Like many, I was a fan who lost the faith and left the fold as his behavior and appearance became ever more bizarre. It was painful to watch someone who had touched us with an extraordinary talent drifting into apparent madness and, perhaps, criminality. So I was startled – and grateful – to hear something this evening during the first rush of memorials on the news that made me rethink what I thought I knew about him. None other than stalwart Sue Simmons – a blowsy fixture of local TV news in New York City – speaking unscripted about Jackson said (I’m paraphrasing), “he tried to become a character – neither black nor white, male nor female, young nor old – that would appeal to all people, who he hoped would follow him as he tried to make the world a better place.” I had never heard this before and it made him make sense for the first time. More than that, it made him seem almost tragically heroic. But not a hero. Any grandiose motivations pale into delusion when we consider the bad things he may have done. Sadly, that will be his epitaph as much as his music.

• What’s wrong with this picture?
• Microsoft Delivers News Network
• Progress report: my soul

East Village, NYC 2/10/2008 2:49pm.

• Mark Allen and Lypsinka’s Lovechild
• Here Come the Memorials
• Boomtown goes bust

Watching the initial [response] of craigslist owner Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster to the shitstorm that erupted following the arrest of the “Craigslist Killer" (who used the site’s prostitution ads to connect with his victims) was remarkable. Cloistered away in their little Silicon Valley bubble they clearly hadn’t a clue about how to manage the scrutiny of meatspace media and ambitious law enforcement officials looking to score. At first they refused flatly to make changes to the way they did business, falling back on the Web 2.0 mantra that the craigslist community would police itself (after all, users provide the content for free, why shouldn’t they also provide the editing for free?). Then, when it became clear that Newmark & Co. were heading to court and maybe to jail on fraud charges, they acquiesced and agreed to change the way they manage listings for adult services – including hiring additional staff to screen out illegal material.

But at least one AG is not satisfied and has threatened to initiate criminal action against craigslist if they don’t remove even more objectionable material from their site by this Friday. Today, Buckmaster [responded] to the Attorney General of South Carolina in a blog post (of course) and just when I thought they couldn’t be more clueless about how to handle this PR disaster he surprised me. Instead of doing what any mature company would do in the face of aggressive policing (think Microsoft and the European Commission…), i.e., aiming to get the moral high ground by swiftly agreeing to meet or exceed demands for cleaning up their sites, Buckmaster demands an apology from the Attorney General, challenges the AG to prosecute South Carolina newspapers that also run off-color ads (and suggesting that he won’t because of cynical self-interest) and offers what I’ll call the “me-too” defense: craigslist shouldn’t be singled out for abetting indecency because all the other kids in the playground are doing it too! The PR trainwreck thunders on.

Sensing that this has the potential to tame the Web 2.0 golden goose that drives so much revenue with so little managerial oversight and cost, some of the New Media machers are weighing in with support: Mike Arrington at [TechCrunch] urges Buckmaster to “Stand firm. Don’t back down. In fact, just turn off the South Carolina site entirely and ban IPs from that state. Forever. And if they press criminal charges, fight it with everything you have.” Then, with a little less bravado, “And if you do end up in jail, don’t worry. I promise to visit at least once a month, even though it will be in South Carolina.”

New Media gadfly Jeff Jarvis takes time out from dancing on the graves of newspaper journalists to [offer], “And so, once again, the internet becomes a threat to the control and power of an elite and they are exploiting craiglist - and the murderer who used it - to reassert their control. But it has the marks of a witchhunt.” Jarvis doesn’t seem to get that the “elite” is law enforcement and the issue is violations of local decency laws. Minor matter.

Perhaps one of Buckmaster’s friends (does he have friends?) could suggest that he take some of that huge profit he makes from the site and hire a decent flack. And a lawyer.

• South Carolina Dems elect McCain
• NYT to Google: “That was AMAZING, give me a cigarette!”
• Google Cedes Enterprise to Microsoft

© Paramount Pictures

"Yo, Dad, can I borrow the keys to the Enterprise?" Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Kirk (Chris Pine) aim to fill some big shoes.

At one point during the new Star Trek movie it occurred to me that perhaps the most amazing thing about it was the fact that I was seeing it at all. Forty years after the original TV series went off the air and thirty years after the first film version was released here I was again watching the redoubtable starship Enterprise fly across another screen. It was interesting, though, to note how the starship was represented here compared to its first big screen appearance back in 1979. Back then, before Hollywood had hit on the formula for milking a property to death, it had taken ten years to sort out the production path for the theatrical version. When it finally appeared it was practically a religious experience for faithful fans who had invested so much in the characters and ideas from the series. One of their rewards came in their first view of the Enterprise after the ten year drought: director Robert Wise spent a full five minutes of screen time displaying the new ship, the camera caressing every detail of the model starship with clear fetishistic delight. In the new film by director JJ Abrams and screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman there is no such doting on the venerable spaceship; views of the Enterprise are for the most part reduced to establishing shots taken from a great distance in space or extreme close ups of firing weapons. Similarly, internal shots are restricted to scenes filmed on a stark overlit bridge or brief scenes in an engineering section that consists oddly of industrial-looking hydraulic tubes and steel scaffolding. The Enterprise, itself a major presence throughout the Star Trek saga, is here relegated to mere backdrop, a somewhat haphazardly designed set upon which the interpersonal dramas of the main characters play out.

I think that’s significant because it indicates where the priorities for the film makers lie and what they do and don’t understand about a cultural inheritance of which they are the latest custodians.

For the three of you who haven’t seen it yet, the new Star Trek is a “reboot” of the whole kit and kaboodle that has developed over the past 40 years. An origin story about how the characters Kirk, Spock, Dr. McCoy, Uhura, Scotty, Sulu and Chekov came to be part of the seminal storyline. It takes us, in just over two hour’s time, from the birth of James T. Kirk to his installation – with all stalwart comrades in tow – at the helm of the Enterprise as they face down their first big challenge: a Romulan meanie named Nero (Eric Bana), who has traveled back in time to wreak vengeance on the Federation – particularly on Vulcan. With so much plot to cover in such a compressed time some things are bound to suffer and story coherence would be one. Some reviewers have expressed bafflement at the villain’s motivation and a major fault of the movie is that it is never clearly explained until a brief speech more than halfway through the film just why any of it is happening. I knew from the start only because a friend shared a comic book “prequel” that explained the backstory (thanks Carl). One gets the sense that a lot more movie was filmed but left on the cutting room floor. I was struck by how little actual screen time the main antagonist had – a disappointing waste of Bana, who is a good actor.

But, truth be told, the whole angry Romulan premise is what Hitchcock called a “MacGuffin” – the plot device used to further the main story which, here, is the coming of age of James Kirk and Spock and how they came to be who they are. It must’ve killed the filmmakers that the title Star Trek – The Next Generation was already claimed because that’s exactly what this is: an attempt to reanimate a moribund franchise, populated by senior citizens, for a new generation of moviegoers who weren’t even born when the original series was on the air. And that requires starting fresh with a cast of (very) young actors who will – if all goes according to plan — carry the sequels forward for the next 10 or 20 years.

As a result, we’re presented with a preposterous set up wherein the fresh-faced and eager Starfleet cadets (at one point Chekov discloses that he is only 17!) are given the responsibility of running the fleet’s premier starship as it faces the grave alien challenge. Uh… okay. But the challenges to these nubile heroes don’t come only from outside the ship – there’s no shortage of interpersonal drama taking place on the venerable starship that at times makes it feel like The Hills in Outer Space. Much has been made of an internecine love triangle that is utterly implausible (are you telling me that a civilization advanced enough to have perfected trans-warp space travel hasn’t figured out that it’s bad news to be dating your co-workers?), but the real drama is between Kirk and Spock, who start out as enemies but – as with any good love story – are able to channel their passion into a bond that (the producers hope) will be eternal. Ah, young love!

The success of the actors and their characterizations vary a lot. Chris Pine seems to have prepared for his role as Kirk by watching one or two James Dean movies. He plays Kirk with a chip on his shoulder and spends a good part of the movie daring people like Spock to knock it off. The anti-hero who comes into his own in a time of crisis is in itself a hoary trope, tailor made for young actors trying to show their chops. Watching Pine, we long for early Shatner who, despite his well-known quirks, was an accomplished actor capable of subtlety and nuance (as evidence I refer you [here]). Zachary Quinto on the other hand was born to play Spock and brings an already mature talent to the role. Karl Urban is wonderful as Dr. McCoy, serving up wry comedy and intelligence along with the trademark lines we’ve come to expect (“Dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor not a physicist!” brought down the house). British comedian Simon Pegg gets in some good licks as a feisty Scotty and Anton Yelchin as Chekov is adorable. Zoe Saldana is a serious disappointment. Her Uhura is hot and has attitude to spare but one thing she is not is professional. We barely see her do any work and her role on the ship seems primarily to be a point of romantic contention for the male leads. Nichelle Nichols’ calmly professional Uhura was (pardon the pun) light years more progressive. Watching the travesty they made of Uhura made me feel sorry for little girls in the audience.

Aside from implausible situations and bizarre character construction, the film is a collection of missed opportunities (one of the worst is the hamfisted screw up of a meeting between young and old Spock that the time-warp plot device affords – what might have been a classic scene becomes a mere setup for a joke). Director JJ Abrams has stated many times that he was not a fan of Star Trek and that’s obvious – he clearly doesn’t get the qualities of the series that made it last so long: characters and ideas. But he doesn’t really have to get it I suppose. His job was to get new faces in front of the audience in an entertaining way and he succeeds. However, if the owners of the property hope for it to live long and prosper (sorry, couldn’t resist…)  they need to remember what made it thrive for 40 years and not sell the next generation short.

• Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
• Brokeback Redux
• Review: There Will Be Blood

A couple of events occurred last week that might have seemed completely unconnected but were, I think, flip sides of the same coin: in the first case, a Swedish court convicted the owners of the Pirate Bay file sharing site of copyright violations involving facilitation of theft, sentencing them to fines and prison time, and, in the second case, Oprah devoted valuable on-air time to the Twitter phenomenon, introducing her legions of fans to the service and calling out Ashton Kutcher as the first Twitter user to gain over 1 million followers. What ties these apparently disparate events together is the fact that they demonstrate in unique ways the mainstreaming of the internet as a medium and its changing character(s).

Piracy 2.0

As an invention of technology, it makes perfect sense that the early proponents of the internet were members of the “technorati” – the geeky folk who build and fund tech start ups and those who buzz around them. Back in the 90’s as the commercial internet was just taking off, one could read one after another manifesto from these folks proclaiming the nascent medium a digital Valhalla, revolutionary in its potential. A good example was [“Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age”] in which futurist Alvin Toffler, venture capitalist Esther Dyson and others attempted to spell out the game-changing nature of this new technology and what was needed to foster it:

To start with, liberation – from Second Wave rules, regulations, taxes and laws laid in place to serve the smokestack barons and bureaucrats of the past. Next, of course, must come the creation – the creation of a new civilization, founded in the eternal truths of the American Idea.

Likening themselves to frontier settlers, they wanted complete freedom to reinvent commerce on the web any way they saw fit. Such freedom would, of course, lead to the unfettered creation of enormous wealth and that is exactly what happened (well mostly for well-connected technocrats, anyway). But the lack of oversight also led to a Wild West ecosystem online where hordes of thieves committed untold abuses of intellectual property. Sadly, some who should know better even sought to undermine claims of intellectual property by basically implying the [inevitability of theft] and [apologizing] for it under the rubric of “free culture”.

It was just a matter of time before the law caught up with the internet and that is what happened in Stockholm. In a landmark ruling, a Swedish court proclaimed that existing laws covering copyright applied to the online entity. While the punishment meted out by the court (one year of jail time and millions in fines) may be reduced on appeal, the judgment is an important precedent that moves internet transactions more firmly into a legal realm with a long history of addressing intellectual property claims and that can provide content owners greater protection. Though not popular with some zealous internet users, who, understandably might prefer a more lax environment in which to sample from creative works, ultimately it benefits them as well since it hastens the day when there are clear limits to what can and cannot be shared online and the ambiguity around liability is cleared up. The libertarian ethos of the inventor/early adopter crowd is giving way to something more traditional and that’s probably not a bad thing.

The Changing Face of Online Fame

Another example of a “changing of the guard” involved the sudden boost in popularity of [Twitter], thanks to high-profile efforts by Ashton Kutcher and Oprah. Since its release a couple of years ago the service has largely been the province of tech early adopters and their fans. Until fairly recently, the most popular users were the usual Who’s Who of the Silicon Valley scene: Robert Scoble with 80,000 followers; Dave Winer and Jason Calacanis with each about 40,000 and a few others ruled the roost — opining on the virtues of communication in 140 characters installments as if we were witnessing Gutenberg for the 21st century. For most of the rest of us (and, to be honest for the tech stars as well…) Twitter was merely the latest toy for vanity publishing – a way to extend our egos into the network. And, as with all other Web 2.0 inventions, the promise of equal access to audience was trumped by [network effects] – resulting in an “A-list” of users, and everybody else.

What turned out to be somewhat revolutionary was the disintermediation this toy provided to users who were already famous (real world famous, not tech famous). Once upon a time, famous people had to work closely with and for mainstream media outlets whose reach largely determined the public’s perception of them. As the internet fractured old media monopolies it led to a proliferation of new sites that trade on celebrity reputations (e.g., Perez Hilton, TMZ). Managing one’s image became infinitely more difficult in such an environment (just ask Britney). But social media services like Facebook and Twitter shift control away from the media outlets back to the celebrity. What fan wouldn’t prefer getting a message delivered directly to them from their favorite star over reading something about them on a blog or news site? In a celebrity-obsessed soundbite-driven culture, Twitter becomes the apotheosis of public relations image management: stars get to deliver their own sound bites directly into the heads of their fans. So easy even an actor can do it!

Alas, the former A-list is not very happy about these new usurpers of their social media thrones. The Philistines are knocking down the gates and there is [grumbling] about the cooptation of Twitter by “big media”. But that’s just sour grapes by those who see their influence dwindling. The rest of us should welcome the evolution. Imagine if television programming in the early days had been restricted to the offerings of the engineers who invented the medium? It would’ve died a quick death. But, happily, we got to watch Lucy. If I have to have someone else’s words broadcast to me through this new medium, I’d much rather it be someone who can at least entertain me. The New Media, same as it ever was.

• Hubris 2.0
• Gawker Stalkers Beware!
• Microsoft Delivers News Network

Sixth Avenue and 28th Street, 9:32am

• Apple moves into the neighborhood
• Taking to the Streets
• Heath Ledger

Who’s that girl? NYU artist Michael Cavayero examines our obsessions

If you’re in downtown Manhattan between now and April 19, stop by the [Broadway Windows] exhibition space to check out the work of [Michael Cavayero], a senior honors art student at NYU, who uses bold color and exaggerated line to deconstruct the tabloid princess. Lindsay then, now and — assuming she makes it — future.

• Clinton Locks Up Southern Vote
• Here Come the Memorials
• Barter and the Brain

A month following it’s release, it looks like Watchmen – while hardly a smash hit – has done respectably. At this writing, BoxOfficeMojo [estimates] that it has earned about $178MM, which means it will likely make back its costs (estimated somewhere between $120MM and $150MM), plus a modest profit. Still, that’s pretty impressive — considering it’s an R-rated movie, targeted to hard-core fans of a dark and violent story populated by not-very-nice characters, that was almost universally panned by critics. What impresses me most of all is that the movie was even made. I’m tempted to call it an act of love on the part of Hollywood – except we’re talking about Hollywood here. More likely, a few people who loved the graphic novel upon which the film is based managed to slip one by the suits. I’m glad they did. I’ve seen the movie twice and have been thinking about the value of comic dramas in general and this one in particular.

Many reviewers make the mistake of judging films taken from comic novels against the standards of a storytelling tradition that stretches back into the history of Western literature. In that context, the truer a movie stays to its comic origins the weaker it looks as a work of art: characters seem one-dimensional, plots are simplistic and the treatment of character motivation and emotions is clumsy. But, to me, comic novels stand outside of the literary canon. They’re more like Kabuki: representing the world through a brightly-hued prism that hardens edges and reduces subtlety. While there may be some conventional literary references (e.g., the tag line “Who watches the Watchmen”, taken from the Roman poet Juvenal) and appropriation of historical facts, comics are sui generis – designed for an audience that has not yet consumed the great works of literature. I suppose their success could be considered an indictment of a culture that cannot reliably transmit to its youth the collected genius of its classic literature, but it’s also evidence of an ingenious adaptation – reassuring us that even amid a cultural breakdown the important questions and challenges that humans must address (“What does it mean to be human? What is the nature of justice? What good is love?”) will be addressed anew by artists with aggressive imaginations. Their starkly drawn characters stand in for ideas that are contested on fields of epic proportion – those still standing at the end of the battle win. And make no mistake, the ideas that Watchmen takes up and the characters that represent them are big.

God exists and he’s American: Dr. Manhattan re-writes the Vietnam War

The story presents an alternate history of the United States in the latter half of the 20th century where (super) power is not merely political but literal. It’s 1985 and Richard Nixon is serving his fourth term as president, having won the Vietnam war (and, apparently, vanquished the 22nd amendment…) with the help of a superhero/weapon named Dr. Manhattan (pictured above) – a nuclear scientist turned “quantum being” who can reorganize matter, time and space effortlessly. This alternate world is structured as a hierarchy of power: at the bottom are the corrupt masses, rampaging through the streets and barely controlled by a strong-arm state that jealously guards its power from “citizen heroes”, as the Watchmen – a self-invented band of vigilantes, now outlawed – see themselves, but which is itself guarded by a deity-like creature with the power to prevent or cause utter destruction.

A potential disturbance in this uneasy power structure is set off by the brutal murder of a former Watchman – a cynical proto-fascist warrior known as The Comedian. His death reunites the disparate band of former heroes, among them a paranoid sociopath named Rorschach, who enlists his former comrades in an investigation of the murder that eventually exposes a world-changing conspiracy. I won’t say more about the plot in case anyone hasn’t seen it yet and, besides, it can be found [easily enough]. I’m more interested in what the characters represent and two of them in particular: Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan.

What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?

Watchmen is credited with being, along with The Dark Knight, one of the first efforts to deconstruct the comic superhero genre. Sure enough, there’s very little heroic about these superheroes – who exhibit plenty of human frailty and venality. What sets each apart is a native distinguishing quality (ruthlessness, intelligence, empathy) and the commitment to act. Watchmen is, in many ways, a long meditation on what motivates one to commit to virtuous action in a world that is corrupt, dissolute and beyond saving. The action of the story is largely driven by the conflicts of the dangerously violent Rorschach and the divinely detached Dr. Manhattan and the attempts they make to resolve those conflicts. Rorschach, the most tragic character in the story, is twisted beyond human recognition by his exposure to the worst of humanity. He represents Justice as vengeance with a white hot rage that burns away any claims of intellect. He is Old Testament to the core. Upon discovering a criminal who butchers children, Rorschach metes out justice swiftly, directly, graphically and repeatedly… with an axe. We’re repulsed by the brutality of the character, while viscerally responding to the purity of his motivation.

For Dr. Manhattan, who is progressively losing his identity as a man and becoming more and more a disinterested observer of the human condition, the challenge is to transcend intellect and find a reason to engage in moral action at all. Though he has the ability to intercede in a pending nuclear Armageddon on Earth, he chooses to retreat to Mars to contemplate the perfection of inanimate matter. If you have ever wondered why God would bother with humanity – well, Watchmen wonders about that, too. The method the writers use to forge his commitment could be called “love”. But it’s no corny gimmick.

All my life I’ve been handed “love” as the resolution to any number of dramatic conflicts in books and movies and every time it felt false. Not this time. During a scene in which his former lover entreats Dr. Manhattan to assist humanity a fact is disclosed about her origin that points up the incredibly random nature of existence – the mathematical improbability of any particular person existing, at all. Seen this way, every living thing is nothing less than a miracle — an invaluable rarity that deserves to be preserved. It’s a simple but profound idea, presented tenderly and surprisingly subtly for such an operatic blockbuster, that elicits powerful emotion from a purely intellectual exercise.

It is not surprising that the story of Watchmen culminates in a confrontation in the icy wasteland of Antarctica between Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan. Being at heart a morality play, Watchmen has to resolve, finally, the conflict between these two characters who represent such different approaches to action, the nature of justice and the value of truth. It’s a brief scene, but, in my opinion, it elevates the story and the film to the level of art. With a simple gesture of his hand the almost-omnipotent Dr. Manhattan brings resolution decisively and in a way that makes perfect sense for the story. But then, in the last scene of the film, the writers give Rorschach the last word and we leave the theater wondering.

• Brokeback Redux
• Brideshead Regurgitated
• The Grid (Koyaanisqatsi)

(Bad) karma, Chameleon…

Time has not been kind to Boy George. Sentenced last week to 15 months in jail for brutalizing a hooker, The Mirror [gleefully reports] — courtesy of a loose-lipped fellow inmate — the pathetic state to which George O’Dowd has been reduced: blubbering in a corner of his jail cell and fearful for his life once he joins the jailhouse rabble. Ironically, according to the report of jailhouse insiders, upon his debut at the jail he was mobbed by inmates seeking his autograph, not his blood. The chatty inmate who provided The Mirror with their quotes remarks upon how he tried to comfort the distraught singer:

“I joked that it wasn’t all bad and said he might even find himself a new boyfriend inside prison. But he just started crying again.”

He could take a lesson or two from Martha Stewart on how to manage the slammer. Tears are probably not the best bet. One wants to laugh at the pathetic spectacle of it — and many will — but one also wants to kick O’Dowd’s fat arse from here to kingdom come for orchestrating this stunningly Grand Guignol downfall (he is currently on suicide watch in the prison). For many people (read “straight” people), Boy George was always something of a clown, but for some of us (read “queers”) he was a bona fide hero back in the day. My first awareness of him came while I was still living in my backwater town in upstate New York. One day while listening to the radio, “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” came on. I enjoyed the unique, blowsy sound of the singer’s voice but what got my interest more was the brief exchange between the DJs that happened after the song. “So, is that a guy?” one asked. “I don’t know,” said the other, “the picture on the album looks like a girl, but I think it’s a guy!” I was hooked. I liked the music, but I admired George more, who pushed queerness so far into people’s faces that they couldn’t avoid it. What I admired most was that he didn’t hedge — in a decade when the most flamboyant characters could still play “Is he, isn’t he?” about their identities, George had the balls to accept Culture Club’s Best New Artist Grammy in 1984 by telling the world, “Thanks America, you’ve got style, you’ve got taste, and you know a good drag queen when you see one.” Heroic.

But he didn’t have the goods to sustain the persona. I felt a bit defeated when he admitted to heroin addiction — a sign of weakness that reinforced the perception of queers as damaged goods. His subsequent slide from grace has continued fairly unabated and now reaches perhaps its nadir. But, for awhile at least, he was the most amazingly transgressive thing on the planet. As evidence I present you with this gem (dug up by [Toby Graham] via FriendFeed):

• Taking to the Streets
• Christmisc.
• Amy Sedaris and Martha Stewart - a classic

F. Scott Fitzgerald published the story “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” in 1922 as part of a collection entitled Tales of the Jazz Age. As with so much of his work, the story, a fantasy about a man who ages in reverse, was a clever way of addressing pet themes concerning class, social standing and our tenuous hold on the conventions that root us to life. But, as Fitzgerald acknowledged, it was also about the meaning and value of maturity in a disordered world following the end of World War 1 where an entire generation of young men were robbed of the chance to grow old. The story begins in arch satire and ends in melancholy reverence of (lost) innocence.

Eighty-six years later, Hollywood and its special-effects wizards have discovered the story and brought it to the screen with Brad Pitt playing Benjamin Button and Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton playing his loves. Director David Fincher and his screenwriters depart from the original story fairly significantly and, sorry to say, not for the better. The film starts out promisingly with a parable — not in the original story — of a blind watchmaker who loses a son in the Great War and, out of his grief, builds a clock for the city that he lives in that runs backwards, as a tribute to all the boys who have lost their futures. It’s a moving little story unto itself, but the movie that follows doesn’t do it justice.

Fitzgerald, able to fully exploit satire for satire’s sake, has Button arriving into the world as a fully-formed old man — cranky and obdurate, arguing with all around him and frustrating his already distraught parents by sneaking cigars into his crib. Button starts out stolid and resigned and, as he “ages” grows more quixotic and finally, as death approaches, innocent. But the film, apparently feeling the need for verisimilitude (in a story about a man aging in reverse…), lingers too long on Button’s origin and rearing by a black foster mother who works in an old folk’s home. Too much attention to the special-effects wonders of a little old Brad Pitt. The Washington Post critic in reviewing the movie summed it up by saying “Forrest Gump, Meet Joe Black” and there were many times that it seemed the filmmakers had simply borrowed the plot of Forrest Gump wholesale: an oddity thrust into normal situations without much made of what it means. Like Gump, Pitt’s Button is a remarkably opaque character. Things of significance happen around him and to him (World War 2 with his buddy Lieutenant Dan, er, I mean Captain Mike; travel to all corners of the earth; the Space program) but he remains aloof, almost a bystander in his own story. Only the lifelong love of Jenny, er, I mean Daisy engages him. There is a chance, I suppose, that, like Forrest Gump, many people will love this movie precisely because — as when listening to a piece of minimalist music devoid of its own meaning — they can invest the story and character with whatever emotional meaning they bring to it. But to me it was just bad.

Why make the movie of this story now? After eighty-six years? I think a story about a man who cheats age by growing younger as time passes might be pretty appealing to a generation of movie goers who are notoriously in love with their own youth. Whereas Fitzgerald’s story arose from angry regret over interrupted maturity, the emotional tone of this movie is more dread of mortality. The closest thing to a moral comes when the youthful Button counsels his aging wife that “it’s never too late” to strike out for the life one wants. Tell the audience what they want to hear. And how does the end finally come? Wrapped in swaddling and cradled in the arms of his lover/mother. It was meant to be beautiful but I found it very sad. A cheat.

• Review: There Will Be Blood
• The Semiotics of Smoke
• Gawker Stalkers Beware!