Okay, not literally. Literally, Benjamin Button is about a guy who's born old and ages backwards, until he reaches childhood and then dies. But in a larger sense, David Fincher's movie is about deja vu. It feels very much like a dozen other movies you've seen before. And it seems to be saying that familiarity is underrated and nostalgia is renewal, by looking at the life of someone whose past is always in front of him.

In particular, Benjamin Button will remind you a lot of Forrest Gump, another literary adaptation by the same screenwriter, Eric Roth. It's got the same sort of heartwarming, quirky feeling, and the protagonist lives through a nice selection of big historical moments. (Although he doesn't meet any famous personages.) Pretty much every situation that Benjamin Button gets himself into will feel cozily familiar, and most of the characters he meets are ones you've seen before. But because he's living backwards, he outlives people who seem to be his age or younger. And the movie seems to be saying, "Take another look at these familiar situations and archetypes, because they won't last forever, and you'll miss them when they're gone."

Here's the story, in a nutshell: Benjamin Button is born old, and his father abandons him. He's rescued by Queenie, a good-hearted African American woman, who devotes herself to him. Luckily, she works in an old-people's home, where he fits right in with the cast of quirky characters. (One of these characters has a running gag that's jaw-snappingly funny.) He meets a little girl, Daisy, and they become playmates. Later, he goes off to sea on a tugboat, and then fights in World War II. And sleeps with Tilda Swinton. Then he comes home and courts Daisy, who's too busy being a fancy dancer. They finally get together, and are rapturously happy, but Benjamin worries his impending youth will ruin everything. (It does.)

There's also a frame story, where Daisy is on her death bed (as Hurricane Katrina looms) and she gets her daughter to read Benjamin's memoir to her. That stuff is like what I imagine The Notebook would be like.

There's nothing wrong with any of it, and it's all quite skillfully executed. Except that Cate Blanchett, as Daisy, and Brad Pitt, as Benjamin, have very little chemistry, and Pitt's performance in general is somewhere between understated and vacant. (I really only like Pitt when he's doing manic nutjob, to be honest.) But apart from that problem, the performances are all great, and some of them are terrific. Tilda Swinton is never anything but amazing, for example.

The movie is three hours long, and there are a few sequences that feel beyond padded. (In one sequence, in particular, the narrator drones that if A, B, C, or D had happened differently, then E wouldn't have happened. But A, B, C, and D did actually happen the way they did, so E happened as well. I felt like I was being spoon-fed by an arthritic.) To some extent, the movie's slowness is a function of its mission: to show us that time is passing, that as Benjamin Button sheds his years, he's still racing towards a grave like the rest of us.

That's in a sense what Benjamin Button is about — paradoxically, by dealing with a character who miraculously won't get old, it aims to make us think about the fact that we will. And by separating aging from death, it reinforces once again that death is universal. All of those heartwarming characters we meet in the course of the movie end up dying, and we linger over their deaths. There's even a gratuitous black preacher who drops dead right after meeting Benjamin.

I always think, when reviewing a non-genre film like Button for io9, it's important to focus on its genre elements and how they're functioning in the story. In Button, the main character's mutant superpower functions as a metaphor for the way the past gets more and more important as you get older. Especially with the framing story, where we see the old Daisy reliving her life with Benjamin on her death bed, the point is driven home that love, and death, make time travelers of all of us as our future shrinks away.

The movie is a triumph of makeup and special effects, by the way. The whole business of making Brad up as an old man, and superimposing his features onto various other people's bodies, is weirdly convincing.

Major spoiler alert: The thing that really turned me off this movie, once and for all, is when Benjamin decides to ditch Daisy after knocking her up. At this point, they're both about 40, and he's courted her for two decades. Now that he finally has her, he suddenly freaks out about the fact that they're "meeting in the middle" and he's doomed to keep getting younger. "I don't want you to have to raise us both," he tells Daisy, referring to her baby and him. But it literally makes no sense to me — why can't he stick around until the baby and he are both roughly 20 years old biologically? Or if I'm doing my math wrong, at the very worst, he would appear 16 or 17 when Daisy was 18 or 19. Again, still not seeing why Benjamin can't help raise his kid.

It feels like the movie has some kind of weird pro-deadbeat dad agenda. Benjamin's own father abandons him, and then later they meet up and gradually become friends. They bond, and we're meant to forgive the dad for being completely absent. And in the case of Benjamin, after he abandons Daisy and goes off to India to "find himself," he selfishly comes back when his daughter is grown and he appears to be a young adult. Then he hangs around New Orleans (Daisy's hometown) and eventually she's stuck nursing him after he's turned into a senile infant. So even though he ran away, she still takes care of him in his old/young age.

It didn't feel like much of a love story to me, but maybe I'm too cynical.

I'm afraid I didn't like Button very much, but you may like it just fine. It has a 76 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, and I'm sure it'll do great at the box office. It's very Oscar-ish, too. I'd say, if you liked Forrest Gump, you might like this, although it's not quite as good.

Assuming you just watched the clip, then you've discovered the truth about George's situation. But it's still well worth checking out Possible Worlds, for its absolutely gorgeous cinematography, razor-sharp dialog and musings about the nature of reality and parallel worlds. And its multiple versions of the same story of love and loss. And Tilda Swinton's heart-rendingly wonderful acting, of course.

The prosecution of Kurtz continued, even after it was clear his wife died of natural causes and he proved the bacteria were harmless. Another cause for the paranoia was an flier in his house for an art show, which had Arabic lettering on it. Once all of these misunderstandings were cleared up, however, the Justice Department prosecuted Kurtz for mail and wire fraud, based on the fact that he ordered the harmless bacteria via a Web site.

Hershman Leeson's first two movies are Conceiving Ada, about Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter who created the first computer language, and Teknolust, about a woman who creates cyborg copies of herself. Here's what Hershman Leeson had to say about the case, and her newest film.

Strange Culture uses a mixture of documentary, actors re-enacting the scenes, and cartoons, because Steve Kurtz was advised by a lawyer not to comment on the case. Were you influenced by the film American Splendor, which uses similar techniques?

It's a coinicidence. I liked American Splendor. My brother knew Harvey Pekar, and he used to come to our house all the time... I think this really had to be a hybrid, there was no other way to make it... The cartoons had actually already been made and I just had to integrate them... I used cartoons in other work, in the 1970s.

Did Steve Kurtz object to any of the ways Thomas Jay Ryan played him, or Tilda Swinton played his late wife?

Not at all. [We had] a lot of leeway with his character, because he likes Thomas a lot. He said the only person who could play Hope was Tilda, so he was happy.

Strange Culture includes a lot of information about the prevelance of genetically modified foods in America. Do you think many people are unaware of how widespread genetically modified foods are in this country?

Yes. I think people are unaware of the erasure of habeas corpus as well, and they are unaware that this case is so important because it would [allow the federal government] to criminalize a civil charge.

The government's case is now entirely based on the idea that it can press criminal charges for a civil statute. Someone says in your movie that this would double the number of laws the Justice Dept could use for criminal prosecution.

It just gives people more control. If someone accidentally makes a mistake on a form on the internet, is it wire fraud?

One of the most chilling scenes in the film is when a professor friend of Steve Kurtz's tries to convince some students to sign the petition for his release. And all but one of the students refuse to sign, because they don't want to jeopardize their futures by getting on the government's radar.

That actually happened to me, word for word. I was at UC Davis and I was trying to get my students to be aware, one, that there was a petition and two, about his case, and they were just afraid, they didn't want to sign anything.

We're huge fans of your previous movie, Teknolust, which also features Tilda Swinton. Is it just a coincidence that both movies are about artists who experiment with science and become accused of being a public menace?

Usually I deal with technology or science and art. I didn't see that relationship before you mentioned it, but it's true.

Do you think part of the reason for the fear of artists using science is the fact that people think only "experts" or specially qualified people should be allowed to do science?

I'm not sure. it's just such a bizarre case that one can't pinpoint why. It had to do with the subject of his work, and he was criticizing the government. And then his wife died and there were strange materials [in his house.]

And there hasn't been any movement on the case since Nov. 2006, when your documentary ends?

There's going to be a trial sometime this year. We don't have a date yet.

Are you ever going to make another fictional movie, like Conceiving Ada and Teknolust?

I just finished a script on Sunday about a vampire. It's really kind of an essay about aging, so it's kind of part three of my trilogy, with Conceiving Ada and Teknolust.

Do you think there are a lot of restrictions on artists using technology and science?

All the time, and they also don't think it's art because it's not painting. so there are all kinds of criticisms... There was criticism of photography when it first happened. It took years before it was taken seriously or considered art. Any time you want to use something new and that people aren't familiar with, they think it's not art and you're a charlatan.

What sort of restrictions on your work as a science artist have you faced?

Not being able to show my work, for as long as 30 years. And then the work was shown, and people got really interested in it.

Does feminism affect how you portray subjects such as creativity or technology?

It absolutely does. The major inventions in tech, the computer language, [came from] Ada Lovelace, artificial intelligence was invented by Mary Shelley. Cellular phone technology was invented by Hedy Lamarr. The major influences have all been women, but people continue to say that women have no aptitude for science or technology.

Do you think you've had a harder time making movies and dealing with technology because you're a woman?

I think it's very difficult for women filmmakers, or maybe it's me because I don't do traditional films. It's amazing I've had as much success as I've had. When I started out, I was paired with Todd Haynes, and then I was paired with Darren Aronofsky. [In both cases], we both won awards, Haynes and I at the London Film Festival for the work we had done and the same with Darren, because he did a film called Pi just when I did Conceiving Ada, and people compared them because they dealt with science. I've just had it much more difficult than my male counterparts. [Strange Culture, from Docurama]

In this clip, Swinton the scientist is chatting with her creations, asking them to be just a little more robotic so that the guys visiting their Web site don't figure out that their VR dreamgirls are actually real — and out to steal their sperm. In one of this flick's many rewardingly surreal moments, her creations decide to cheer up their "mother" by showing her a dance they created that day. After seeing Swinton as the Winter Queen in Narnia, and as the ultra-serious lawyer in Michael Clayton, it's great to see her looking sexy and goofing around in this dance of the sex cyborgs.

Despite its oddness, or perhaps because of it, Teknolust manages to be sweetly romantic. One of the cyborgs eventually falls for a very strange human man, after having an even stranger sperm-extraction encounter with comedian Josh Kornbluth. And of course the mad scientist has to learn that not every experiment has a rational outcome.

Teknolust [official Web site]