Brad Pitt‘s Benjamin Button performance is passivity incarnate. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. He simply chooses (or was told) to become the watcher — a nice fellow who delights in absorption of all things, a sponge man. But his best performance of the year, hands down, was in Burn After Reading. He wasn’t Hamlet in that Coen Bros. film, but Pitt’s every line and gesture was a kick. His gym instructor was stupidly, radiantly alive, and brimming with presence.

Gus Van Sant “also picked the right time to tell this story. He picked the last eight years of Harvey Milk’s life.” — At The Movies‘ Ben Lyons speaking about Milk. Quote supplied EFilmCritic’s Eric Childress. “As opposed to what?,” Childress asks. “His grade school years?”

A commanding majority of Rotten Tomatoes critics have today reminded themselves that Baz Luhrman, the director of Australia, is more or less certifiable (in a creative, go-for-broke sense of the term) as well as recognized the fact that Australia itself is a work of overwhelming psychedelic cinematic kitsch.

Many of them clearly emerged from their Australia screenings “drained and weakened,” as Salon‘s Stephanie Zacharek puts it, “as if suffering from a gradual poisoning at the hands of a mad scientist.” Or, as I put it on 11.20, as if “injected with Baz serum.”

It is marked, as the Chicago Tribune‘s Michael Phillips puts it, by “constant visual redirection, strenuous comic relief, a synthetically preordained, romance, on the verge of morphing into a singing-cowboy musical. With Zeros.”

N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis calls it “a pastiche of genres and references wrapped up — though, more often than not, whipped up — into one demented and generally diverting horse-galloping, cattle-stampeding, camera-swooping, music-swelling, mood-altering widescreen package…a testament to movie love at its most devout, cinematic spectacle at its most extreme, and kitsch as an act of aesthetic communion.”

Marshall Fine calls it “sprawling, silly, overlong and bizarrely bogus-looking. All of that scenery — and Luhrmann is dicking around on sound stages with green screens. Plot and character are both drawn in the broadest strokes; a subtle moment would die of loneliness.”

New York‘s David Edelstein says it’s “blessed with dialogue that defies parody. In one scene, the transplanted Englishwoman (Nicole Kidman) gazes moist-eyed on the rough-and-ready cattleman (Hugh Jackman) as he caresses an edgy stallion, and you know her line will be a clever variation on ‘You really have a gift with horses.’ Instead, she says, ‘You really have a gift with horses.’ It’s like that all the way through.”

I especially love this Edelstein riff on Kidman’s facial work: “I’ve always admired her gumption in working so hard to overcome a certain temperamental tightness — but that tightness has now spread to her skin. In one scene, she haltingly sings ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ to an orphaned half-caste; but watching that big immovable forehead, I thought of another bit from The Wizard of Oz: ‘Oiiil caaan.’

With a five-day weekend about to start, Four Christmases is tracking at 82, 40 and 15 — not blockbuster numbers but the likely Thanksgiving winner. Baz Luhrman‘s Australia is tracking moderately well — 68, 33 and 12 — with the two strongest quadrants being older women and older men. Transporter 3 is 69, 42 and 15 — young males, better-than-decent business, neck and neck with Four Christmases.

Sean Penn will attend next Tuesday’s Gotham Awards, which will happen at Cipriani Wall Street. Penn will present a special award to Milk director Gus Van Sant. My first time at this event, looking forward, etc.

Okay, I first saw this on Kris Tapley‘s In Contention. The same art is on the cover of Bernhard Schlink‘s “Author’s Notes” pamphlet handed out at yesterday’s Reader screening.

I’m such a fool for Martin Ritt‘s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold that I’m thinking of buying the just-out Criterion DVD of same, even though the 2004 Paramount Home Video DVD has always looked fine to me. I’m mulling the buy on the half-chance that the Criterion may look slightly richer and more detailed. Neither DVD Beaver’s Gary Tooze nor DVD Talk’s Jamie S. Rich offer comparisons between the two.

This is old IMDB news, but the plot of Woody Allen‘s Whatever Works is about a May-December relationship (marriage?) between Larry David and Evan Rachel Wood, and her mother, played by Patricia Clarkson, somehow persuading a Manhattan-residing British actor, played by Henry Cavill, to try and seduce Wood in order to break up her marriage to David, whom Clarkson feels is too old for her daughter.

Contrary to what MCN’s David Poland reported on 11.14, L.A. Film Festival director Rich Raddon did not, I’m told, tender his resignation to the FIND board a day earlier over the revelation that he’d donated $1500 in support of Proposition 8 — the California gay-marriage-ban amendment that passed on 11.4. Raddon did, however, submit his resignation yesterday, and it was accepted.

Former L.A. Film Festival director Rich Raddon, Effie Brown

The Raddon/FIND/Prop. 8 situation was inflamed or at least re-addressed in a Sunday L.A. Times article by Rachel Abramowitz that ran two days ago.

Abramowitz wrote that Raddon “offered to resign last week.” Verbally, she apparently means, and not in the form of a letter that said “I resign.” What I’m told is that Raddon “never resigned, ever, so when the board voted unanimously, they weren’t voting not to accept the resignation, although they did decide not to fire him.”

In any case, the anger about the $1500 wouldn’t go away, and after Abramowitz’s article it was time to fold the hand.

“‘There is still roiling debate within [FIND],” distributor Howard Cohen, a gay advisor to the film festival, told Abramowitz. “Is it okay to let this go? There are a lot of gay people who work at Film Independent. The issue has not been closed.” .

Director Gregg Araki “has said he won’t allow his films to be shown at the L.A. Film Festival,” Abramowitz reported. “Others, such as Milk producers and gay activists Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen, say they’re going to ‘study in depth all the facets of our specific situation before making a decision.’

Araki said that Raddon “should step down. ‘I don’t think he should be forcibly removed. The bottom line is if he contributed money to a hateful campaign against black people, or against Jewish people, or any other minority group, there would be much less excusing of him. The terrible irony is that he runs a film festival that is intended to promote tolerance and equality.’

Raddon declined to talk to Abramowitz, but Dawn Hudson, executive director of Film Independent, said, “Are we happy with his donation? No. But he has a right to his religious and personal beliefs.”

Outside Hollywood’s left-liberal, gay-friendly political arena, that is.

Raddon’s departing statement is included in this Indiewire story.

The shorthand take on Button is that it’s a technical knockout, atmospherically sublime, emotionally poignant, and yet — a key distinction — fundamentally a Gump thing. Artier, more elegant and far less mawkish and chewy than what Robert Zemeckis delivered 14 years ago, but essentially drawn from the Gumpian well. It is therefore not, in my head, as fully fresh and stand-alone bold as Steven Soderbergh‘s Che — a film that doesn’t play the movie game but is stellar and studly in that it owes nothing to anyone or anything else, and the fact that it is all muscle and fat-free.

Che is still and will remain my Best Film of ’08 choice, and if the will of the Movie Gods carried any kind of clout with the mortals scrambling around on terra firma it would be at the top of a lot more lists. The hell with “emotional delivery” in this instance. The hell with “movie moments.” No film has the balls, the clarity and the take-it-or-leave-it honesty of Che.

As I wrote last week, “Soderbergh’s lack of interest in even beginning to attempt to ‘entertain’ the popcorn-munchers is not a plus sign in and of itself, but critics and smart industry viewers should at least be able to see what’s going on here and at least give credit where due. Che is the pure and even made majestic, the telling of a two-act story that could only have been lessened by being shaped into ‘drama.’ It is naturalism in the rough, unpretentious verite magnificence, poetry in the details, a form of truth both literal and eternal.”

Revolutionary Road is my #2 for ’08. A movie about a glum situation and doomed characters that isn’t itself glum or doomed, but tight and true and searing. A film that reflects some aspect of the real grit out there. A film that says “this could be about you” and in fact is about you, suckah. The strongest heavyweight drama I’ve seen all year so far. A corrosive and heartbreaking masterwork.

My third-place favorite is Benjamin Button, fourth is Doubt and fifth is Slumdog Millionaire, followed by Milk, Frost/Nixon, The Visitor, The Wrestler and Nothing But the Truth. Forget The Dark Knight as far as the Academy is concerned — it’s not gonna happen.