Fresh Loaf

>> CHANGE: The new administration lifts the ban on photographing military coffins’ arrivals, letting the families of the fallen decide if they want them photographed.

>> SURPRISE!: The recession didn’t go away overnight. The economy just keeps shrinking and rapidly so.

>> Clint Eastwood says down with political correctness. The whole easily-offended schtick is putting comedians out of a job.

>> PENDING EGG SHORTAGE?: Nope, just a continued intelligence shortage affecting mostly the political populace. If comedians weren’t so busy being politically correct, they could’ve thought of a much better joke involving the first black president and watermelons.

>> Lesson learned by Facebook: Don’t piss off social network users. They know how to wield an online mob like nobody’s business.

>> Obama administration puts its Robin Hood plans in action with new tax cuts and increases.

>>STOP THE PRESS: Colorado’s oldest daily newspaper says goodbye in the classiest, and most stirring, of ways.

(Photo by Joeff Davis)

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GRAY AREA: Brad Pitt as Benjamin Button (Photo by Merrick Morton/Copyright © 2008 Paramount Pictures Corporation)

Two of the holiday season’s most prestigious, Oscar-baiting movies seem informed by the resentment of aging and mortality summed up in Dylan Thomas’ poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”

In Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood plays a Korean War vet who rages against the dying of the light with bigotry and the occasional firearm. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button turns our expectations for youth and senescence upside down through Brad Pitt’s age-regressing hero. But will he go gentle into that good, uh, morning?

The discrepancy between Benjamin Button’s outward age and his real maturity offers an intriguing if limited metaphor for the way people’s failing bodies don’t match their ageless spirits. Benjamin Button director David Fincher also proves that state-of-the-art special effects can apparently do anything. Button offers astonishing images of Pitt as a child-sized senior citizen who gets taller and healthier every year. Gran Torino, on the other hand, proves thoroughly old fashioned in ways both good and ill, and only succeeds thanks to Eastwood’s undimmed star power. The film, like Eastwood’s character, resembles the kind of crotchety old timer with so much piss and vinegar, you make excuses for his bad manners.

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