Button-Mashing.

Everyone is evanescent, and everything in this world, no matter how beautiful or important, fades. Alas, David Fincher’s striking but flawed The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is not exempt from this grim calculus. A lovely movie to gaze upon while it’s actually playing out, Button begins to wither and deteriorate the minute you’re once again exposed to the sunlight.

To switch up metaphors, Button is a dazzling contraption at times, to be sure…but a contraption it remains. Unlike Milk, which felt alive in every moment of its run, the stately, strangely inert Button — despite trying to wring emotion from more death scenes than your average season of Six Feet Under — moves to a tidy, mechanical, and clockwork pulse that ultimately feels pretty far removed from the messy emotions and drawing-outside-the-lines sensations of real life. Fincher, the actors (particularly Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, and Taraji P. Henson), and the special effects team put forth an undeniably impressive effort, but as the movie progresses, it starts to feel more and more like what it in fact is: well-made but sloppily written Oscar bait. And the more you think about Button, the less it holds together.

Trade out feathers for hummingbirds, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is, for all intent and purposes, Forrest Gump. (Indeed, while Button began as a Fitzgerald short story, the two films share a screenwriter in Eric Roth. It shows.) After a Katrina-era framing device is established, involving an old, terminally ill woman sharing her last few moments with her daughter (Julia Ormond) in a New Orleans hospital, we head back to 1918 and the end of World War I, as Benjamin Button begins to recount his tale…with a Gumpish southern drawl, no less. Born “under unusual circumstances” and left at the doorstep of the local old folks’ home, Button (Pitt, good but something of a cipher), as you probably know by now, ages backwards — He begins life as a very old baby and grows younger over time, like Dick Clark or the Bob Dylan song. (I’ve skipped over a short story involving Teddy Roosevelt and a distraught clockmaker (Elias Koteas) which, with the final visual payoff of the Katrina angle, may actually be the most beautiful and affecting part of the film.)

The central conceit established, Button’s life then proceeds to follow a surprisingly Gumpian course. Raised by his take-no-guff, God-fearin’ mama (Taraji P. Henson, a much-needed breath of life throughout) and considered a “special child” by all around him, Button eventually embarks on a series of grand adventures. He hooks up with a gruff but lovable sea captain (Jared Harris, nothing at all like Lt. Dan) who teaches him the ways of the world. He eventually finds himself in the midst of war, and spends several years traveling by himself all around the globe. And throughout his days, he finds himself continually drawn to his childhood friend turned free spirit, Jenny…uh, Daisy (Blanchett, graceful, alluring and thoroughly unDylanesque). But Daisy, like the rest of us, is aging along the usual lines. (Indeed, given that Daisy is a prima ballerina, her window of time seems that much shorter and more precious.) How can Benjamin and Daisy forge anything lasting when they’re at best two ships passing in the night? However happy they are at any given moment, time is against them and they know it. And time, whether one ages backwards or forwards, has a way of inexorably marching on.

There are scenes (such as Daisy trying to seduce Benjamin through dance one midsummer night) and vignettes (such as Benjamin and Tilda Swinton in their own version of Lost in Translation) that are eminently engaging throughout, and yet The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ultimately seems to add up to less than the sum of its parts. (This is particularly true of the last hour, where it begins to devolve into an interminably long Abercrombie & Fitch ad.) Part of the problem is that the script starts beating its central thesis — “time keeps slipping, slipping, slipping into the future” — into the ground after awhile. But, even allowing for that, there are clumsy plot holes throughout. Ben and Daisy (well, Ben) reach a decision near the end of the film that makes zero sense from any perspective, other than to add further poignancy to their romance. Characters are created (Benjamin’s sister, Julia Ormond’s dad) that seem to have no other purpose than to drive the story along, and disappear as soon as it’s convenient.

Taking a step back from the basic plot mechanics, Button often seems confused about what it really wants to say. At times, it veers in the direction of “No fate but what we make“…ok, I’m all for free will. Later, in the middle going, it digresses in Paris for a visually arresting but totally-out-of-left-field Amelie-style reverie on the cruel vagaries of luck. (Which seems clever, until you realize that the entire sequence makes no sense given that we’re meant to have been reading from Button’s diary the whole time.) But if free will and/or randomness is the order of the day, then why do Ben and Daisy seem to keep circling each other all their lives (and why do so many second-tier characters seem to hold down the same jobs their parents did?) Is it…fate? I wasn’t expecting Button to come up with a unified theory of the universe or anything — Life sure doesn’t have one that I’m yet aware of. (Ok, other than “life is a box of chocolates,” etc. etc.) But the movie is so emphatic and precise about the short term points it’s making that, taken as whole, it all seems a bit poorly thought through.

Now, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button isn’t a disaster by any means. In fact, it’s one of the most sumptuously filmed movies I’ve seen this year. Still, as I walked out of the theater — and even more in the days since — I found the film wanting. At first, I assumed the problem was Fincher, who’s a quality director (Zodiac, Fight Club) but whose style might’ve been too cool, clinical, and remote for this particular project. But, the more I think about it, it was probably Fincher’s distance and reserve that prevented Button from becoming an unwatchable schmaltzfest. (Roth seems the real culprit.) In any case, Benjamin Button is a likable lad who shows occasional flashes of real potential. But, other than that whole aging-young thing, he unfortunately doesn’t end up seeming all that special.

Once (or Twice) in a Lifetime.

“A man only gets a couple of chances in life. It won’t be long before he’s sitting around wondering how he got to be second-rate.” Lots of choice stuff in today’s trailer bin: First up, President Josh Brolin braves pretzels, Poppa Bush, and enough JD to kill a small horse in this fun extended trailer for Oliver Stone’s W. (I can’t wait.) Elsewhere, Frank Miller borrows from Robert Rodriguez, who, of course, borrowed from him, to mine Will Eisner’s back-catalog in this short new teaser for The Spirit. (I’m still not sold.)

Also up recently, Kate Winslet and Leonardo di Caprio forsake the Titanic to suffocate in the suburbs in the first trailer for Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road. (Ok, altho’ it looks Little Children-ish.) Tom Cruise leads an all-star team of character actors in a plot to kill Hitler in the second trailer for Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie. And Brad Pitt moves from age to wisdom in the second trailer for David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. (Not as haunting as the teaser, but close.) I gotta say, it’s good to finally hit the Oscar stretch for 2008 — I haven’t seen nearly enough movies this year.

Update: One more, via LMG: Philip Seymour Hoffman puts on a play — and gets stuck waiting in the wings — in the trailer for Charlie Kaufman’s much-anticipated Synecdoche, New York, also starring Hope Davis, Catherine Keener, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Dianne Wiest, Emily Watson, and Michelle Williams.

Update 2: Ok, what with Marky Mark, Ludacris, Bridges the Lesser, the lousy whiteboy angst-metal, and the highly Matrix-derivative gun-fu and explosions throughout, the recent trailer for John Moore’s Max Payne looks Skinemax bad. But, then again, it does have The Wire‘s Jamie Hector (Marlo) briefly playing Exposition Guy with an island accent, so that’s enough for a link. Hey, I’m easily amused.

Burn, Baby, Burn.

Well, i’ll have to reserve final judgment for several months or years down the line — It’s hard to think of any Coen film that hasn’t improved considerably with age and/or repeat viewings (although I have yet to give The Ladykillers, another spin.) But, for now, the brothers’ larky spy spoof Burn After Reading, which I caught last week, feels right now like medium-grade Coen. (Mind you, saying Burn is middling by Coen standards isn’t a criticism per se — Even medium-grade Coen delivers at several degrees above standard film fare, if you’ve acquired the taste for it.) Burn is nowhere near as funny as, say, The Big Lebowski or Raising Arizona, and I actually prefer the much-maligned and underappreciated Intolerable Cruelty. But it does hit at about the level of The Man Who Wasn’t There or The Hudsucker Proxy, and I think it could even grow into O Brother territory one day.

Like Lebowski after Fargo and Barton Fink after their magnum opus, Miller’s Crossing, Burn has that jaunty, drawing-outside-the-lines, devil-may-care ambience to it, which suggests the project was mainly just a mental sorbet of sorts for the brothers after their dour venture into (Cormac) McCarthyism, No Country for Old Men. In any case, I could see the film falling flat to those moviegoers ambivalent to or aggravated by Coenisms. But if, like me, you enjoy panning for hidden gold in their slow-fuse sight gags (among them this time are purple sex cushions, Jamba Juices, and Dermot Mulroney) and relish their penchant for eminently quotable buffoonery (“You too can be a spy, madam“), I suspect you’ll have a decently good time with Burn. There are worse fates in this world than having drunk the Coen Kool-aid.

Just to make sure we’ve all moved on from the dark contours of west Texas nihilism, Burn after Reading is basically goofy from Jump Street: It begins with a ludicrous eye-in-the-sky shot of Planet Earth, eventually zooming down into Langley, VA, that (give or take a few more flashy whip-pans and slo-mos) would seem more at home in a Tony Scott film. Our Great Eye soon settles upon the sacking from the Balkans desk of one Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich), a veteran CIA analyst with a hair-trigger temper, a cold, cuckolding wife (Tilda Swinton), and — at least by the standards of Mormons — a problem with the sauce. (To his credit, he tends to wait until exactly 5pm, and not a minute later, to commence the day’s boozing — On Mad Men, he’d be a teetotaller.) Determined to exact his revenge on the Bureau for this slight (and perhaps save face before both his wife and aging father, the very definition of silent reproach), Cox commences to penning his “memoirs,” most of which — in the venerable memoir tradition — is a ponderous, self-serving litany of blatant name-dropping. (He fancies himself as one of “Murrow’s Boys” to containment architect George Kennan. I would guess this self-assessment is somewhat inflated.)

But, due to some twists and turns involving divorce proceedings, Cox’s manuscript (in CD form) ends up in the hands of Linda Litzke and Chad Feldheimer (Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt), two enterprising, if somewhat clueless, employees at the local athletic center, Hardbodies. Alas, both Linda (blinded by her desire to procure cosmetic surgery and get off the Internet dating train) and Chad, not the brightest bulb on the tree in any event, make the critical mistake of thinking this “raw intelligence” is something somebody might actually be interested in, and thus said gym rats decide to blackmail Cox into paying for return of the CD. And, if that fails, well, they’ll still get theirs by going to the Russians with the data…but, of course, things don’t go exactly according to plan. Throw some X-factors into the equation — say, George Clooney as the paramour of both Mrs. Cox and Linda, a paranoid, lactose-intolerant US marshall who loves three things in this world: kinky sex, a good post-coital run, and quality flooring; or Richard Jenkins as the kindly Orthodox priest turned Hardbodies manager who nurtures a crush for Ms. Litzke from afar — and this proposed blackmail starts to get really, really complicated. It’s no wonder the CIA suits (J.K. Simmons and David Rasche) can’t wrap their heads around it. What are they, rocket scientists?

Now, a caveat: If you find Coen movies to be generally irritating, you’re probably going to loathe this film, and those critics who think the brothers are nothing more than elitist misanthropes (See, for example, Dave Kehr on No Country: “a series of condescending portraits of assorted hicks, who are then brutally murdered for our entertainment“) will have a field day in panning this film. To this line of criticism, I would say two things: First, Burn is assuredly the work of equal-opportunity misanthropes — It’s clearly as ruthless toward Malkovich’s self-centered, Princeton-educated ninny as it is to the good-natured boobs at Hardbodies. (Besides, speaking as someone who burnt out years ago on the Internet dating rigamarole, and who now runs mostly at night, partly to facilitate the Chet-and-his-iPod-type grooving, it’s not like the foibles of Coen’s characters here aren’t at least somewhat universal.)

Second, particularly every time I read the news these days and find not only that I’m honestly expected to take a silly, patently unqualified, score-settling and habitually dishonest fundie like Sarah Palin — a.k.a. an evil Marge Gunderson with the leadership skills of Johnny Caspar (minus his ethical instincts) and the stuck-in-Vietnam worldview of Walter Sobchak — seriously as a potential leader of the Free World, but that close to half of our country is actually enthused by this notion because, well, shucks, she’s “just like us”…well, I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that intelligence is relative, and that elitist misanthropy (or misanthropic elitism, if you’d prefer) might just end up being the new black. It’s a Coen world, y’all. They didn’t make the rules, and they — and we — are just living in it.

I was so much older then.

“I was born under unusual circumstances.” The moody and mesmerizing teaser for David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, from the short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald and youtubed in Spanish a few weeks ago, is now officially online, and in hi-def.

Intelligence is Relative.

By way of Bitten Tongue (who does a nice job of highlighting its provenance), Cinematical gets its hands on the poster for the Coen Brothers’ forthcoming Burn After Reading, with John Malkovich, Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins, David Rasche, and J.K. Simmons. (The trailer is here.)

Update: And, behold! An international teaser trailer for Burn hits the tubes. Update 2: And here’s a slightly different domestic version.

Reading Rainbow.

“Osborne Cox? I thought you might be worried…about the security of your s**t.” So the Coens followed up their last Oscar winner (Fargo) with an out-and-out comedy masterpiece (The Big Lebowski.) And, after NCFOM? We can only hope…Now online: The new red-band trailer for the Coens’ Burn After Reading, starring John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins, J.K. Simmons, and David Rasche. (If you don’t truck with iTunes, it’s also available here.) Looks like great fun (and after The Dark Knight, this is probably my most-anticipated film right now.)

Grow Young or Die Trying.

As seen in front of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (twice), Brad Pitt goes back in time in the trailer for David Fincher’s Curious Case of Benjamin Button, from the story by F. Scott Fitzgerald and also featuring Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, Taraji P. Henson, Jason Flemyng, Elias Koteas and Julia Ormond. (Until it officially is released, this is the Spanish-language version.) Looks intriguing…and is it just me, or is it exceedingly strange to see Swinton and Blanchett in the same film?

Also in today’s trailer bin: Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino look for two full hours of that Heat magic in the second preview for Jon Avnet’s Righteous Kill, also starring Carla Gugino, John Leguizamo, 50 Cent, Brian Dennehy, and Donnie Wahlberg. (I’m not sold yet, even if Inside Man‘s Russell Gewirtz is the scribe.) And, over in former Soviet Union, the new international, R-rated trailer for Timur Bekmambetov’s Wanted pops up on the grid, with James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Common, Terrence Stamp, and Thomas Kretschmann. Definitely maybe…although Night Watch had a good preview too.

Update: I neglected to post this one the other day: Uptown girl Nicole Kidman and cowboy Hugh Jackman find love during World War II in the trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s historical epic Australia. Not really my cup of tea, but you never know.

No New Tale to Tell.

As I noted of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe back in 2005, I could take or leave the Narnia books as a child, even despite my inordinate fondness for Tolkien. I liked LWW well enough, but as the “Famous Five“-style adventure of that book yielded more to high fantasy, and particularly as the lion became more overtly arch-Christian in the later tomes, I pretty much tuned out of the series, and if I read the last few books, I don’t remember them at all. So it was that I ventured into Andrew Adamson’s The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian yesterday evening out a sense of fanboy dutifulness more than anything else. (Also, I’m not sure what it says of summer movie culture that this is the third review in three weeks that I’ve had to preface with an explanation of my relationship to the kid-oriented source material.)

In any event, dutiful is a good way to sum up Prince Caspian. It’s a competently-made fantasy-war film, and it hits all the beats I remember — In fact, unlike PJ’s LotR, the best parts of the film may be the deviations from the book. But I found the overall experience somewhat lackluster and prosaic, and I had the vague sense throughout of being forced to watch a high-end BBC production of an acclaimed children’s fantasy novel in school somewhere. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure if that’s due to Adamson’s film or Lewis’ tome. Either way, unless you’re considerably more fond of the Narnia books than I (or are looking to prosletize to children) I’d probably skip it. Caspian isn’t a bad film per se — it just feels like a hollow one.

Prince Caspian begins with an eclipse, a birthing, a midnight assassination attempt, and a Ford of Bruinen-style horse race, all of which suggest that we’ve moved pretty far afield from the twee satyrs and beavers of the last Narnia outing into more Elizabethan fare. The target of said attempt is one Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes), the rightful heir to the Telmarine throne, who’s now been forced out of the picture by his uncle, Lord Miraz (Sergio Castellitto)…but not before being given a magical horn from the ancient days of yore. After being accosted by dwarves (Peter Dinklage, Warwick Davis), Caspian toots his own horn and, lo, we’re back with the Pevensie children — Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy — in wartime London, one year after the events of LWW. The horn’s spell soon shuttles the four back to Narnia (a good thing, since they seem to be having trouble adjusting to the real world)…but now it’s 1300 years after their last visit, the land has grown more savage, and the Narnians are all but extinct, thanks to the depredations of the Spaniards, uh, Telmarines. And so it falls upon the Pevensies to come to the aid of Caspian, and to try to make things right in their former kingdom. But where is Aslan? Only Lucy (Georgie Henley), the youngest, believes He still might around to help, here in this darkest hour of Narnia. But, who’s everyone else gonna believe? Lucy or their lion eyes?

What ensues, give or take some alpha-male grandstanding between Peter (William Moseley) and Caspian — and goo-goo-eyes made between Caspian and Susan (Anna Popplewell) — is basically a two-hour fantasy-war film: In other words, this is the Two Towers of the bunch, with sieges, cavalry, trebuchets, the whole nine. And, while it’s interesting to see how much Tolkien shared with and/or borrowed from his fellow Inkling — we have the dispossessed king of Men, a variation on the Ents, and the aforementioned Ford here — it’s hard not to get the impression that medieval fantasy-wars are a bit played out in cinema at the moment. Aside from a stealthy incursion upon the Telmarine fortress, one that ends rather horribly (and includes a minotaur pulling a Gan), there’s a lot of been-there, done-that to the proceedings here. And, despite the valiant efforts of Peter Dinklage (making a solid case that del Toro’s Hobbit might do well to take a page from Time Bandits when to comes to Thorin Oakenshield’s band), the cast from the rather-bland Caspian on down is mostly unmemorable, particularly compared to James McAvoy, Ray Winstone, et al from LWW. (And Eddie Izzard’s turn as a mouseketeer, basically Shrek‘s Puss-in-Boots spliced with the Ratatouille gang, reinforces the unfortunate sense that Caspian has mostly been beaten to the punch, film-wise.)

One of the best sequences in the film is a surprise appearance by Tilda Swinton’s White Witch (one apparently added by Adamson), which not only helps round out Edmund (Skandar Keynes)’s story arc from the first film but, for a few minutes, brings both personality and a real sense of menace to the tale. Otherwise, alas, Prince Caspian is mostly a lot of medieval grunting, centaurs and satyrs cheering, and we the audience waiting around for the inevitable leonis-ex-machina. O Lion, why has thou forsaken us?

Malkovich Burns. | As does Gotham.

Several stills from the Coens’ next, Burn after Reading, appear online, along with a brief synopsis: “Burn centers on Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich), who has hit a bit of rough patch. He was recently fired from the CIA and decides to write his memoirs, naturally documenting government secrets along the way. His wife (Tilda Swinton) decides to steal the material to use in their upcoming divorce proceedings, but the CD mistakenly ends up in the hands of two doltish gym employees, Chad (Brad Pitt) and Linda (Frances McDormand). In response to Linda and Chad conspiring to sell the material to help pay for Linda’s plastic surgery, the CIA dispatches Harry (George Clooney) to sort it all out at whatever the cost.” And, if that doesn’t sound like Coen comedy territory, check out Brad Pitt’s hair.

Also in the image department, enterprising fanboys have rifled through the new Dark Knight trailer and kindly chopped it up into high-rez stills. The money shot of the trailer is this one, of course (unless you’re Patrick Leahy), but I still want to see more of the Clown Prince of Crime…

Eat your heart out, Nicholson. Update: For the more Two-Face-minded, some purported concept art leaks. (Not for the squeamish.)

The Caspian Siege.

We’re an action movie, honest! The new trailer for The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian is now online. I’ll admit to having no real connection to the Narnia books (other than the first one). Still, this looks like little more than two hours of WETA-enhanced air conditioning to me.