Movie Diary 2/17/2010

Creation (Jon Amiel, 2009). Darwin vs. the memory of a dead child, a battle waged while the genius is writing The Origin of Species, the book that really should have settled all this stuff a long time ago. Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly labor mightily to bring the film’s peculiar focus to life. (full review 2/19)

Oscar-nominated short films (various). Packaging the Oscar-nominated short films together for a tour just before the Oscar show is either an inspired way to get these underseen and underappreciated movies before the public, or a method of torture for those of us who have an irrational and unfair aversion to short films. Or possibly both. (Although I do have one of these packages to thank for letting me see Martin McDonagh’s Six Shooter, for which I’m grateful.) Did not care much for the live-action bits, but the cartoons offer a half-hour Wallace & Gromit number and the most original thing in the group, Logorama, which is about product placement gone wild and casts Ronald McDonald as a homicidal maniac. (full review 2/19)