The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a good movie, whose grasp never quite closes around the great it is clearly reaching for.

Bard Pitt plays Benjamin, who is born old and grows younger. He loves a woman. He meets people. He has adventures. His story ends as all life stories do.

Benjamin Button is not alone. The idea of someone aging in reverse, becoming physically and mentally younger as they grow chronologically older, is not a novel one. At least as far back as Arthurian legends about Merlin, reverse aging has been a mainstay to certain genres of fiction. In this film, no real explanation is given as to why Benjamin is born in the shriveled husk of a hollowed out octogenarian (although baby-sized) and continues to “move in the other direction” as time passes.

The film suggests it may have something to do with a blind clock maker’s masterpiece, a timepiece designed to run in reverse so that it may undo some of the horrors of world war I, but for the most part Benjamin’s condition operates in the heightened reality of magical realism. People he meets just accept his curious malady without asking too many questions, and so should the audience.

The film could have worked just as well if the eponymous character aged like everyone else, and the storytelling device works to add poignancy and thoughtfulness to the movie rather than a pointless gimmick. Without it, the film would feel even more like a retread of Forrest Gump than it already does. Coming from the same writer, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button shares more than a few thematic and structural similarities with the earlier film. Both feature an odd social outcast as the main character, spending a lengthy first act on the wacky characters they met as they grew up before chronicling their epic lives. Both Benjamin Buttons and Forrest Gump carry decades-long torches for seemingly unattainable girls next door until such time as the women realize the error of their ways and accept that the men of their dreams were right in front of them the whole time. There is even a hummingbird in Benjamin Button that performs the same symbolic role as the feather in Forrest Gump.

While this film may be guilty of playing a few of the same notes, the feel of the song is vastly different. Benjamin Button is both more lyrical and more wistful than its forebear. The story feels slightly more artificial, in the sense that the narrative hangs on the artifice of Benjamin’s condition and the poetry of seeing a man drift toward youth and irresponsibility even as his mind gets older. The price for this lyricism is the occasional foray into pretentiousness. While more often than not, he takes a light touch, director David Fincher is sometimes guilty of beating a metaphor into the ground. I was worried that the gimmick of Brad Pitt running around in old man make-up and computer-generated images of his altered face would prove too distracting but for the most part they weren’t. The early part of the film, wherein Benjamin is tiny and outwardly elderly has an appropriately eerie vibe but by the time he sets out to sea the off-putting effect has mellowed. What is left is the story of  a man’s life.

The biggest complaint I had with the movie was not necessarily its prodigious running time. I’m perfectly happy with long movies. And the story never felt particularly draggy, but the present day story was far too intrusive. The meat of the movie comes from Benjamin’s journal, which a young woman reads aloud to her dying mother as Hurricane Katrina closes in on the hospital. As a framing device its effective (although the presence of the storm doesn’t really add anything and feels decidedly tacked-on). Yet it seems like every few minutes, the central narrative arc pauses while we get a meaningless update on the present day. If some of these momentum-killers disappeared, the movie would be shorter and tighter. They feel like padding.

Fincher is an old hand at directing Pitt, having done so in the seminal Fight Club, and before that in Se7en. They work well together, and Pitt has more dramatic weight on his shoulders this time around since he serves as the movie’s through-line. He must carry the audience from the end of World War I to the nascent 21st century, and although he meets several colorful characters along the way, the story unfolds from his point of view. Cate Blanchett plays his true love. The two leads look very pretty together, and they each give their roles a solid portrayal. They’ve worked together before, and their chemistry is convincing even if Pitt’s accent slips occasionally.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons involves a great deal of travel and all the locations from Murmansk to Manhattan look beautiful, but the heart of the film is in New Orleans and Fincher seems incapable of taking an ugly shot of the city. But for all the strength fo the actors, the talent of the director, and beauty of the story the movie falls flat.

Far from bad but well short of great, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button gets:

Three and One Half Creepy Old Man Babies (Out of Five)

How did I spend New Year’s Eve? I drank beer.  I watched Justice League cartoons. I read Vonnegut. I fired a shotgun into the air. Not a bad way to send out 2008, symbolically speaking. Here’s some digital detritus:

Isn’t scientific knowledge just the sort of thing we should hold in common?

1. Beer Does Not Come in Pints.
The Pint unarguably is the proper and correct serving size. It’s impossible to feel cool ordering a schooner and having a tiny little girly glass.

2. Assigned Seats in Movie Theaters.
I can see no earthly reason for this, aside from pissing me off by slowing down the lines.

3. Book Prices are Ridiculously Jacked-up.
Prices in general seem high even for a San Franciscan, but books seem disproportionately pricey. The latest fluctuations of the dollar and Australian dollar have helped somewhat, but this poor reader is still out of luck. First stop when I get stateside: Powell’s.

4. High Hippie Density.
Maybe its something to do with the prevalence of surfers and backpackers who populate Bondi, but it seems like there are quite a few unnecessarily dreadlocked individuals. I can barely walk down the street some days without wanting to retch a little from the patchouli stink.

5. Coffee is more complex than it needs to be.

6. High Douchebag Density.
This is actually a much bigger problem than the hippies. I see alot of bling and hat-tilts in the male population. Others have written more extensively on the geopolitical ramifications of this topic, to which I have to add only: Amen, brother.

7. High Deadly Animal Density.
Sydney is an urban area, and encroachments from angry mother nature are rae. But I can never forget about all the thousands of animals and plants out there who are plotting my death.

8. They Only Speak English in the Loosest Sense of the Word.
Australia’s unique linguistic heritage has created a hodge-podge of unlikely names and words that just sound weird to my American ears. Coupled with a racial incliniation to shorten/infantilize every word they come across, it can become inscrutable. For example: breakfast is often “shortened” to breakie. But you’ll notice that they both have the same number of syllables (2) and are therefore the same length. Same for “football/footy” An Australian friend introduced himself as “John, but you can call me John-Oh for short.” He lengthened his name for short.

9. Disappointing Scarcity of Kangaroos.
Despite having signs like this:
There weren’t that many kangaroos hopping around. I expected the people to ride them to work in the morning and store their valuables in the safety of their pouches. Imagine my dismay when I learned that not only was this not true, they don’t box or rap either. And upon my return to the United States and the inevitable debriefing of my family and friends I find that they tend to be more disappointed with the things I didn’t see (Kangaroos and the Outback) than the awesome things I did see.

10. It’s Too Big and Too Beautiful.
And I had to leave it.

From the director of the Barack Obama “Yes We Can” video comes an explanation of just what the Creative Commons is all about.

If I don’t see a certain number of comic book movies every year, they threaten to revoke my geek credentials. But I was excited to see The Spirit, the first solo directorial effort of esteemed comic mainstay and Sin City creator Frank Miller.

The story of murdered rookie beat cop Denny Colt’s posthumous war on crime was never really all that compelling. Killed in the line of duty, Colt (played by perfectly servicable if slightly bland Gabriel Macht) mysteriously returns to life and decides to use his status as a postmortem P.I. to go places the police can’t and wear the ties they won’t.

He conspires to work with police commissioner Dolan ( an awesomely grouchy Dan Lauria (a.k.a Kevin’s Dad from The Wonder Years (side note: I really want to see a remake of Grumpy Old Men starring J.K. Simmons and Dan Lauria))  to rid central city of its criminal element. This mostly means battling the Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson at his hammiest and least restrained) and dealing with an old flame turned art thief Sand Saref (Eva Mendes).

As an origin story, it works to set up the world that The Spirit operates in, but it lacks the pathos and iconic identification of a rocket hurtling to earth carrying the last survivor from a doomed planet or an irradiated spider granting amazing powers to a teenager who quickly learns the relationship between power and responsibility. (Hint: they correlate). The Spirit in the comics served as more a storytelling vehicle for Will Eisner to explore the bleeding edge of what was possible to convey with words and pictures. Will Eisner literally wrote the book on how to tell stories in comic books, and The Spirit offered  fine experiments in composition and motion but the source material doesn’t scream out for adaptation to the movie screen.

Frank Miller is an odd choice to make a Spirit movie. Will Eisner created the character in 1939 and despite numerous revisions and reinterpretations over the years, The Spirit seems to work best with a kind of “Gee Whiz” optimism that pulls away from the babes and bullets of Frank Miller’s noir-tinted wheelhouse. I know, I know. The man sat at the feet of the Master and his close personal relationship with Eisner does give him a plausible reason to want to spearhead The Spirit’s transition from comics to film. But Miller’s overly muscular approach to visual storytelling doesn’t mesh well with the character. The result is a kind of Sin City-lite. The Spirit spends a good portion of the film offering tough-guy first person narration about how much he loves his city and his plan to kill his opponent The Octopus “all kinds of dead.”

This tone clashes horribly with the bits and pieces of screwball comedy and excruciatingly unfunny attempts to incorporate visual humor into the story. One scene where the Spirit finds himself suspended from a gargoyle and has to save himself by removing his belt and swinging to safety as his pants drop falls particularly flat. But there are a few genuinely funny moments. Jackson’s performance is way over the top, but sometimes his bizarre portrayal of the mad crime lord approaches camp brilliance. The scene where he lectures the Spirit while wearing a Nazi uniform for no discernible reason while his assistant Scarlet Johanssen  poses under a picture of Hitler is delightfully surreal.

The recurring gag of the effect the Spirit has on the ladies is also pretty funny. It seems like the eponymous hero can’t walk more than a few steps in his city without some woman trying to jump his bones.

All the dames, broads, and skirts that throw themselves at him seem powerless to resist his charisma. Even the anthropomorphic personification of death is putty in his gloved hands.

Those of you of a more feminist or Freudian bent will likely have some serious issues with the way Miller depicts women. For all his obsessions with showing the female form in fetishistic display of all sorts of cleavage and the frequent reminders of The Spirit’s desirability, the narration constantly reminds us that he loves his city (who he personifies as feminine: ” My city screams. She needs me. I am her Spirit.”) more than any actual woman of flesh and blood.

But for all its flaws (though they are many) I left the theater feeling satisfied. In fact the film was almost exactly what I expected. The Spirit was an enjoyable movie that was kind of ridiculous. And kind of awesome. The awesome outweighs the ridiculous and that’s more than I get from most comic book adaptations.  It looked incredible. Miller used a whole color pallet and he is obviously still in the process of honing his skill with creating moving images. The film could have been more dynamic, but it was Oh-So-Pretty.  I imagine that those seeing Miller’s name attached and expecting a Sin City quasi-sequel will leave the multiplex disappointed, because the formal style of that movie informs this one, but the end result is totally different.

It is also kind of goofy. But if you are willing to go along for the ride, there are pleasures mixed in with the detritus. It gets:

Two and a Half Red Ties (Out of Five)