Thursday, 12 February 2009

Push

There are special people in this world that have been born with psychic powers. In 1945, government agencies set up for psychic warfare, trying to turn those people with abilities into soldiers. After the war, governments began to set up divisions with agents trained to hunt them down like animals, test and categorize them. There are a bunch of different types of psychic abilities: A watcher can see the future, A mover is telekinetic, Sniffers who can see the history of an object, Shifts can temporarily change the shape of things, Wipers can wipe your memory, and pushers can put thoughts in other people’s heads. The divisions are trying to develop a drug which would allow normal people to develop psychic abilities, but apparently every test so far has been fatal. Cassie Holmes (Dakota Fanning), a watcher, teams with a young man named Nick Grant (Chris Evans), to take on a clandestine agency in a race against time the will determine the future of civilization.

Wednesday, 4 February 2009

Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The

“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” which occupies around 25 pages in the collected works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a slender piece of whimsy, a charming fantasy about a man who ages in reverse, descending through the years from newborn senescence to terminal infancy. As Fitzgerald unravels it, Benjamin’s story serves as the pretext for some amusing, fairly superficial observations about child rearing, undergraduate behavior and courtship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From this odd, somewhat unpromising kernel, the director David Fincher and the screenwriter Eric Roth have cultivated a lush, romantic hothouse bloom, a film that shares only a title and a basic premise with its literary source. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” more than two and a half hours long, sighs with longing and simmers with intrigue while investigating the philosophical conundrums and emotional paradoxes of its protagonist’s condition in a spirit that owes more to Jorge Luis Borges than to Fitzgerald. While the film’s plot progresses, with a few divagations, in a straight line through the decades of Benjamin Button’s life, the backward vector of that biography turns this “Curious Case” into a genuine mystery. And the puzzles it invites us to contemplate — in consistently interesting, if not always dramatically satisfying ways — are deep and imposing, concerning the passage of time, the elusiveness of experience and the Janus-faced nature of love. Above all, though, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is a triumph of technique. Building on the advances of pioneers like Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson and Robert Zemeckis — and on his own previous work adapting newfangled means to traditional cinematic ends — Mr. Fincher (“Fight Club,” “Zodiac”) has added a dimension of delicacy and grace to digital filmmaking. While it stands on the shoulders of breakthroughs like “Minority Report,” “The Lord of the Rings” and “Forrest Gump” (for which Mr. Roth wrote the screenplay), “Benjamin Button” may be the most dazzling such hybrid yet, precisely because it is the subtlest. While he does treat the audience to a few grand, special-effect showpieces, Mr. Fincher concentrates his ingenuity on the setting and the characters, in particular — and most arrestingly — on the faces of his stars, Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt., The New York Times