In a chat with In Contention‘s Kris Tapley, Last Chance Harvey star Dustin Hoffman confesses to having “strong feelings” about film criticism. “There’s no job description,” he says. “You see someone’s suddenly a new critic, and you say, ‘Oh, I know that name.’ Yeah, he was a food critic. So the newspaper moved him up from food critic to film critic, which is fine, because everybody is a critic.

“But there are other people who know film, who really understand it, maybe even on the level [that] Scorsese does.” That’s me! I’m that guy! I may not have quite the same open-door, Michael Powell-worshipping passion that Scorsese has, but I’m from the same fraternity, the same church, the same faith. If anything I probably care about movies too much, to the point of neurosis and basic denial of life habits.

“I name Scorsese because he’s probably seen as much or more film than anyone I’m aware of, and is sensitive to film deterioration,” Hofman goes on. “And the fact that these critics see so many films, I don’t know…if it’s a job it’s already questionable. And I do think that films are meant to seen with audiences, and they don’t do that. There has to be some self-consciousness, I think.”

At the very least, Tapley writes, Hoffman feels that “the critical fraternity should be more steeped in the process than they are.”

What…the making of movies? Hofman knows that can’t happen without integrity issues coming up. And yet most of the people I know in the writing-about-movies racket are as steeped in the process of knowing movies and as much of the attendant political hoo-hah as they could possibly absorb without being p.a.’s or actors or producers.

Imagine a world in which the assurance of fast wifi on a train trip would be so locked down that you wouldn’t have a moment’s doubt. I’m experiencing considerable doubt right now, of course, as I prepare to catch an Amtrak train from Albany to Penn Station. I found out during a train ride from Grand Central to Norwalk earlier this week that you can have three, four or five bars on your AT&T Air Card but you still can’t connect to the internet if you’re moving.

Albany-Rensselaer train station — Friday, 12.26, 12:35 pm — waiting on 1:05 pm train to Penn Station.

Oh, and some of the yokels up here pronounce Albany like Albany, as in “you can call me Al.” It’s Albany as in “all of me,” of course.

Okay, so Marley and Me/Old Yeller is the big 12.25 to 12.28 champ — bigger than anyone had projected, myself included. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is second, Adam Sandler‘s Bedtime Stories is third and Valkyrie is fourth. Marley‘s success — it will end up with $100 million and then some — is, of course, a bit of mixed-bag thing — bad for our collective movegoing souls, understandable from an economically-afflicted-viewers POV, good for sales of the original book, bad because of the “me too, Marley!” movies it’ll inspire.

This response to Rick Warren‘s 12.23 “this is who I am and what I believe” video is interesting for the points that are made, for the intriguing Latin accent of the speaker, and the fact that he speaks very quietly, so as to not wake someone else up, I’m guessing.

I thought I was all safe and locked in at Park City’s Star Hotel, having stayed there during the ’07 and ’08 Sundance Film Festivals and having left a cowboy hat there as a token of my intention to return the following year. A cowboy hat left behind means you’re a true-blue guy! But I failed to place a proper, formal confirmation call to proprietor Carol Rixey, and now she’s given away my room. So now I have to scramble with the festival starting in 20 days. If anyone knows of a share situation inside Park City proper (just a room, a bed, a chair and good wifi), please get in touch ASAP.

Untitled from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo

I was delighted with the sharp, robust, extra-clean image quality of the Fox Home Video French Connection DVD that came out in February ’05. William Friedkin‘s 1971 crime classic probably looked and sounded better than it ever had in Nixon-era theatres.

But it’s not supposed to look too good. Too much attractiveness would take away from the raw-grit vibe that Owen Roizman‘s photography tried very hard to capture as he shot in various Manhattan, Brooklyn and other-borough locales. So I’m wondering what the point is going to be of the French Connection Blu-ray disc that’ll be out on 2.24.09.

Not that I won’t buy it — I probably will, sucker than I am — but I could think of many other Fox Home Video titles that I’d rather see on Blu-ray first.

The Financial Times once defined Pinteresque dialogue as ”full of dark hints and pregnant suggestions, with the audience left uncertain as to what to conclude.” That’s not bad, but I’ve always defined it with seven words: (a) spare, (b) precise, (c) cutting and (d) sometimes a bit cruel. That leaves out opaque, terse, witty, chilly and all the other applicable terms, but however you slice it the man who created this form of expression — playwright Harold Pinter — died yesterday in London at age 78.

I’ve seen The Birthday Party and The Homecoming on-stage once each, and some of the films Pinter wrote screenplays for — The Servant (’63), The Go-Between (’70), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (’81), The Trial (’93) and Sleuth (’07). But being a bit of a Pinter plebe, my favorite is Betrayal, which has been called his most accessible work.

I’m queer for Betrayal because of its reverse chronology, the fascinating game it plays (i.e., what does he/she know, and when does he/she know it?), for the constant expert lying that goes on between the three main characters, and because it happens in a carefully mannered, flush and somewhat shallow middle-class milieu (which provides a form of comfort to me because I’ve lived in this world and feel I know what it is), and because it fulfills my definition of Pinter’s signature style — crisp, knowing and acrid in a less-is-more vein.

“I’ve always liked Jerry,” the cuckolded Robert says to his unfaithful wife about her longtime lover who’s also been his longtime friend. “To be honest, I’ve always liked him rather more than I’ve liked you. I should have had an affair with him myself.”

I saw Betrayal on the New York stage twice (with Roy Scheider, Raul Julia and Blythe Danner in ’80 or thereabouts, and again in a 2000 revival with Juliette Binoche, Liev Schreiber and John Slattery ), as well as that superb 1983 film adaptation with Ben Kingsley, Jeremy Irons and Patricia Hodge, directed by David Jones .

Originally released by 20th Century Fox, Jones’ Betrayal came out on VHS in ’84 but that was 24 years ago, for heaven’s sake. I’ve written this seventeen or eighteen times over the last ten years, but will be rights-holder please, please cut a deal with someone to put it out on DVD or Blu-ray? It’s been out of circulation for so long it looks like up to me.

Can anyone imagine any half-savvy online journalist or news site running a December 2008 story titled “VHS Era Is Winding Down”? I can’t. At the same time I shrugged when I read Geoff Bouncher‘s story with this title in the 12.22 L.A. Times because this is the kind of “duhh” story that the LAT sometimes likes to run. It’s about a low-rent, bottom of the barrel VHS distributor named Ryan J. Kugler who’s finally decided to pack it in as far as this format is concerned. Whatever. It’s the Be Kind Rewind of video-format trend stories.

My 11.25 review of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, reposted with David Fincher’s film opening today: Will viewers be willing to let Button be Button and put aside whatever high falutin’ expectations they may bring to it? It could all work out if they do, but it didn’t quite work for me because I couldn’t. I enjoyed and was even heartened by this dreamy-sad glide through time and memory and the textures and aromas of 20th Century America, but I can’t say I’m as hungry for a second immersion as I was when I first saw Fincher’s Zodiac some eighteen or nineteen months ago.

Brad Pitt, Tilda Swinton

Zodiac is a legendary art film — a deeper, fuller thing every time I re-view it because of how it never tries to overtly persuade its audience that it’s anything more than a whipsmart policier about a legendary cold case. Because the theme of obsession is simultaneously dramatized and embodied by the obsessive nature of the film itself. Because it’s settled and confident in its own skin and lets the story tell itself while Fincher, remarkably, builds it into something more than the sum of its parts.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, on the other hand, feels very caught up from the start in its attempts to mesmerize and create a burnished good-old-days atmosphere. And it works like a champ in this respect. I’ll never forget the ripe vibe this movie casts. And yet I’m not sure if I really know what it’s saying, or it’s really “saying” anything other than that life is an adventure to be savored and lived to the fullest. That’s a good thing to express in any fashion or medium, but I was saying to myself as I watched it unfold, “Yeah, yeah, I agree, yes….and?”

The basic idea behind the original F. Scott Fitzgerald story basically says that the best part of life comes at the beginning and the worst part at the end, and what would a man feel and learn if the journey was reversed?

Like Forrest Gump, which was authored by Button screenwriter Eric Roth, Fincher’s langorous tale is about a passive, good-natured fellow — Brad Pitt‘s Benjamin Button — who lives a kind of charmed (and at the same time somewhat cursed) life that’s rooted in the New Orleans but involves much travel, traverses decades and nurses a lifelong, never-waning love for a beautiful spirited woman — Cate Blanchett‘s Daisy.

It starts with old-baby Pitt — a withered, carcassy, white-haired infant — being born in World War I-era New Orleans, and then watches him de-age and gain strength, enjoying the lusciousness of living more and more, as he moves through the ’20s and ’30s and into World War II as an old and then an older middle-aged man.

And then as he gradually becomes a progressively younger and hunkier guy who looks cool and likes to ride a motorcycle and whose blissful sensual peak comes at the height of youth and vigor in his early 40s, 30s and 20s, which manifest 40, 50 and 60 years after his old-man birth (and happily coincides with Blanchett’s normal-progression trajectory). And then he’s a teenager, a kid, a toddler and a baby.

The renderings of Pitt’s and Blanchett’s various age-states are just about perfect. Face-pasting, makeup, prosthetics, digital-wrinkle removing — all or most of it as exquisite as the wizardry of new and emerging digital technology can miraculously provide.

But you get used to all this. Pitt’s reverse-aging is endlessly absorbing, but it loses its wow-ness after a while, and once it levels off you’re basically left with a story about a guy just living a life. And his journey has little in the way of story tension and the rooting interest isn’t really there because all he’s trying to do is be with the love of his life, Daisy. Well, that happens finally when they’re both young and close in age. But then time pulls them apart, and then they’re together again and true-heart Daisy becomes his care-giver when he can no longer fend for himself.

Like I said earlier, it’s not that you don’t care for Pitt’s Button but he’s a watcher, an observer, an eternal quiet man. He’s there to absorb and experience and love and savor, but he’s nothing like a take-charge doer with any kind of primal goal or need.

We’re witness to the unfolding and passage of decades here, and the movie is basically a Gump thing — a leisurely cruise on a slow riverboat down a pastoral but mostly rapid-free river. Many intense and eye-filling things happen. The randomness of life, the give-and-take, the eternals all bleed into the whole. But the story is basically a journey of chapters — this happens, that happens, shit happens.

Button is filled, yes,with all kinds of touching meditations and observational riches and a constant awareness of the here-today, gone-tomorrow thing. It is a moving film to sit through, but it provides only as much warmth and emotionalism as director David Fincher and screenwriter Eric Roth felt was right and true and appropriate.

Benjamin Button is a dream — rapturous, essential, eternal filmmaking. And with a heart that is kindly, charitable, gentle, open. It’s beautiful, it’s unique, it’s bold…and I’m not at all sure that it’s going to reign supreme as a Best Picture candidate. Nor am I persuaded that it’s going to make any kind of real money. It’s a fascinating, very brave and half-wonderful film, but it’ll be a real challenge selling it to the stooges out there, particularly the under-30s.

I agree with Variety‘s Anne Thompson that it’s “an historic achievement, a masterful piece of cinema, and a moving treatise on death, loss, loneliness and love” and that “it may pack a more powerful punch the older you are and the more people you have lost.”

But it doesn’t feel like a Best Picture slam-dunker — no to me anyway, for reasons stated above and before.