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What’s the only thing worse than a comedy that doesn’t make you laugh?  The answer might be a comedy that’s so fixated on setting up the next joke that it forgets to establish any normal semblance of “story” or “character development.”  This movie is not just unfunny; it is downright boring.  I felt myself squirming with boredom far more than I’d be had I saved the trip to the theater, instead opting to sit on my back porch watching plants sway in the wind.  I’m sure some might be quick to peg me as someone who simply doesn’t “understand” the ever evolving genre of comedy.  The one so jam-packed with irreverent pop culture references that it only takes a break from those to flash you one of the main character’s asses.  Are these actually movies?

The film starts with four friends on their way to Vegas for a bachelor party.  Phil (Bradley Cooper), Stu (Ed Helms), Alan (Zach Galifianakis), and Doug (Justin Bartha) each have a rather one-dimensional problem in their respective lives: Phil is a dismissive and money-laundering school teacher who comically hates his wife and kids.  Stu is a dentist who has been dating a one-dimensionally evil woman, and is planning on marrying her when he gets back from the trip.  Alan is hilariously a registered sex offender.  And then there’s Doug: the character not on-screen long enough to have any established problems with his life.  It’s ironic that the least developed character is the one we’re expected to care so much about after he mysteriously goes missing.  The rest of the movie is a painfully witless odyssey while these three friends trace their steps (á la Dude, Where’s My Car?) to try to recover Doug in time for the wedding.  (For awhile, they even hypothesize he might be dead!  Boy howdy, wouldn’t that have been a riot?)

In good comedies, entertaining vignettes can exist, but characters must connect them if only with subtle expressions of growth or lack thereof (i.e. Fellini).  Instead of accepting this fundamental approach to storytelling, this movie sets up scene after scene as if it were a crappy MadTV sketch, where the only constraint in writing was the number of characters with which to alternate giving marketable catchphrases.  Take the story and the characters and put them in situations where their reactions fuel the humor (i.e. The Big Lebowski, Superbad).  Alternatively, lazy or ignorant comedy writers can instead take stock characters and put them in stock situations and throw in completely sophomoric clichés.  Don’t expect any more than the latter from this movie.

Continuing to spiral out of control, The Hangover runs around in circles until the writers simply run out of “ideas.”  At which point, the characters make a convenient realization, and all in the world is right again.  Sadly, after an hour and a half of alternating juvenile one-liners and men’s asses, the last thing I wanted to see was a feeble attempt to have all the characters learn a lesson.  What I thought was just a setup turned out to be an attempted frame story.  This movie never tries to be anything, yet still fails wholeheartedly.

My thoughts walking out of this movie turned to some simple math: The Hangover has already made over $150 million.  If we assume people are paying roughly $10 a ticket, then that works out to 15 million tickets sold.  At a running time of 100 minutes, mankind in general has lost 25 million hours on this movie.  That’s almost 3 millenia of time people have already spent watching The Hangover.  I pose to you the question: was it really worth it?

-Paul Brinnel

It’s a good thing Billy Wilder released Sunset Blvd. in 1950.  Another three years, and chances are he would have had to have the following sit-down with his producer:

“Now Billy, the guys and I were thinking.  The market being what it is, these kids are coming to the movies expecting certain things out of their movies.  Well, I’ll cut to the chase.  Wouldn’t the ending be all the more spectacular if we could get more of a jump from the audience at certain moments?  Just imagine.  The kids are already on the edge of their seats and then, BOOM, old Norma pops out to within an inch of their face and they all scream, and then she screams: ‘All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up,’ then we see her stare ya straight in the eye!”

Not a single great film of the 1950’s (a.k.a. Golden Era of 3D) is in 3D.  Great artists for whatever reason chose not to utilize the day’s gimmicks to supplement their already great movies with cheap thrills.

I saw Up in Disney Classic 2D followed a week later by Disney Digital 3D.  It was absolutely breathtaking both times.  3D is never used as a gimmick and is never in the way of the experience.  Nothing ever flaunted the 3D, and there were long stretches during which I stopped even thinking about it.  It maybe took 15 minutes to get used to the slight motion blur inherent in 3D.  (I assume if I were to watch more films in 3D I would eventually cease to notice said motion blur.)

My final conclusion is that it really doesn’t matter how you see a film.  As long as it doesn’t need 3D to support any gags or gasps, then it’s really just one more frill the theater can charge you for.  Undoubtedly, it’s also another subtle way to combat piracy.  If the pirates don’t have 3D cameras, then it’s pretty hard for them to pirate said experience.  At the end of the day, a great artist can create great things.  When movies operate at this level, nothing can stand in their way.  Now let’s give James Cameron a chance to prove me otherwise.

-Paul Brinnel

Steven Soderbergh is a very interesting man.  His last film, Che was a four and a half hour masterpiece.  Never boring, never dull, I not once found myself looking at my watch.  The Girlfriend Experience, however is a painfully long 78 minutes.  The movie doesn’t flow like Che; it just sits there, stagnantly awaiting some sort of justification for its own existence that never quite comes.

Famed adult movie star Sasha Grey proves to us once again that porn stars can’t act.  She is virtually emotionless.  No, this does not add to her character.  Some could be inclined towards arguing that she is living such a depraved existence that she no longer experiences pleasure, therefore that should be self-evident in her acting (or lack thereof).  To people who thought her “minimalistic” performance works with this theme, I say that they are missing the point of watching movies in the first place.  Things happen.  Yes, things do indeed happen in this movie (albeit few).  Still, we see no reaction brew inside of this woman.  Even in the film’s (relative) emotional climax we see her react like a crappy community theater actor to the dashing of the little joys remaining in her life.  I can’t pity a woman who doesn’t react to things happening around her.  If she doesn’t seem hurt, than why should I feel bad for her?

Interestingly Soderbergh chooses to take a simple story, and convolutes it by presenting the linear story out of sequence, but without any way of knowing where in time any given scene takes place.  Yes, this blatant confusion of the sequence of events can work (i.e. Pulp Fiction), but it just doesn’t here.  Certain parts are even shot on a video camera like a reality TV show, and are similarly painful to watch.  There is not much going on in terms of story, and no fancy or confusing devices are going to hide that fact.

In conclusion, this movie feels long even though it is exceedingly short.  It is not in any way enjoyable to watch, which is the fault of the directer, editor, and certainly the actors.  This movie is quite simply bad.  I recommend saving your money or just watching Che again.

-Paul Brinnel

Back in the mid-90’s, there was some buzz that Terry Gilliam was to helm his own adaptation of this classic graphic novel of the 1980’s.  Famously, Gilliam proclaimed that to be true to the source material, a 12-part mini-series was in order.  Needless to say, no one financed this aforementioned effort.  Cut to two years ago: the great Zack Snyder, fresh off his “victorious debut” with 300 is deemed the brilliant mind capable of turning this complex character drama into a mainstream action movie.

Before I start to really pick apart this film, I must say that I am a huge fan of Alan Moore’s original graphic novel.  It is brilliant, revolutionary, visually stunning, brimming with mind-bending complexity, and above all an absolute joy to read.  I’d like to say that a tremendous amount was lost in its translation, but in reality, the problem is more that so little was lost in translation.  Snyder has proved to us that he fundamentally doesn’t understand the point of adapting source material for the screen.  Rather than creating a film that can stand on its own, he has sowed this 2.5+ hour monstrosity so filled with references to characters and events developed far more fully in the book, that this movie is nearly impossible to follow.  I hear the director’s cut might reconcile this, but at the cost of making the unfortunate viewer sit through an additional hour of previously unused footage.

Watchmen takes place in a universe where superheroes are real.  That concept needs a large amount of explanation.  Snyder gives us a title sequence of “stills” that are meant to bring the viewer past the rise and fall of the superhero (a period of about 40-50 years).  There are a few more allusions to these past events as the movie goes on, but never is the audience specifically told: this is why super heroes are real; this is why their world is different than ours; this is why you should give a damn about what is happening on-screen.  The audience is thrust into a world they can’t possibly understand, almost entirely in medias res.  The effect is an unfortunate one.  Who are these decaying characters that claim to be the superheroes of old, but only spend fleeting time on-screen, with little or no reference made to anything that happened to them prior.  Who can care when one of them dies or cries or lies or has an affair?  We know nothing about these people.  If Snyder didn’t have the screen time to develop characters, then why did he instead opt to stick them into a scene or two, and just assume his audience could surmise that in some way they must be important, even if he has not taken the courtesy to indicate why.  Yes, if you read the book, everything would make sense.  But should reading the source material be a prerequisite to watching the movie?  Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of adapting it in the first place?

Mr. Snyder, you need to make changes, “adaptations” if I might be so bold, if you wish to successfully “adapt” a book for shooting as a movie of any reasonable length.  A literal adaptation could not possibly fit within Hitchcock’s classic rule that the length of a film need by directly proportional to the endurance of a human bladder.  Gilliam understood this when he said it would take 12 hour long parts to do Alan Moore justice.  Snyder would have been better suited to take a cue from Victor Fleming and suitably change the story into that of a self-contained movie, as opposed to an abridgment of an un-adaptable source material.

Few things made this film watchable.  (Here’s a hint: it definitely wasn’t a bizarrely long sex scene, or the soundtrack, which seemed to come from a CD titled “Greatest Hits of Hollywood Soundtracks: 1990-2008.”)  Billy Crudup, Jackie Earle Haley, and Patrick Wilson make their characters the only really believable things in a terribly unexplainable world.  These three acted as if even though their histories were never addressed on-screen, they still existed as complex human beings nonetheless.  Everyone else was mediocre, with the exception of a certain Miss Malin Akerman, to whom I attribute a new depth of mediocrity.  Her scenes might have been more believable had they been played by any of our great deceased leading ladies of the 40’s and 50’s (their present condition withstanding).

In conclusion, this is a bad movie.  If you really want to experience Watchmen, put your ticket price towards a copy of the 1987 original.

-Paul Brinnel

Imagine Steven Soderberg coming up to you and asking for upwards of $60 million to make his next movie.  Now imagine him telling you that it’s a four and a half hour bio-epic about Che Guavera.  Who knows how this movie got made?  It was obviously doomed from the onset to have negative returns for its investors.  That said, this movie is unlike anything I have ever seen.  It accomplishes everything it sets out to do from the beginning, chronicling the last 13 years of this man’s life using a variety of cinematic techniques, which all complement one another beautifully.

The first part of the movie starts in 1954.  Guavera and Castro are sharing dinner with other revolutionaries in Mexico City.  Probably one of the most important realizations comes here when we see a few casually dressed individuals planning the fate of an entire country over dinner and a few beers.  The movie takes off with the onset of their campaign in Cuba.

It’s difficult to say what exactly this movie is trying to say.  Sometimes it follows slowly developing, mundane events, sometimes it brings us into the heart of a battle.  All of this is done cutting back to an interview with Guavera from 1964.  This creates an incredible perspective, allowing us to hear all about the passion of these guerrillas as the hardships and barbarity of their campaign takes place on screen.  This voiceover allows the first half of the film to have a fantastic contemplative feel.  Conversely, there are no real opportunities to study the internal conflicts within these characters.  They are constantly in situations where there are more important things than actualizing the class struggle taking place around them.  This ongoing internal monologue makes up for a lack of real time spent alone to focus on the overflowing emotions of the characters.

In order for the characters of this movie to be sympathetic, one needs to understand what oppression has brought them to the point that they’ll sacrifice their life just for the chance that other’s will be able to live in a more humane world.  There was virtually no exhibition on-screen of any such government oppression, leaving viewers to their historical knowledge in making up back stories and motivations for these characters.  It was a bit odd that the antagonist was constantly exhibited as simply “the bad guy” with no exhibitions of the bad things that he has allegedly done.  We are forced to assume that the choreographers of the revolution are intelligent, ambitious, moral, and most importantly, trustworthy.  Looking back on the movie, there was never any justification for any of these assumptions.  There was never any harm displayed on the screen that seemed to warrant the tremendous foul called by the likes of Castro and Guavera.  We are left with Che’s contemplations via voiceover instead.  We believe this man is good, because he talks with such charm.  Soderberg assumes that is all the audience needs to know to eat out of this man’s hand.

The second part of Che takes place over the course of just under a year, starting in 1966.  Che has achieved international fame, but feels that in keeping with his revolutionary ideals, must now turn his eyes inland and orchestrate the start of a similar revolution in Bolivia.  Slipping into anonymity, changing his name, initially even using disguises, Guavera becomes an odd sort of spectre.  His mere mention seems enough to excite any freedom-craving Bolivian, but his actual presence seems to do very little to bolster their struggle.  This portion of the film aims to suck the viewer into that exact feeling of doom that the actual Bolivian guerrillas felt in 1966 and 1967.  This portion of the film is shot in a less wide aspect ratio, and utilizes a much less saturated color palette.  There is all of the violence of the first half, with many scenes playing out very similarly, but something is missing.  Gone is that incredible voiceover!  We are left very much in the dark in terms of what any of the characters are thinking.  Of course we can surmise when something scares them or makes them happy or more likely, sad, but that complex internal debate is sadly missing without any deliberate reflection of the events unfolding on-screen.  It is certainly tragic to watch Guavera’s plan’s unfold, unfurl, and generally go to shit, but this is only because we grew to know so much about him in the first two hours of the movie.  The second part simply cannot stand on its own.  It felt like this latter half was more about going through the motions, and attempting to repeat the first half, but this time with a different result.

I wholeheartedly recommend Che, as it is one of the most ambitious movies of the last several decades.  Del Toro fits into the role so naturally, that it is easy watching the movie to forget that you are watching anything but original footage of Che, himself.  Soderberg has created something that approaches the life of an impactful man, and chronicles it without drawing any conclusions as to his morality.  The comprehensiveness of this movie is what is truly to be commended.  It is at heart, great filmmaking.  The only enduring question is how on earth this movie ever got the financing to be made.  Does it even have a target audience?

-Paul Brinnel

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

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