Ben Button...

So I'm back in LA and I caught a mid-day screening of Benjamin Button at the Dome. I've been all bent up lately, knowing awards time is soon approaching. And the source of my bend has been this notion that all we'd have to root for come time to hand out golden statues would be a handful of misconnecting, quasi-disappointments. So far, that's been the field. No one's really excited about anything. Slumdog was good. Everything else has kinda gone limp - and I've yet to run across someone who would argue otherwise.

So back to the subject at hand, Ben Button. I guess there's not a lot I can say...or maybe I'm choosing not to say much. Movies come along every weekend, hopefuls that span the globe, pieced by our great living storytellers. If you see enough, you learn to spot the flags -- you notice familiarities where so many tread or share similar gravel. Everything is somewhat derivative...somewhat, and that's fine. Today, I had this nagging and welcome thought...new roads, new feelings. Something different about this one. Something settling about this one - taking my bend away - a worthy best pic.

And it felt like a weight was lifted. Really. And I floated on my walk back to the parking garage. And I kept on thinking, because it's what I do...ceaselessly -- I don't mind so much where the rest of the nominations go, so long as the Academy grows up -- or down, allows a sidestep, spends two of their noms on the most deserved but usually all too ignorable big money faction. Now if that happens, maybe then we'll be alright...

Heath Ledger...

It stole my breath when I saw it, this freeze as it went from my eyes to my head…stopping in an instant to think it was wrong or misprinted. So arresting.

And it wasn’t just about the movies. It was the thought of a father, of a recent husband who somewhere, to an unknown extent had a grieving heart of his own.

It’s mind-bending, the thought…to have the best parts of you so visible…or what it would be like to find yourself in front of a camera and trying, just trying to be good, to be remembered. Then to be a small piece of a film that’s offered up to the world. To be offered up to the world. And suddenly everyone has a right to know and love, you…your life, or not, instantly materialized from air, from nothing.

He dealt make believe. And now, all that’s left, remnant memories…the life of a great and still budding talent coming to an instant and vicious halt. He had a pull, always had something of a pull, and now that he’s dead, I find myself realizing how easy it was to glance over the moment he became something else entirely, gravity, and in remarkable form, like a coat that takes time. Heath Ledger was a great promise far from ripe, an already rare talent and yet so far from realized.

He was a scientist on the brink of curing cancer. He was our hopeful to shatter record in the mile. He was a politician to rally sides divided. And the thought of a loss like that makes me sad. At the end of the day, all he was to us was an artist, an actor. But he was loved. The simplicity of it makes me sad.

I’m not going to come out and say he was too young, that it’s not supposed to go down like this. And I’m not going to fall back on crutches like, “this just goes to show.” Not a chance, ever…not how I’m constructed. Great and terrible things happen all the time.

Tonight, I rest with a heavy heart. Heavier than expected…and that seems to be the gathered sentiment.

We end on tonight’s final salute. Brilliant, tragic, brilliant…