protagonist, Jamal, is a contestant on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” We know from the first frame that he is going to win. This knowledge eliminates a would-be suspenseful sequence toward the end of the film. Why does he win? Throughout the film we’ve been taught to believe that Jamal can find sanctity and sanity amongst terrible poverty. This message is sacrificed as Jamal simultaneously wins ten million rupees and secures the love of his life. His brother also dies, but it’s as a martyr in slow-motion, so the audience feels more elevated than upset. Does he need the money? It can be argued that he never wanted the wealth or fame, only Latika, the obligatory object of his affection. The theme of this movie: love conquers all.

The game show also serves as the frame for a series of flashbacks that correspond to each question. Flashbacks are an interesting convention in film. In Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, the flashbacks construct a fractured narrative, providing multiple perspectives of the leading protagonist, Charles Foster Kane. The narrative serves as an exploration into the mysteries and ambiguities of a public figure who was a secretive man. The film does not succeed without the structure. However, in Slumdog Millionaire the flashbacks are all in chronological order. Altering back and forth between present and past becomes tiresome and predictable, without providing any deeper meaning into the lives of the main characters. Jamal, in theory, has led an eventful life, but the film would suggest that the events in his life have only happened so that he can answer a series of questions.

There are indeed some spritely moments to Slumdog Millionaire. I particularly enjoyed the sequence involving theft at the Taj Mahal, but I found that the treatment of poverty was condescending. Once upon a time, neorealism, was used to explore the nature of poverty and depravity in a damaged society. Those films were characterized by a minimalist style in a realistic setting. Slumdog Millionaire’s stylized cinematography, with its sweeping shots of Mumbai, and its rapid paced editing, fail to illuminate the day to day struggles of those who suffer from injustice in India. The Bollywood style ending dance sequence was perhaps the most insulting aspect of the film, as it clearly celebrated an industry that chooses to ignore the struggles of its country by marketing fabled, romanticized entertainments. Now I’m not against fun and escapism, but I am offended when it pretends, and fails, to be politically motivated and socially conscious.

-Jason Bardin

In Bruges realizes a simple truth that is becoming increasingly overlooked in the film industry: a good comedy is one where you legitimately care what happens to the characters.  With this concept in mind, Martin McDonagh has created something truly remarkable.  This is by far the funniest movie of the year.  It has some of the funniest violence, slapstick witticisms, and raunchiest tenderness I have ever seen in a movie.  It realizes that all these seeming oxymorons, needn’t be.

The acting ensemble of this movie is one of my favorites of the year.  The unlikely team of Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson flesh out a remarkable dynamic onscreen.  They create an atmosphere that cries out buddy film, but let’s the two characters maintain just enough distance on screen to still allow for both characters to be explored very distinctively.  Both portray their characters fluidly, with very little time spent meandering about the camera in the act of self-contemplation.  These are hit men, not poets; it works perfectly.  Also noteworthy is the typically understated Ralph Fiennes.  Fiennes plays Farrell and Gleeson’s boss, a temperamental lunatic, and unlike many of his previous roles, does it with such gusto.  Watching Fiennes was just as much intentionally unsettling as it was pure fun.  Lastly, Jordan Prentice is noteworthy more as a device than an actor.  His character was certainly only necessary to move the plot along, although it is good to see that midgets in the industry haven’t lost any ground since Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire (1977).

In Bruges has a particular vibe that is holly original.  The screenplay is brilliantly hysterical.  It is wonderfully dry, yet allows for countless moments that truly justify audible laughing.  This is without a doubt, the best comedy of the year.  It is undeniably dark, but the movie is by no means about violence.  Violence is merely something that exists within the lives of these characters. It doesn’t make them any less human, it only makes them feel more delicately mortal on screen.  At any time, we know that any one of the characters might die.  They know it too, and maybe that’s why they all can maintain such a splendid opposition to taking life too seriously.

I’ve been asked to describe In Bruges several times now.  All I can say is that at times it could be described as a scaled down British version of a Quentin Tarantino film.  Unlike Tarantino though, it manages to maintain tenderness even in its most violent moments.  When it comes down to it though, this movie is so much fun to watch because it just happens to be a damn good movie.  It represents great writing, great acting, and flawless execution.  It has no single genre, which is why it feels so much like real life.  There are moments of utmost hillarity only to be followed by those of terrible tragedy.  In between, it’s a joy to experience every annoyed or apathetic plea from the characters for life to start moving again.  It’s most fun when Farrell is anxiously awaiting the next major development, and Gleeson is swaggering along, simply absorbing the beauty of the respite between each action.

I loved this movie.  It’s everything a movie should strive to be.  I await your next feature with baited breath, Mr. McDonagh.

-Paul Brinnel

The most reoccurring critique of Benjamin Button has nothing to do with it as a film. Certain mainstream critics base their opinions not on the nearly three-hour film, but on the singular premise on which the entire epic is constructed around. The leads to my first maxim: In order for this film to work, the watcher needs to completely accept its fantastical device as reality. Unlike its source material, this universe within which completely human characters interact, the “unusual circumstances” with which Button lives are never farcical. They are sympathetic, tragic, and ultimately used as a device to make him a far more humanized character than anyone else in the story. Of course to truly feel for this character, one must essentially suspend a basic axiom of reality.

Once one abandons the concept that as a body lives, it ages, it decays, and it is gradually destroyed by its surroundings, can the whole concept of linear cause and effect still exist within the new reality that screenwriter Eric Roth has constructed? Case in point: there is a rather lengthy montage in the film, in which the tragedy of cause and effect is (over) dramatized. Are people watching supposed to swallow that Benjamin is a completely self-contained anomaly and that all of his surroundings still have to play by normal rules? The inevitability of a car accident based on a purely deterministic concept of the universe would be perfectly fitting in any movie that takes place within a reality with which a viewer can maintain a fundamental empathy. Unfortunately, this movie has traded the luxury of empathy for its main character’s “unusual circumstances.”

Even if Benjamin Button doesn’t work holistically, it’s still undeniably brimming with noteworthy performances. In fact, Blanchett gives one of her best performances since 2006’s Babel. Brad Pitt gives a believable performance too, but as the movie progresses it becomes increasingly apparent that he is as always, essentially a physical actor. When he needs to convincingly inhabit a body completely unlike his own impressive physique, he is quite simply mesmerizing. Just like Twelve Monkeys and Fight Club, he is fantastic at moving across the screen completely convincingly. Unfortunately, Pitt’s control over his facial expressions is far less consistent. In this movie he is playing the loneliest man in the world. He theoretically has the ability to empathize and understand everyone around him, yet he knows that none of them will ever be able to relate to him. He represents this terrible burden with a tremendous amount of on-screen apathy. The only real doubt he expresses seems contained within the script. His character’s supposed rampant self-doubt just doesn’t come through in the performance.

I read the Fitzgerald’s original novella sometime last year, and was completely taken by how simply it subscribed to telling this man’s story. It is a narrative, and it both starts and ends vaguely. One of my favorite moments is when Benjamin, a once decorated soldier of the Spanish-American War attempting to re-enlist to fight in WWI. He arrives at a recruitment station wearing all of his past decorations, but now with the appearance of a pre-pubescent boy. He runs home crying after he is laughed away from the station. It is simple moments like this that run too few in the movie. A man who ages backwards: any screenwriter would be bursting with a plethora of fantastic, funny, tragic, and playfully entertaining vignettes in which the day-to-day difficulties of such a man could be explored. Instead, the movie is littered with interactions that could exist within any other movie. I was constantly wondering why a character with as much potential to bring something truly original to the screen was being so consistently wasted on very well done, but nonetheless very ordinary scenarios.

At nearly three hours, Benjamin Button is easily the longest mainstream movie of the year. Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with a movie being objectively “long.” The problem only crops up when it feels long. With the material that he had, Fincher was perfectly justified in making a movie as long as he did. The problem here was in how much time was spent on each part of Benjamin’s life. The first half was very deliberately paced, and even his middle age seemed deliberately whirlwind as to represent the only truly happy period for him. It was oddly apparent that the end of this character’s life seemed so rushed. The entire movie had been Benjamin and Daisy worrying about this period of his life, and then when it actually came, it felt all too glazed over.

My lasting contemplation over Benjamin Button is over an artistic choice of either Roth or Fincher. Fitzgerald’s original novel is crafted with a Scarlett Letter like parallelism where the first half of the book is comprised of scenes that each have a parallel scene in its latter half. Instead of this, the film represents Benjamin’s growth less predictably. This feels most glorious when as an old man he leaves to see the world; unlike every other man to ever live, he is blessed with his physical pique at a time during which he can draw on the cumulative knowledge of an entire life. Soon after though, a child with dementia takes the place of a traditionally aged man with Alzheimer’s. I can’t decide if this is an improvement on the book, but I have a hard time criticizing this. At the very least, these auters have kept me thinking long after the credits rolled.

My lasting impression of Benjamin Button was not one of satisfaction. I walked out of the theater wholly unsettled by the movie I had just seen. I wasn’t sad for the characters or the tragedy that unfolded before me on-screen, I was mourning the lack of direction took on such a promising concept. Now as I muse over the movie, I can accept that what Roth and Fincher did certainly did have direction. The fact that I personally disagree with their artistic decisions is a minor issue. The real issue is that Benjamin Button is an unsatisfying movie that leaves viewers both confused and quite appropriately, still curious.

-Paul Brinnel

1. We’ll provide the (English speaking) people of the world with an ongoing narrative that will review all current cinema honestly.
2. We will also provide them with fighting and tireless champions of their rights as film-goers and as human beings.

Signed,

Jason Bardin, Paul Brinnel & Robert Henderson