“The character in the first hour of Benjamin Button was created in post, basically, with Brad inspiring it,” says director Spike Jonze in an interview with AICN’s Drew McWeeny. “[David] Fincher totally invented his own technique, and it’s insane. I’m always a little skeptical whenever you hear there’s a CG character [in a film], but I never even noticed it. It’s just this totally compelling, really charming character, you know, because he’s like a little boy inside an old man’s body, and the performance is amazing.”

Baz Luhrmann‘s long-awaited and over-budget Australia manages, against the odds, to avoid turning into one big sunburnt stereotype about Godzone country,” writes the Times Online‘s Anne Barrowlcough. “Instead, in what turns out to be a multi-layered story, it describes an Australia of the 1940s that is at once compellingly beautiful and breathtakingly cruel.

“Described as a cross between Gone with the Wind and Out of Africa it bears, in fact, little resemblance to either movie – apart from a similarly spectacular landscape as Out of Africa and a plot line that loosely resembles that of Gone with the Wind.

“In this case, Lady Sarah Ashley, a passionless English aristocrat (Nicole Kidman), inherits a vast cattle station in the Northern Territories only to find that the station is the target of a dastardly takeover plot.

“Much against her will, she is forced to enlist the help of a local stockman known only as Drover (Hugh Jackman), to save the station by driving her huge herd of cattle hundreds of miles across the Kuraman desert to Darwin. Which is then bombed by the Japanese.

“In the worst Mills and Boon tradition, Lady Sarah – whose emotions are as frozen as Kidman’s forehead – and the rough neck Drover loathe each other on sight but, as they endure the harsh and rather dusty travails of the cattle drive they quite quickly fall in love. She even teaches him to dance. Under a boab tree.

“But if it sounds shallow and predictable, Australia is, in fact, anything but.

“The cliches are saved by little jokes and asides, as if Luhrmann is saying ‘Yes, I know, but what can you do?’

“But what gives the film its heart is something else entirely. This is also the story of Nullah (Brandon Walters), a mixed race Aboriginal boy left orphaned by the inhumanity of Australian law. The 1940s was the time of the Stolen Generation, when mixed race children were banned from living either with their Aboriginal families or within the white community, but were taken from their homes to be brought up in church missions.

“Nullah’s increasingly frantic attempts to escape from the ‘coppers’ and his symbiotic relationship with his grandfather, the mystical King George, played with awesome power by the renowned Aboriginal dancer and musician David Gulpilil, is treated with a stark honesty and is what actually makes this film truly Australian in both its best and its worst sense.

“Brandon, 13, was discovered by Lurhmann in his local swimming pool in the West Australian town of Broome and he plays Nullah with a combination of mischief and tragedy that may turn him into the real star of the film, despite – or perhaps because of – the fact that he has never acted before.”

Australia “is not without flaws, it’s not the masterpiece that we were hoping for, but I think you could say that it’s a very good film in many ways,” says The Australian‘s David Stratton, who’s obviously writing from a kind of Down Under home-team perspective.

“[But] while it will be very popular with many people I think there’s a slight air of disappointment after it all.

“Like his earlier films Strictly Ballroom, Romeo+Juliet and Moulin Rouge, Australia shows Baz Luhrmann as a very theatrical director. He has a great eye for compositions and the film is beautifully shot by Mandy Walker, but there’s theatricality about the film which is a bit off-putting at the beginning. The early scenes, even the first 20 minutes or so of the film, are handled in a slightly artificial, arch manner which doesn’t sit well with the outback locations and the natural settings of the story.

“It’s all very well to be artificial when you’re dealing with a theatrical concept like Moulin Rouge or even Strictly Ballroom, but it doesn’t really work so well when you’re doing the same sort of thing here, so there’s something that’s just a little bit off key about these scenes. Then once the cattle drive gets under way either you get used to it or that aspect of it is played down because the remainder of the film is much stronger in a rather conventional way.

“I have to say, there are a lot of cliches in the script, a lot of familiar elements from other films of the past — The Wizard of Oz and the song ‘Over the Rainbow’ are heavily referenced — and it’s as though the film is aimed at not so much an Australian audience but an international audience, and especially an American audience.

“I will say that the acting is of a very high level, especially given that some of the actors have been encouraged to perform in this rather stylized, theatrical way. Nicole Kidman does a very good job as she develops from this very stiff, awkward, naive Englishwoman to become a really warm character at the end of the film. And Hugh Jackman has tremendous charisma and charm.

“The supporting cast is particularly good. Jack Thomson as the alcoholic accountant for the property gives a lovely performance, Bryan Brown is a terrific as the cattle baron although his demise is extremely perfunctory, and David Wenham is another terrific villain, very charming and intense.

“In minor roles there are all sorts of interesting people including Ben Mendelssohn, Bill Hunter and Arthur Dignam. And then there’s little 12-year-old Brandon Walters, who plays the Aboriginal boy, who’s really very good indeed.

“Despite its flaws — and it certainly has flaws — I think Australia is an impressive and important film, and if I were to give it a star rating I would give it three and a half out of five.”

Special preview footage from JJ Abrams‘ Star Trek (Paramount, 5.8.09) was shown here tonight for fanboy press and exhibs. We were only shown four scenes, but what we saw was jaunty and full of spirit, handsomely and at times beautifully composed (images of massive, mall-like super-cities rising over the plains of futuristic Iowa were a highlight for me), boasting more than a few loose and nervy performances. My favorite was Zachary Qinto‘s Spock because of his natural Vulcan authority, but I’ve always been a sucker for high intellect.

Relatively new plex on 34th Street where roughly 14 minutes of Star Trek footage was unfurled. Director JJ Abrams offered a few remarks, set up the four scenes. Paramount chief John Lesher also attended and spoke.

Here‘s a riff on the showing by AICN’s Louqacious Muse.

The 15 short-listed feature documentaries were announced today by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. For me the biggest mind-blower is the omission of Marina Zenovich‘s Roman Polanksi: Wanted and Desired — one of the sharpest and most persuasive inside-the-legal-system docs ever made, as well as a perceptive portrait of a fascinating and haunted artist. My guess is that some Polanski haters didn’t care for Zenovich’s generally admiring (and yet thorough and fair-minded) approach.

I don’t want to hear about any stupid disqualifiers because it played on HBO for a week or whatever. Academy disqualifiers is this realm are bullshit. Docs are always struggling for attention, and anything they can put together revenue- or attention-wise outside of theatrical should not be a penalty, for God’s sake.

I’m also a bit surprised that Alex Gibney‘s Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson — not a great film but certainly a professionally assembled and earnestly felt one — wasn’t included. And yet the dutiful and less-than-exceptional Trouble the Water — a piece about the devastation of Hurricane Katrina that I’ve been calling the “King Kong of hand-held jiggle-pan docs” — made the cut.

The 15 docs are At the Death House Door, The Betrayal, Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh, Werner Herzog‘s Encounters at the End of the World, Fuel, The Garden, Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts, I.O.U.S.A., In a Dream, Made in America, the great Man on Wire, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, Errol Morris‘ Standard Operating Procedure, They Killed Sister Dorothy and Trouble the Water.

The Documentary Branch Screening Committee viewed all the eligible documentaries for the preliminary round of voting. Documentary Branch members will now select the five nominees from among the 15 titles on the shortlist.

The 81st Academy Awards nominations will be announced on Thursday, 1.22.09, at 5:30 a.m. Pacific in the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater.

In the view of Variety‘s Todd McCarthy, Revolutionary Road is “constantly engrossing as it successfully engages the yearning of Frank and April Wheeler to rescue themselves from their decorous, socially acceptable oblivion, just as it clearly defines how the ‘trap’ is stronger than they are. The rows, tender moments and downtime in between are fully inhabited and powerfully charged by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.

“For his part, DiCaprio often achieves the kind of double register the film as a whole less consistently captures, as he indicates Frank’s thought process in the split second before he decides what to say. At certain moments, the conjoined cerebral and emotional aspects of his characterization summon the spirit of Jack Nicholson‘s breakthrough performances around the time of Five Easy Pieces.

“Winslet’s perf is less surprising, perhaps, if only because she has shown tremendous range throughout her career. April is a difficult role in that her mood changes sometimes seem inexplicable, but the thesp makes them all seem genuine, which resonates with Frank’s occasional hints that she’s possibly in need of psychiatric help. Winslet’s starkly etched April is steely, strong and brittle, capable of great highs and lows as well as massive uncertainty.

“Pic’s startling supporting turn comes from Michael Shannon, who’s mesmerizing as the clinically insane son of local realtor and busybody Helen Givings (Kathy Bates). He’s a loony who is able to tell the truth about the Wheelers that everyone else so politely avoids; when Shannon is onscreen, it’s impossible to watch anyone else.”

Claire Sutherland‘s just-posted review of Australia is obviously coming from the obsequious side of the room — she doesn’t strike me as tough-minded in the slightest. Here, however, is The Australian‘s Michael Bodey — “intermittently brilliant, largely good but ultimately erratic.”

N.Y. publicist Sophie Gluck has announced that Guillaume Canet‘s Tell No One, which is still playing at the Cinema Village, has now passed $6.2 million in U.S. domestic box office, making it the highest grossing foreign-language film of the year. The DVD and Blu-Ray will come out in the first quarter of 2009.

Persistent European adventurer Jett Wells, taken in Madrid two days ago.

No, Uli Edel‘s The Baader Meinhof Complex doesn’t romanticize terrorism, as the Guardian‘s David Cox seems to believe. It’s angry and provocative, yes, and very well made, but not all that sexy. Not in a way that got me going, at least, as I explained in 9.30.08 review.

I called it “a strong but bleak account of the impassioned but self-destructive insanity that took hold among radical lefties in the late ’60s and ’70s, and which manifested with a particular ferocity and flamboyance among the Baader-Meinhoffers. [It] mainly sinks in as a revisiting of a time in which a small but dead-serious sector of the left-liberal community temporarily lost its bearings and in some cases jumped off a cliff in order to stop what they saw as a form of absolute establishment evil.

“I’m glad I saw it, I’m glad it was made, I respect and admire the contributions of everyone on the team (Edel, producer-co-writer Bernd Eichinger, exec producer Martin Moszkovicz and cast members Martina Gedeck, Moritz Bleibtreu, Johanna Wokalek, Bruno Ganz, Nadja Uhl, Jan Josef Liefers, Stipe Erceg, Niels Bruno Schmidt, Vinzenz Kiefer, Alexandra Maria Lara), and I’m glad it’s doing well commercially in Germany and elsewhere.

“But The Baader Meinhof Complex is a gripping but awfully strange and even weird story about some very extreme, go-for-broke people who didn’t know when (or how) to chill out and seemed, in the final analysis, to be more than a little in love with death.”