Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (5/5 Stars)

Whenever some crazy person does some horrible thing in the world, deranged manifestos from the extremes of society are festooned upon us by a media exploiting our collective morbid curiosity. The dead are victimized twice. First they are robbed of their live, then their lives are forever connected and largely overshadowed by the attention spent on the perpetrators. Sharon Tate is a perfect example. This utterly blameless young woman was horrifically murdered by the Manson cult. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood uses this real event from 1969 Hollywood as its reason for being. However, upon exiting the theater, you may notice that during the course of the movie, you have learned far more about Sharon Tate then Charles Manson. Writer/Director Quentin Tarantino to his great credit has flipped the murders on their head. He showers attention on the victims and treats the perpetrator dismissively. This is too my great relief. I was very worried coming into this movie about what Tarantino would do with the material given that Roman Polanski was still alive. Coming out of the movie theater, I can marvel at the deft way Tarantino handled it all.

Reappearing in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood from Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained are Leonardo Dicaprio and Brad Pitt respectively. Tarantino writes them some tailor-made roles. Leonardo Dicarprio plays Rick Dalton, former star of Bounty Law, on the downward trajectory of his show business career (in an early scene, he gets presented the ‘opportunity’ to move to Italy and star in westerns over there). Brad Pitt plays Rick Dalton’s former stunt double, Cliff Booth. Cliff may or may not have been involved in the tragic death of his wife in the style of Natalie Wood’s mysterious fate. Nobody can prove whether or not Cliff did what and Tarantino makes it purposefully ambiguous. Enough people think Cliff might have to the point where he no longer is a working man (he also got into a fist fight with Bruce Lee). He spends his days doing odd jobs for Rick and feeding his bulldog.

Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth are completely fictional. It is a testament to the movie that we become highly invested in them while waiting for the real occurrences to occur in the last half hour of an almost three hour movie. It must be noted that Brad Pitt at 55 years old still has a six-pack of abs. It’s absurd. While Leo plays worn and tragic, a type of role he has become very good at.

As a very present character is Hollywood itself. The 1969 production value, the neon details, the cars, the Playboy mansion, the year round sun. Most of all, that feel of innocence before those dirty hippies ruined the party and gave the sixties their hangover.

I very much don’t want to ruin this movie for you. If you don’t know anything about it, I think you should do some historical homework and then listen to nothing else. You should know something about the Manson murdes. Read the Wikipedia article. Then watch this movie. You will not be disappointed.

Would you believe me if I told you that this is Tarantino least vulgar and arguably least violent movie. It is on the same violence level of pre-Kill Bill. As far as cursing is concerning, not that much at all really. It’s kind of refreshing. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is top-tier Tarantino. Put it up there with Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained. Highly recommended.

The Big Short (5/5 Stars)

This movie is an achievement on several fronts. First it achieves clarity in its subject. Second it achieves humor throughout. Third it has a strong moral. It takes considerable skill to do this given that the subject, the secondary mortgage market, is complicated and obscure and I can only hope my review is organized well enough to capture everything that needs to be praised.

The story comes from Michael Lewis’s nonfiction book, “The Big Short.” That book tells three completely separate stories about who profited from the subprime meltdown that cratered the global economy in 2008. Given that almost nobody figured out (or wanted to figure out) that everything was terrible before it was, the people that did are very interesting outsiders. The movie was adapted by Charles Randolph and Adam McKay. It was directed by Adam McKay.

One is Dr. Michael Burry (Christian Bale), an ex-brain surgeon hedge fund manager, who did something nobody else did. He read the underlying mortgage bonds. He spent a couple weeks doing so while barefoot in his office listening to deafness-inducing death metal. Then he did an extraordinarily audacious thing. In 2005, he invested 100 million dollars of his client’s money (against their wishes) in a financial instrument he requested the banks invent that bet against these bonds. It was a ballsy move given his own calculations had the bonds failing in the second quarter of 2007. How the movie treats this character is illuminating. They could have easily gone down the Benedict Cumberbatch route of making him arrogant and dismissive of all the ordinary people of the world. But as Michael Burry points out to his angry clients, “I don’t know how to be sarcastic. I can’t tell a joke. I know numbers.” He corresponds with the incredulous bankers he works with in a humble unassuming way. Everybody is either making fun of him or angry with him for the next couple years.

Second is Mark Baum (Steve Carell). We are introduced to him in an anger management support group. A troubled man is talking about how the world makes him angry. Mark Baum walks in late and immediately starts talking about himself. He is angry with Wall Street bankers and all the big guys beating up the small people. He casually pours himself a cup of coffee and sits down completely oblivious to the fact that he has interrupted the meeting. Then his phone rings. “I have to take this,” he remarks and leaves the room to take the call. Fucking Brilliant. The man is an asshole, but given that he hates Wall Street and spends the entire movie railing against corruption and fraud, he is our asshole. He has a team of angry people working for him including Danny Moses (Rafe Spall), Porter Collins (Hamish Linklater), and my favorite Vinnie Daniel (Jeremy Strong). This quartet form an angry hedge fund that is propositioned by an oily banker named Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling). Vennett has heard of Michael Burry’s bet and wants to sell somebody else the same thing. Unfortunately nobody wants in on this bet. Except the Baum hedge fund guys who don’t trust bankers. There is a lot of yelling amongst these guys, most of it hilarious. And that is a very important thing as what Vennett is explaining to Baum and (also to us) is the secondary mortgage market, which is an absurdly obfuscated and complicated thing. The movie pulls out all the stops and breaks a lot of rules in order to explain how it works. Jared Vennett, the chief explainer, also serves as the movie’s narrator. At other times people just turn to the camera and make it a little clearer to the audience what exactly is happening on the screen. Then at other other times the movie employs Margot Robbie in a bubble bath, Selena Gomez at a blackjack table, and Anthony Bourdain making a Monday morning stew of old fish to explain the different tranches of a Collateralized Debt Obligation. It also helps that McKay sometimes substitutes for different financial terms the word “dogshit,” as in “these loans are dogshit,” as opposed to “non-performing." All of this saves a lot of time, which as McKay should know and amply demonstrates is the friend of comedy.

Third is the twenty-something partnership of Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Witrock). They specialize in betting that bad things will happen (natural disasters and the like) given the theory that most people do not plan on terrible things to happen to them. They are introduced (about 45 minutes into the film) in a very endearing way. They want to go work for JP Morgan and have an interview that does not get past the lobby of the building. An intern (or at least a very young associate) meets them downstairs and points out that they have one billion (or something) less money than it takes to get an ISDA (described as the ticket to get to the big boys table). They feel stupid and rejected. So let us do a tally. We have our bullied nerd, our asshole, and our young nobody underdogs.

There is one more character but I’m going to intterupt my own review to talk about the ingenious way Adam McKay brings all of these characters together. They never meet each other, but they know about each other. Jared hears about Michael Burry’s bet at an afterwork bar. Charlie and Jamie pick up Jared’s prospectus in the lobby of JP Morgan. Except that is not how it happened. We see this happen but then Jared turns to the camera at the afterwork bar and tells us that he does not hang out with these people. He has fashion friends. Actually, Charlie tells us, he did not pick up the prospectus in the lobby. He heard it through a friend and Jamie found out about some other not very cinematic way. This is halfway brilliant by Adam McKay. First, how these characters hear about the other deals is not important to the story. In many nonfiction adaptations moviemakers do this sort of efficient blurring of the truth all the time. It saves time for the audience, this is understood, so it does not take away from anything for the characters to turn to us and let us know that we are seeing a movie convention. But only that would not be brilliant. It is brilliant because McKay takes this convention and admission and turns it into a setup for one of the greatest, hilarious, and cathartic payoffs in the movie. During a seminar Mark Baum interrupts a speaker on a stage (not during a Q and A session) with a question. The speaker answers and Mark interrupts him again to contradict him angrily. Then Mark’s phone rings, he answers it, announces to everyone that he has to take this and leaves the room. Then Jared, who is also in the room, turns to the camera and states, “That actually happened. Mark did that.” This joke would not have been possible if McKay had not been breaking the rules all the while. He needed to break the rules in order to tell the story efficiently. What makes this movie’s screenplay brilliant is how he uses all the broken rules (that are rules generally because they are distracting and take the audience out of the story) to do things that bring home jokes and cathartic points. The techniques that break the rules do not distract, they reinforce and make scenes better. Adam McKay and Charles Randolph deserve the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

So Charlie and Jamie are rejected but they have a trick card. They have befriended an ex-banker in their hometown named Ben Rickart (Brad Pitt with a beartd). Underscoring how bullshit the system is, this guy uses his connections with a big bank to get the necessary ISDA that they would not have been able to get based on their underlying merit.

So now everything is set up and explained and the rest of the movie is payoff. It is generally funny up until a point and then the movie hits us with several very moral scenes. My favorite (and there are plenty to pick from) comes at a point where Charlie and Jamie make several great bets and are very excited about it. They are dancing in the lobby of a Las Vegas convention center and Ben Rickart angrily tells them to stop. “Do you realize what you just did? You bet against the U.S. economy. If it turns out well for you it hurts everybody else. One tick upward in the unemployment rate is a hundred thousand people out of work. This is what I hate about banking. It takes human beings and turns them into numbers in a spreadsheet. Just don’t fucking dance.”

There are several moments like this in the movie and they all work very well. It may come as some surprise that this is the first dramatic movie Adam McKay has ever made. He is known for the best of the Will Ferrell comedies (Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Step-Brothers, and The Other Guys). It is fun now to watch other movie critic revise what they think of the guy now that he has made a truly great movie that is not a comedy. (Not me. I have always thought Talladega Nights was a perfect movie). I hope McKay makes other movies that are not completely comedies. He obviously cares deeply about people and has the skill and talent to take complicated problems and break them down in digestible parts. He also has a comedic director's skill in caricature. This comes into play most readily in his satirical treatment of secondary characters. I especially love how the woman at the ratings agency (a fine Melissa Leo) has come back from an eye exam and is wearing thick sunglasses. And the coup de grace has to be the SEC girl who is in Vegas at the secondary mortgage market convention with the sole purpose of shacking up with a guy with Goldman Sachs in order to get on the ground floor of that bank once her couple years at the agency are up.

I have studied this subject quite a bit and have only this to add. Everything this movie shows about the banking industry is correct and their angry attitude is entirely called for. Having said that, it does not follow that the homeowners (who this movie does not hold under their satirical light) are entirely blameless. Many took out loans for houses they could not afford. Some people took out two or three mortgages and a line of credit on their property. These people deserved to lose their homes. I bring this up not to contradict this movie but to impress upon the reader that one does not need to take sides between ordinary people and banks in this crisis. It is entirely possible and I would posit that it is completely true that everybody is guilty and the true injustice is not that ordinary people suffered but that the big banks and the people who worked for them did not. Of course if one had to decide who is guiltier, it would tip towards the banks. After all, they were professionals who told everyone that they knew what they were doing.

One of my favorite scenes is when Charlie and Jamie sneak into Lehman Brothers after it has collapsed. And they walk around the deserted trading floor with its infantile Red Bull can pyramids. It was not how Charlie imagined it would be. “What did you expect?” asks Jamie. Charlie reflects a moment before adding, “I thought adults worked here.”

Fury 3/5 Stars

‘Fury’ purports to be one type of movie, does it exceedingly well, and right at the moment of truth blindsides the audience with an incredulous conclusion that has no right whatsoever to be in a movie of its type. This movie is intended to be a serious movie about a very specific place and time, the invasion of Germany in World War II by Allied tank divisions. War is hell, the movies shows. Hitler, the ultimate asshole, refuses to give up a lost cause going so far as to start conscripting German children into the army and hanging those that refuse to fight. The allied tanks roll past hanging corpses of kids with placards hung on them that read ‘Coward.’ The other children have guns and so the Allies have to kill them themselves.

As most war movies feel they sort of must do, we are introduced into one particular tank division through the eyes of a green youngster by the name of Norman (Logan Lerman).  Get it? Norman equals Normal Man. This is a cliché but not a particularly bad one. After all I don’t know anything about tank warfare or warfare in general and sort of need a character to identify with. The tank division is led by Wardaddy (Brad Pitt). He has a tight knit group of gritty comrades. Among them are Grady ‘Coon-ass’ Travis (Jon Bernthal), Trini ‘Gordo’ Garcia (Michael Pena), and Boyd ‘Bible’ Swan (a nicely non-annoying Shia Lebouf). You will get to know these guys as well as you can possibly get to know guys in war in a two hour movie, that is, pretty well. The movie, which is serious, shows them dirty, drunk, vile, prone to epithets, and perfectly willing to take advantage of desperate poverty stricken german women, which very much happened during the war, all over the place. At one point after Norman conscientiously refuses to shoot dead bodies on the ground to make sure they are dead, Wardaddy takes him over to a real life German prisoner of war and orders him to shoot him in the back. ‘I made a promise to get my men out of the war alive, and you are making it harder for me to make good on that promise,’ Wardaddy tells him matter of factly before forcibly putting the gun in Norman’s hands and making him pull the trigger. A little hardhearted? Well, no, that’s just war.

There are two excellent scenes in this movie. One is a tank battle between three crappy American tanks (and yes historically speaking they were crappy) against a superior German panzer. Watching the scene I was struck with the truth that I had never seen a tank battle in a movie before. At least I had not seen one with as much suspense and clarity of strategy as the one here. Apparently the thing about American tanks is that they weren’t built strong enough to withstand german tank fire. One direct hit and the inside of the tank would burst into flame burning everyone inside alive instantly. Those things were literal death traps.

The second excellent scene takes place immediately after the allies take a town. Wardaddy spies an occupied apartment and takes Norman in to it to explore it. Inside they find two German women (played by Anamaria Marinca and Alicia Von Rittberg) who undoubtedly are afraid that they will be raped and/or killed. Given Writer/Director David Ayer’s treatment of the first half of the movie, it is quite conceivable something along those lines may happen. It doesn’t happen and Brad Pitt instead puts the women to work making dinner from potatoes and eggs he has stashed. (This is a good deal given the fact that the German women probably haven’t had a decent meal in long time.) However, about twenty minutes through the scene the other three men show up and they are not happy that Wardaddy is having this dinner without them, and what about the women? And here we can notice a real balancing act of fine acting (and good writing) by Brad Pitt and company. Wardaddy won’t actually order his men to behave because they have been living through hell for years and will be back out there doing it again together no matter what happens in that dining room. His loyalty to his men stops him from putting two anonymous German women over his crew. But he also does not want a mean scene to occur. So he stops it essentially by declaring he is going to have a nice meal and won’t allow his boys to stop it. He provokes good behavior by example and his boys follow him because of respect not necessarily because it is the right thing to do. This is a long and complicated dinner table scene (which are not easy to shoot/edit) and it speaks much about the director’s faith in his audience’s attention span and emotional intelligence to grasp the meaning of what happens in it.

Of course, the last scene in the movie is like a nice hard slap across the face reminding the viewer that yes the director and/or producer and/or studio ultimately thinks you are a mass-market dumbass. The last scene is a John Wayne avalanche of bullshit. Think of every stupid (i.e. not serious) and false thing you’ve seen in a war movie. It is inexplicably all contained in this one final last stand battle where our heroes are prepared to commit heroic suicide against an entire foot division of S.S. soldiers. Why these particular guys we just got to know as people who very much want to live would want to commit heroicide is completely beyond me. Why there is an entire division of well-uniformed S.S. troops marching around from nowhere to somewhere is also beyond me. Why would the battle take all day and all night long? Why would the S.S. waste so many men in dumb charges? Why couldn’t they just bring that sniper guy up at the beginning before so many of them died? Why would the German stop shooting so the wounded good guys could say tearful goodbyes to each other? All of this, what is it doing in a serious movie?

Did David Ayer think that I wouldn’t be satisfied if he didn’t end his movie with a ‘Wild Bunch’ climax? If he didn’t think so, what was the point of making a serious movie about war at all? Why didn’t he just make the whole thing bullshit? I don’t get it. I don’t get it at all. There was so much good stuff here that I can’t even say the ending ruined the movie for me. It just did not feel like it was part of the same movie at all. 

12 Years a Slave (5/5 Stars)

“It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman.”

- Joseph Conrad, Hearts of Darkness

In Joseph Conrad’s Hearts of Darkness, a young British officer travels up the Congolese river to seek out a renegade Colonel named Kurtz. Africa, and this especially undeveloped part of it, was an entirely different world to the educated officer. It is a given in both the story’s authorial voice and in the character itself that the British with all their clothes and technology are superior to the hunter-gatherer savages of Africa. But as the officer contemplates the natives upon seeing them at the start of his journey he is overtaken with a strange discomfort. It isn’t a discomfort born from a sense of racism. No, on the contrary, he recognizes that there is no difference between him and the “savages.” They are obviously of the same species. And this brief acknowledgement of the native’s humanity unnerves him.   

12 Years a Slave, is the third feature by Director Steve McQueen having previously made Hunger and Shame, both collaborations with actor Michael Fassbender. Fassbender in a DVD Bonus feature once referred to McQueen as a man of great empathy. McQueen’s movies are a witness to the truth of that statement. One of the things that make 12 Years a Slave especially remarkable is its treatment of the white characters who are not portrayed as 100% nasty but are allowed brief moments like the one given to the British officer in Conrad’s Hearts of Darkness where they recognize the humanity of those they consider inferior. Apparently this is true not only of McQueen’s adaptation of Solomon Northup’s autobiography 12 Years a Slave, but of the novel itself. Solomon, born a free man in New York, kidnapped, and sold into slavery, repeatedly put himself in the shoes of his slave masters in his account of the ordeal. (I have said before that Django Unchained treated its slave-owners like the Nazis in Indiana Jones. Here I would argue that 12 Years a Slave treats its slave-owners like the Nazis in Schindler’s List, particularly the Ralph Fiennes character, Amon Goeth) Counter intuitively, this does not make the slave owners look better. In fact, it makes them look far worse. In law, it would be the difference between crimes committed knowingly (like murder) as opposed to unknowingly (mere manslaughter). A character like Leonardo Dicaprio’s deluded and indulgent plantation owner in Django Unchained is not shown making moral choices. He considers only one way of doing things. Here, though, the slave-owners can sense what is morally correct if only in that Huck Finn way of feeling ‘something not quite right in the pit of my stomach.’ Then given the choice of whether or not to recognize the humanity that they sense, they choose not to do it. Their behavior comes off as especially cruel, unnatural, and evil. After all, even if they lived by the moral code of the South, Solomon Northup still deserved to be set free. All he had to do to be released was get a letter to his family back home telling them where he was so they could find him and show the local sheriff his free papers. Even in the South this was all the law needed. What stood in the way was the insidious nature of slavery; an institution that oppresses the slave but also warps the moral constitution of the master. It makes cowards of good men as well as enabling the worst impulses of the evil ones.

Is there anything that Michael Fassbender would not do for Steve McQueen? It is a relationship between actor and director that can only be rivaled by the 70s relationship between De Niro and Scorsese. These are all especially hard performances and it speaks to the enormous amount of trust that Fassbender has in McQueen that he is willing to do them. Fassbender in 12 Years a Slave is taking on one of the most notorious of slave-owners, Edwin Epps, in this role. In a world of systematic cruelty, he somehow stood out as being notably more cruel than usual. One of things that 12 Years a Slave portrays that Django Unchained conveniently sidestepped is the subject of widespread rape. (Not to say Django Unchained was not a brave movie, it just seemed that rape was one too many things to consider. And thus Dicaprio lives with his sister, not a wife.) Rape would be one thing, but as Malcolm X liked to point out, most slave-owners were married. And boy how would you feel as a wife if your husband continually raped his slaves? Could you really bring yourself to think the adultery did not count because the women your husband repeatedly raped were black? And thus is set up the most horrific love triangle in the history of cinema between Master Epps, his wife played by Sarah Paulson, and the slave he is in love with Patsy played by newcomer Lupita Nyong’o.

Patsy is perhaps one of the more remarkable slaves in the world, picking an average rate of 500 pounds of cotton a day. Most men in the field pick around 200 pounds. This among other obvious things captures the attention of Epps, who absolutely hates himself for finding her attractive. He rewards her abilities by continually raping and beating her. His wife, fully aware of his philandering, demands that Epps sell her. He will not do so. The wife, who has no power herself in this ridgidly patriarchal society, responds by making Patsy’s life even more of a living hell. Among other things, she denies her soap for cleaning, cuts her rations, and throws a bottle of hard liquor at her face from point blank range. What can Patsy do about this? Commit suicide? That literally seems to be her only and best option.   

I think it would make sense to go ahead and include 12 Years a Slave within the genre of survival movie that is being exceedingly well represented this year with such movies as Gravity, Captain Phillips, and All is Lost. McQueen’s presentation of slavery Solomon Northup's situation absolutely akin to it. There is an extraordinary scene of Northup, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, being almost lynched by an overseer named Tibault, played by Paul Dano, after a mild disagreement. The lynching is in mid-swing when a second overseer stops Tibault not because, you know, it’s murder, but because Northup is property of a different man named Ford, played by Benedict Cumberbatch. Mr. Ford is summoned to make the decision himself. Meanwhile Northup waits all day on his tippy-toes, hands still fastened behind his back, neck still hanging in the noose. In the background all the other slaves go about their business, the situation being that if anybody helped Northup they might be killed as well. Northup may as well be in the middle of the ocean like Old Man Redford or up in space like Sandra Bullock. There is no human community bound by law and order here. All is savage, brutal, and uncaring. 

“Why don’t the black people just rise up and kill the whites?” asks Dicaprio in Django Unchained. Perhaps the fate of one of the newly kidnapped slaves, played by Michael K. Williams, in an ingenious choice of casting, may illustrate the answer to that. Michael K. Williams, best known as one of the more badass characters in TV history, Omar from The Wire, brings up the idea of revolt. He is killed within the space of a couple of minutes. If Omar would last only half a scene, how do you think you would fare? 

Moneyball (4/5 Stars)

The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

One of the main arguments I hear batted around for keeping steroids out of sports is that it makes the game unfair. And the usual retort I always bring up to everyone’s bafflement is that sports aren’t fair anyways, so what’s the difference? And they aren’t fair. They really aren’t. One of the hardest things to do in life is to distance oneself from mass delusions and the idea that sports are somehow fair is one of the most broadly accepted and thankfully rather benign fallacies around. Genetic differences (for instance height in basketball) between opponents are not fair. And neither is a system that allows one professional sports team to have a much bigger budget than others. That difference allows the richer team an unfair advantage in attracting top talent. That is what Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics in this movie based on a true story, must come to grips with. The movie starts with the Athletics coming off one of their best seasons and subsequently losing their three best players in free agency to richer teams like the Yankees. The experienced scouts around the back-room table are talking about rebuilding the team from the ground up with old baseball knowledge and old baseball customs, the same way they did it the last time. No, No, No, Billy says, we cannot do the same thing. More importantly, we cannot do the same old thing because the Yankees are doing the same out thing. If we scout the way the Yankees scout than we will lose because the Yankees will outbid us no matter how well we scout. The game is rigged. We either find a way to play the game differently or we lose. That is Billy Beane’s problem.

How Billy attempts to solve the problem is the main focus of “Moneyball.” Billy Beane, played here by Brad Pitt, essentially disregards most or all of the advice of his experienced scouts and starts listening to a young recent economics major from Yale named Peter Brand, played here by Jonah Hill. The chubby bespectacled Peter Brand is not an athlete, but he does know math and  can use it to spot trends. He tells Beane in confidence his hunch that scouts completely overlook certain things and place way to much emphasis on others. For instance, Peter suggests that a manager’s job shouldn’t be to buy players, but to buy wins, and to buy wins he needs to buy runs. Billy Beane follows this advice. This leads to some rather unorthodox moves, one of the more outrageous things being hiring a life-long catcher to play first base because the guy has a very good getting on first base percentage. Hopefully the runs he will score will offset the plenty of mistakes he will make on defense. The scouts think Beane is crazy. The team manager Art Shaw, played here by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, goes further and refuses to follow the directions. As he explains, he wants to play the team in a way that is defendable in job interviews next October. The A’s start the season with an 11 game losing streak. Beane’s job is on the line. If things don’t turn around he may never be hired as a general manager again.

All of this is very succinctly told with brevity and humor by a great screenplay written by Steve Zaillian and rewritten by Aaron Sorkin. It is impossible to tell which lines are whose but there are several scenes that come off just as well as all those scenes between computer nerds in last year’s “The Social Network.” In fact it can be said that the movies performs much better off the baseball diamond than on it. The backroom dialogue is filled to the brim with smart dialogue that explains things as if it knows what it is talking about. When Brand takes Beane aside and shows him videos of his “hero,” a pudgy little known baseball player who happens to get more walks than anybody but Barry Bonds, we understand exactly why that player is drastically underrated. We also understand why Billy Beane would be willing to take such chances. Through flashbacks we see a young Billy Beane being talked up by scouts who thought he would be the next big thing. They flashed him a huge paycheck and told Billy to skip college and go straight into the big leagues. Billy did and didn’t turn into anything big. The scouts didn’t know what they were talking about and in one of the best scenes in the movie; an older and wiser Billy takes on an especially irate veteran scout. “You don’t know. You say you know, but you don’t,” he tells him. No more of the confidence bullshit for Billy. He is going to trust math from now on. You know, that thing they tried teaching us in school.

This movie is especially satisfying for someone of my generation because we all grew up in the golden age of bullshit sports movies. All that “Just believe in yourself,” horseshit that adults think is okay to foist upon unsuspecting children were heaped onto us in movies like “The Mighty Ducks” and its many ripoff copies. But this movie tells it like it is. Confidence, such a cherished virtue, is shown to be the most useless and overrated of all skill sets. What really counts is doing actual work, crunching numbers, and using deductive reasoning. To show this is not an easy thing for a movie to accomplish. We are after all, an emotional species. But, by and large, “Moneyball,” accomplishes this task. Unfortunately it ultimately falls short due to the same pitfalls that beset everything it is trying to debunk. The last half of the movie veers into melodrama and misplaces an ending that should have been revelatory instead of muted.

What do I mean by that? Well, for one thing, the director Bennet Miller (last movie of his was “Capote,” way back when btw) uses way too much soft focus and slow motion in the climatic scenes. The idea of statistics is to cast clarity on a muddled world. A man like Beane, who has crunched the numbers, should be seeing things more clearly (think Neo finally seeing the matrix at the end of “The Matrix”). Instead, there is a five-ten minute scene near the end of the movie about a very meaningful game in which we see Beane in the weight room, fixed on the television, hoping to all hope that things turn out well on the field. This is not correct. A man who believes in math does not hope or pray for anything. They know what the probabilities are. When so-and-so comes up to the plate they know there is a certain percentage of chance that they will either hit the ball or not. They also know that there is a certain percentage of chance that the game will be won or lost. A man of math is not surprised. They are not brought to disbelieving elation or despair by the occasional impossible miracle. They knew it was possible actually, just unlikely.  Thus, we shouldn’t have out-of-focused shots. We instead should have full-focus shots. The movie should be set in a setting of hyper-awareness. This is not done to the movie’s detriment.

Now, take for instance the ending. It speaks boatloads of the very problem Beane was up against (i.e. human intuition against mathematical reality), but does not exploit it to dramatic effect. Billy Beane ends up turning down a very high offer to manage the Boston Red Sox. Now, if he were using his own philosophy, he would probably determine that access to the Red Sox would mean a greater budget, better players, and thus a better chance to win the World Series Title. In fact, the Red Sox would win the World Series just two years later having adopted some of Billy Beane’s methodology. But Billy didn’t join the Red Sox. He turned down the offer and stayed with the A’s….and he still hasn’t won the World Series. I’m sure the decision felt right though.

The Tree of Life (4/5 Stars)

He’s the one

Who likes all our pretty songs

And he likes to sing along

And he likes to shoot his gun

But he knows not what it means

Knows not what it means

When I say….

In Bloom, Nirvana

“The Tree of Life,” is a very pretty movie. I admit I didn’t quite understand it, but that still won’t stop me from suggesting other people see it. I would say it is worth seeing just because it exists. Sure, it is probably a good idea to take some time to think about it or read an article or two about the meaning in order to draw your own conclusions. That is something I myself will attempt to do at the end of this review. But I don’t think you have to in order to enjoy the movie. If there is one thing about this movie I can definitely say, it is that it is not the least bit preachy or confrontational. The movie is rated PG. It contains gorgeous images that are flashed onto the screen at a dime a dozen pace. It is lovingly directed, acted, and edited with great attention to artistic detail and is told in a calming, meditative, and above all, spiritual way. There was once this very similar movie called “2001: A Space Odyssey.” It too involved an incredible scope of vision that intertwined the eons of history with a visual odyssey set to an amazing score. Sure it was kind of long at times and had a meaning that was kind of hard to grasp, but the children of the sixties had a good way of dealing with that problem. They got high before they saw the movie. Now I’m not saying that you should do that before seeing “The Tree of Life.” I’m just saying I heard it worked for “2001: A Space Odyssey.” No, I wasn’t high when I saw the movie. I was tipsy on white wine, which is totally fine with Jesus.   

The director of “The Tree of Life,” is none other than Terrance Malick. He has made five movies since 1973. Rounded out, that is about one movie per decade. It shows. A Malick movie is something that always looks like the creator took the time to make as perfect as possible. In most other movies, there will perhaps be a scene or a single shot of great beauty that will catch your eye. Those movies will almost always take the time to really linger on the shot and milk it for all its worth. This happens about every 30 seconds in a Malick movie. If you watch the trailer and then the movie, you will notice that most of the images in the trailer happen within the first half hour of the movie. There is plenty more where that came from and it is just as good. The cinematographer’s name is Emmanuel Lubezki and the composer’s name is Alexandre Desplat. You should remember those names, as it is very likely that they will be hoisting Oscars come next February.

The plot of the story is unconventional to the extreme. After a brief prologue concerning several family members hearing about the death of a 19-year-old son and brother, the movie takes a detour to show the creation of the universe, from the big bang to the formation of the Earth. Evolution takes over in a series of montages that could be described as a biologist’s wet dream. This includes dinosaurs. Finally a boy named Jack is born in 1950s suburbia. At this point, we finally get characters. There is the mother played by Jessica Chastain, the father played by Brad Pitt, and three boys played by Hunter McCracken (“Jack”), Laramie Eppler, and Tye Sheridan. The story of the family is told through vignettes of specific details. The camera flows through the house and surrounding neighborhood in a curious and wonderful way. Most of the time it doesn’t matter what scene came just before or what scene comes right after. When the people speak it has the tendency to break the spell, so most of time the characters don’t speak, or when they do it is whispered in a voiceover or replaced by the lyrical score. In a way, the actors are even really acting. They are more like models in a moving Norman Rockwell painting. The main conflict in the movie is Jack’s relationship with his domineering father, a strict disciplinarian who insists that his sons call him sir, do their chores very perfectly, and learn how to fight him, etc. He is a bully but is deliberately shown as having the belief that he is doing his son’s a service in getting them ready for a hard world. He speaks enviously of neighbors with more money and his failed dreams of being a musician. He has it all figured out for his kids though, that is until the end of the movie where something happens and he doesn’t anymore. Life goes on and the family moves away from their idyllic house in the suburbs. We then see Jack all grown up as Sean Penn. The movie loses reality as Sean Penn looks like he’s taking a journey into the wilderness until we see that he is meeting up with a crowd that contains his already dead parents. They all walk around a big lake together to the tune of a Gregorian chant. Then the movie and the song end with several Amens. I read Ebert’s review and he suggested that the last couple of scenes were some kind of afterlife. I’m going to take his word for it. (Although if heaven we’re walking around a lake for all eternity, I think I would rather be reincarnated.)

So okay, what the hell does all of it mean? I’ll take my best shot at it. We might as well start with the quote at the beginning of the movie. It says “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.”  It is from the biblical book of Job. For those not acquainted, the book of Job is the story of a good person who has many bad things happen to him. Wallowing in self-pity and scorning life, Job is joined by three friends who insist that since God is just, Job must have done something to deserve his situation. Job disagrees. He does not lay blame at God’s feet nor ask for anything back but simply asks for an explanation. If he is guilty than what did he do? This conversation goes on for a while until finally God shows up to put in his two cents. And here is where it gets interesting. God doesn’t explain himself. Instead he chides Job for having the gall to even raise the question. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” God asks. The point being that men do not have the knowledge or experience to understand what God is doing nor does God have the duty to answer the questions of his own creations. The book of Job is part of a series of books in the Bible called the Books of Wisdom (others are Proverbs and Ecclesiastes). These are kind of amazing books because in essence they take an agnostic view of God. They don’t deny the existence of God, but they also quite explicitly reject the idea that God can be fully understood. Ecclesiastes is particularly skeptical. It declares everybody to be wrong and everything done on Earth to be in vain. All of this just goes to show that no matter what your beliefs are, there is a book somewhere in the bible that will support them.  

My best guess is that “The Tree of Life,” is a deeply spiritual agnostic movie. It juxtaposes the creation of the universe over billions of years with the story of how young Jack’s father was really mean to him for seemingly no reason. It assumes that they are connected somehow in some greater plan but does not explain why or how. In other words, a connection between the different parts in this movie is something the audience has to take on faith. Either you believe it or you don’t. The ending of this movie drew giggles in the theater that I was in. I can understand that because I saw the movie and I can attest that it doesn’t make logical sense. But such is spirituality and I believe Malick gets it at least that much right by not trying to prove anything. It is a mistake I would think to look to biblical prophecies or miracles as definite proof of God or his will because basing belief of God on tangible things isn’t exactly faith. It is more of a pseudoscience. In essence, faith is about being presented with a legitimate mystery, attributing it to God, and accepting that you won’t be able to understand it. Science on the other hand is based on the assumption that with enough work everything is knowable and if there is a God, then how that works is knowable as well. The two are completely incompatible no matter what anybody says. Both points of view have their downsides when it comes to living life though. The linchpin in this movie is the conflict within the Brad Pitt character. He is struggling to master a world he doesn’t understand and ruinously brings that fight into his home instead of accepting the mystery and being thankful and enjoying the life that has been given to him. 

I don’t know, maybe.

For those interested in spending more than one restless night thinking about these sorts of things, may I suggest the Coen Brothers movie, “A Serious Man.” It is about a Jewish physics professor who wants a decent explanation as to why his life is turning to shit, just like Job. 

Inglourious Basterds (3/5 Stars) August 29, 2009

Shutup Nerd! 


Writer/Director Quentin Tarantino returns to the silver screen this time with a World War II film. It’s only been two years since his last film ‘Death Proof.’ That’s a record for shortest hiatus for this notoriously unprolific director. He has only directed six films in a span of eighteen years. Headlining the advertising campaign of this film is Brad Pitt as a the non-Jewish leader of a band of renegade Jewish American soldiers called the ‘Inglourious Basterds’ who specialize in killing Nazis behind enemy lines. The ‘Inglourious Basterds’ is the German high command gave them. Apparently the correct spelling was lost in translation. In truth though the Basterds only comprise a third of the movie’s screen time. The other storylines feature an evil Nazi (redundant isn’t it?) officer known as the ‘Jew Hunter,’ played deliciously by Christopher Waltz, a Jewish girl named Shosanna who has escaped the ‘Jew Hunter’ and is now the owner of a cinema in Paris, and a British spy that goes on a mission to blow up the movie premiere of Goebbels newest cinematic propaganda masterpiece ‘A Nation’s Pride” at the same movie theater. These storylines are each successfully started off in their own separate chapters in the first half of the movie. Then they hang about too long, go off in weird directions, and ultimately fail to intertwine themselves into one effective overall story. Does this movie deserve three stars? Technically no, it’s got a lot of good stuff in it, more than some four star movies. But I feel inclined to give it such a bad rating because I feel it could have been a masterpiece had the Director not been arrogant enough to think that he could break basic rules of pace, suspense, and logic without suspecting that it would hurt the overall picture and confuse and bore the audience. (In other words, it annoyed me on a gut level). Why didn’t he think that? Well I bet it’s because Tarantino thinks that every line of dialogue he writes (typos included) is gold and that people will have an infinite tolerance for self-referential ‘aint I cool’ speech. They don’t. That’s why nobody went to see ‘Death Proof.’ You think the guy would have gotten an ounce of humility from that colossal failure. Now there is nothing wrong with long extended scenes of dialogue itself, Tarantino himself proved that in previous movies and in this one. But they are delicate things and must be cared for in a certain way or else they belong in the deleted scenes menu of a Special Edition DVD set. To fully explain what I mean, I will compare and contrast Tarantino, the masterful movie writer/director, and Tarantino, the stubborn, indulgent prick that has sabotaged every good idea he has had since he made ‘Pulp Fiction.’ Conveniently I can use examples of both of these Tarantinos in this movie alone, although I will also use some examples from what unfortunately looks like will be his one and only masterpiece, ‘Pulp Fiction.’ 

Let’s take a look at the first chapter in this movie: Once upon a time in Nazi-Occupied France. It opens on a farmhouse in the French countryside. A man is chopping wood when he sees a Nazi car driving up. The Nazis arrive; the officer played by Christopher Waltz gets out. He asks to talk to the man. They are talking in French. Both are very polite. The man invites the officer into the house. Therein he introduces his daughters and offers the officer a glass of wine. The officer noticing that this is a dairy farm asks for a glass of milk instead. One of the daughters pours him a glass. We watch him drink the whole thing. Then the officer suggests the man ask his daughters to leave for the conversation they will have. The man does so and the daughters leave. After they have left the officer asks the man if he knows who he is. The man tells him. The officer asks the man if he knows his nickname. The man says he does. The officer’s nickname is “Jew Hunter.” The officer inquires as to the whereabouts of one of the Jewish families in the county that is unaccounted for. The man says he has heard a rumor that they are in Spain and that the previous Nazi officer assigned to the county had already searched his house. The officer smiles and is very amiable. Then he asks the man if they can switch the conversation from French to English as he is not so good at the latter. They do so. Then the officer goes into the reason why he is called the “Jew Hunter.” He gives a very Anti-Semitic explanation of the difference between the Germans, who are like Hawks, and the Jews, who are like Rats. The man asks if he can smoke his pipe. It is a small corncob pipe. The officer explains that he got his nickname because he was especially good at thinking like a rat and mentions that he thinks the qualities of a rat are quite admirable in some ways. At this moment, after it seems like they have been talking for quite awhile, the camera moves and it is revealed that the man has been hiding the Jewish family under his floorboards the entire time. The officer than remarks that he finds it amazing what the Jews will do when they have abandoned any sense of decency. The man is starting to look nervous. Then the officer asks if he can smoke and takes out a comically large pipe. Not missing a beat the officer tells the man that a person who tells him what he needs to know will not suffer a whit whereas a man who has to make him search will suffer dire consequences to not only himself but his family. At this point the man seems very perturbed. Then the officer asks the man flatly whether he has Jews underneath his floorboards. The man, with a single tear running down his face, quietly admits it. The officer than remarks that since he has not heard any sounds underneath it is quite evident that the Jews do not understand English and asks the man not to give away the fact that three Nazi soldiers are entering the house instead of his three daughters. As the officer, in very polite and charming French, tells the man that he won’t search the house and says goodbye, he motions to his soldiers to shoot at the floor. They do so. All the Jews are shot and killed except one girl who escapes. We are then treated to a very iconic shot of a beautiful girl running for her life across the fields of the French countryside. We are told her name is Shosanna. The chapter ends.

Okay, this scene is a bit of a masterpiece. But why? It’s all about momentum and payoff. We start out very small, just two guys talking. One affable and evil, the other is good and unmoving. We don’t entirely know what there are talking about. The audience is confused on several levels. We don’t know why the officer is talking to this particular person, we aren’t used to cheerful Nazis, we don’t get why all the attention is being paid to milk and pipes, we don’t know quite what the officer is getting about when he’s talking about rats and hawks, and we don’t understand why he’s taking his sweet ass time. Every one of these questions is answered in a dramatic and satisfying way. The officer is talking to the man because he is hiding Jews, he’s talking about rats because he knows the Jews are in the floorboards and he’s an anti-semitic basterd, he’s being affable and charming in French and then switches to English because he gets a kick out of not only killing Jews but playing one last psychological trick on them before doing so (my favorite part. I have never seen language used as a dramatic twist in a movie before, caught me completely by surprise), the milk and pipe is meant to intimidate the man, and he’s taking his sweet ass time because he gets a sociopathic kick out of wearing down the man to the point where he betrays himself. Tarantino could have just written that the Nazi goes into the house, searches the floorboards and kills the Jews. He did it this way because 1) It gives the audience an idea of just how smart and cunning the main bad guy in the story is and 2) the purely evil and sociopathic way he goes about doing it reminds us of how much we really really hate Nazis. Plus this gives us great empathy for the girl who escapes. So now the story has set up the really bad guy and the damsel in distress. And now the audience is chomping at the bit to be introduced to the heroes of our story, which is what the next chapter is all about. 

My main point is that extended scenes of dialogue need to add up to something, and that something needs to be a sufficient climax to make the extended dialogue worth listening to. When the scene is exceptionally long, there needs to payoff to the early dialogue and the climax needs to be really big. ‘Pulp Fiction’ is rife with these exceptional scenes. In the first story we treated to carpool talk between two hit men about quarter pounders in Paris. This dialogue pays off in the big climax of that story when one of the hit men brings it back up again before he executes a man in incredibly dramatic fashion as he quotes the bible. In the second story we are treated to extended dialogue about an unseen character, which supposedly gave the boss’s wife a foot massage and was thrown out of a three-story window. The payoff comes after the wife overdoses on one of the hitman’s heroin and the hitman has to somehow save her life or risk being killed by his boss. The story ends with an unforgettable scene in which John Travolta has to pierce her heart with the largest needle you’ve ever seen, which itself is a payoff for a prior discussion about a woman’s fetish with piercing. That woman happens to be in the room and her reaction to it is ‘cool.’ Why? because she and the audience has just witnessed the ultimate piercing. I could go on but suffice to say that every long period of just talking in ‘Pulp Fiction’ is punctuated with an unforgettable scene in which things are revealed, logical choices are made, and incredible shit happens. The two parts are inseparable. They justify each other. You cannot have one without the other, especially if jokes aren’t being told. For example of a movie which is all payoff and no build up I give you Tarantino’s ‘Kill Bill’ which features a lot of shit happening but lacks the sense of realism that gives the characters any logical motivation. In the end you can admire how Bill gets Killed but you don’t really care whether Bill gets Killed or not. For an example of a movie which is all build up and no payoff I give you Tarantino’s ‘Death Proof’ which features a group of girls talking for so long about completely irrelevant things that when the climatic car chase finally does happen it is underwhelming and quite forgettable. 

The first three chapters of ‘Inglourious Basterds’ follows the ‘Pulp Fiction’ model in which a great deal of dialogue is capped off with a satisfying ending whether it’s Brad Pitt carving a Nazi insignia into a Nazi’s head or Shosanna encountering the Nazi who killed her family and is now in charge of security for the movie premiere. Then the movie veers off into a scene a la ‘Death Proof’ about a British spies mission. This is the first mistake because we are treated to yet another substantial chunk of time introducing another character when Tarantino had already done this three times before. The hour mark is not the time for another ten-minute introduction. Anyway the spy is briefed by Mike Myers for a long time (they go into some depth about German cinema) and then sent to rendevous with the Basterds and a German Actress who will give him a briefing about his mission to blow up the cinema. The Actress agrees to meet them in a basement bar in some French city. The scene opens with her playing a card game with a bunch of German soldiers where a person writes a famous person on the card, puts it up to their head, and asks questions to figure out who he is. We see them play out a game of this and are given the background of one of the Nazi soldier’s family. Then the basterds walk in and the Actress excuses herself. Before she can brief them though one of the soldiers asks for her autograph. She does so but the guy hangs around longer. The British spy finally tells him to piss off because, you know, he wants the info for the plan and the soldier is stopping the actress (and the movie!) from doing so. You think that would be the end of it, but the soldier is disturbed by the spy’s accent. This is followed by a lengthy discussion about where the spy would get that particular accent. A German officer joins the discussion after a bit and more words about it are batted around. Finally after some discussion the German actress convinces the officer that the spy is from a German town no one has ever heard from. The officer seemingly satisfied, sits down with them and makes them play another round of the previously mentioned game. At this moment I groaned with boredom because the momentum of the story had effectively killed itself. Not only had the movie gone for I don’t know how long with any payoff or climatic scene, but it had completely forgotten about the several interesting characters it had introduced beforehand. The scene ends with a very forgettable shootout in which basically everyone in the room dies, including the British spy, which the movie had just painstakingly introduced for the last half hour. A great deal of time has passed and very little of what we just sat through was paid off. 

The movie ends at the movie premiere with a spectacle al a ‘Kill Bill’ in which we are treated to some very pretty death and destruction that has very little logical buildup to it. What happens is that the ‘Basterds’ go ahead with the British spy’s mission without him even though they speak no German and they’ve apparently lost half of their band (no explanation is given for the absence of about half of the basterds from the second half of the movie). They get into the premiere as the Italian escorts of the German Actress. They’re plan is laughably shallow. None of the basterds know Italian and Brad Pitt doesn’t even bother to change his thick hillbilly accent. Alongside their plot to blow up the theater is Shosanna’s plan to burn the entire place down. Christopher Waltz happens to be the Nazi in charge of security, an especially important job since the German high command is present at the premiere. You would think with a set up like that we would see a great battle of strategy or some suspense as to how the entire thing would play out. Too bad, the Nazis lose so easily it’s like watching a Chuck Norris movie. Now mind you I don’t give a damn about historical accuracy and take a good deal of pleasure out of watching Nazis die horrible deaths. but to me, watching battles in movies is like watching sports on TV. I would rather see my favorite football team win it in overtime than to see them trounce the opposing team by 50-0. It is just far more enjoyable. 

The thing is, Tarantino didn’t have any time to put much thought into the climatic scene because he had already wasted so much time with the previous storyline about the British spy that didn’t go anywhere. What he should have done is cut the British spy out all together and focused in depth on a Dirty Dozen style plan that would have put to use the entire squad of basterds (he only uses four in the movie). He also could have connected the basterds and the Shossana storylines somehow, something that didn’t happen in the movie. Shossana doesn’t even get a revenge scene with Waltz at the end that pays off her two previous very suspenseful encounters with him. And wouldn’t it have been cool if Tarantino had Hitler pick a fight with Brad Pitt and had them duel it out with swords and fists. I’m just saying. 

Another thing I have to mention is that Tarantino’s nerdy love for movies is creeping into his films in disturbing ways. He even stops the plot at one point to have an unseen narrator explain to us how some type of film stock is especially flammable. Also the idea that Jewish Vengeance would take place in a movie theater (Because you know there’s a lot of Jews in Hollywood) only makes sense if you don’t notice the more obvious motivation, namely that Tarantino probably had an orgasm when he found a way to put a movie theater into his film. That way he could have the characters drop names from antiquated and long forgotten movies! The movie ends with a line that would only work if you agreed with it. I don’t and I think it’s perhaps the most arrogant ‘look at me,’ line I’ve ever witnessed in a movie. 

Roger Ebert has declared this the best movie of the year and has said that a person needs to watch it several times to get its greatness. I will see it again because I admire and respect Roger Ebert. But I reserve the right to think of movies that need to be seen twice the same way I think of jokes that need to be explained. Badly told.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (3/5 Stars) 12/29/08

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button reunites Brad Pitt and Director David Fincher for the 1st time since 'Fight Club.' It tells the story of a man who ages in reverse. He is born eighty years old and slowly gets younger as he gets older. Why? The movie gives no real explanation. It just happens. Cate Blanchett plays Ben's childhood sweetheart, Daisy. Eric Roth (Forrest Gump) adapted the screenplay from a Fitzgerald short story.
The overall effect of this movie is a triumph of style over substance. Benjamin Button, as a person leads no extraordinary life (besides the whole aging in reverse thing) and isn't an incredibly interesting person. The strength in this movie lies in the gorgeous cinematography of Claudio Miranda, a haunting score by Alexandre Desplat, and the beauty and charms of the two leads Pitt and Blanchett.
Much of the joy in this movie is simply looking at the screen. Brad Pitt is a special actor. He has the unique ability to appear flat out gorgeous. At one point in the movie, Cate Blanchett sees him and says matter-of-factly "you're perfect." This line garnered laughs from the audience because it was the 1st time in the movie that Pitt wasn't wearing his digital makeup. In other words he looked like himself. and who else but Brad Pitt could make that line seem an appropriate thing to say. I will venture that the major draw to see this movie is the prospect of seeing a 25 year old Brad Pitt again. Unfortunately the technology needed for eternal youth on the silver screen is not completely there yet. The effects in this movie are ten times better than Beowulf, but the digital rendering still didn't fool me. Young Pitt didn't look completely natural. It was especially distracting when he talked. This is probably the reason why Young Pitt is kept in the shadows for most of the time and very sparingly used in closeups. He doesn't even take off his shirt. What a shame. 
Any digital effect used on Cate Blanchett on the other hand went completely unnoticed. And this is maybe a huge compliment because her character, when young, is a dancer, and I have trouble believing that a middle aged woman like Cate can move like that. I was looking everywhere for a stunt double but couldn't see her. So somebody deserves major kudos. Either the stunt double or Cate the Great herself because there is some beautiful ballet here. (For the record, Cate has broken the tie with Renee Zellweger to become my favorite actress. Amy Adams has also supplanted Renee at the two spot.)
As always with a David Fincher film, there is gorgeous cinematography. Or at least it looked like it should have been gorgeous. Let me explain. It has been said that the difference between shooting with a digital camera instead of a film camera is an intangible element called 'warmth.' I had never really noticed it until this movie. A lot of the scenes in this movie felt 'cold.' I am convinced it had nothing to do with the crew's competence, it simply is because they shot the movie digitally. I could tell because Fincher decided to go for a very rich and bold New Orleans look. For a good example of this style on film take a look at 'JFK' or 'Miller's Crossing.' This type of look intangibly looks better on film. I don't know why. It may seem nitpicky to criticize a movie for lack of 'warmth' but I did notice it and it did sort of bother me. 
Another thing I didn't like about the movie was the idea to have a dying woman narrate the story. Call me age-insensitive but the raspy and stuttering voices of the elderly are not the best for storytelling. I hadn't experienced such a bad storyteller since 'The English Patient.' And I don't see why they had to make Cate Blanchett so ugly and so out of breath. I don't understand why they needed her dying in the hospital at all. It is so unattractive and unappealing. Take it out altogether I say. There I just cut twenty superflous minutes out of a 2 hour and 45 minute movie without losing anything. Your welcome. 
I also have to point out that this is the second movie this year to have at least five funeral scenes. The other was "Syncedoche, New York." In terms of style "Benjamin Button" is superior because you get to stare at Brad Pitt getting prettier instead of Phillip Seymour Hoffman getting uglier. But in terms of substance, "Synecdoche" is much better than "Button." What "Button" only mentions in small vignettes "Synecdoche" delves into in great detail and a better discussion. The numerous funeral scenes are funnier and more thoughtful in "Synecdoche" than they are in "Button."
There is buzz that "Button" will garner a lot of Academy nominations. I don't agree with the buzz. I don't think it is good enough for Best Picture or Best Director. I have always been a fan of Brad Pitt and believed he has been snubbed before (Especially for 'Fight Club' 'Snatch' and 'Babel') but he shouldn't get a nomination for this role. Seriously, there isn't too much here and how many accolades should you receive simply by looking like yourself. I can see support nominations for cinematography, visual effects, original score, and Blanchett perhaps depending on whether it was indeed her who was dancing. But that's all.