Up in the Air

Seeing the character that George Clooney plays in Up In The Air reminds me of George Peppard in The Carpetbaggers. If you remember Jonas Cord was flying all over creation in his private plane developing and supervising his many enterprises. Just like Clooney here, Peppard had some deep seated issues about settling down even though unlike Clooney he was already married.

Clooney has an interesting job that really keeps him moving. He works for a firm that specializes in aiding fired workers make a transition. I can testify myself that getting fired can be traumatic. In my case though my firing lasted two months and I went back to my old job and stayed there until retirement.

Clooney's boss Jason Bateman has him going all over the country. He says that he spent only about 43 days in his sparse apartment in Omaha. It really is sparse the various hotel rooms look more homey. But a woman who also spends a lot of time traveling on her job Vera Famiga and a woman who is being trained by Clooney, Anna Kendrick help him see that maybe his life and lack of commitment isn't the best thing for him.

Nor is his stated goal of gaining 10 million frequent flier miles. He spends so much time in the air that all the airline personnel on all the airlines know him on a first name basis. That's one significant accomplishment. Maybe Clooney should have taken up with a stewardess.

The characters are drawn well in this script which got one of several Academy Award nominations, in this case for adapted screenplay. Up In The Air also got Academy recognition for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for Clooney, Best Actress for Famigia, and Best Supporting Actress for Kendrick. I thought Kendrick was especially good as the young lady who sees a career treadmill she doesn't like and gets off.

Up In The Air is an intelligent and modern comedy with some characters I think we can all identify with.

Up In the Air Movie Review

I finally got around to seeing the soon to be Oscar nominated movie, Up In the Air today. A lot of critics are putting it on their lists for top movie of the year and I will have to agree with them. This is a very good movie. It's funny and witty and has some good dramatic moments at the end that really hit you in the stomach. It's one of those rare movies that is fun to watch and makes you think at the end.

The movie stars George Clooney as Ryan, his job is to travel around the country and fire people personally and hopefully tries to help them move on with their lives. It's an art form that Ryan has perfected over the years and he is really good at it. I will have to warn you not to watch this movie if you have just been fired, because the movie is littered with scenes of people getting fired. Most of the people react in an angry fashion and it's almost comical in way they show these montages. Then there are people that react with a sadness and desperation that really makes you feel their pain. Ryan explains that he spends some 300 plus days traveling and a miserable 43 days at home. Through his travels he gives speeches at different hotels about putting your life in a backpack and feeling that weight. Your different attachments in life weigh you down. So he believes in having no attachments.

Anna Kendrick and Vera Farmiga play Natalie and Alex in the movie and their characters provide a challenge to Ryan's way of life. Natalie is a young college graduate with big ideas that will change the way Ryan will do his job. Ryan is not happy about this and thus there is conflict between the two. Ryan's boss, played by Jason Bateman, pairs Natalie with Ryan so that Ryan can show her the ropes. Their totally different personalities and philosophies on life clash and these provides for most of the funny and witty dialogue of the movie. Ryan is an older man who is calm and full of confidence in his job and in his life. Natalie on the other hand is young, naïve, and looks unsure of what to do most of the time. Alex is another business room that Ryan meets on the road and has a fling with. During the course of the movie they keep in contact and hook up as much as possible. Natalie seems to be just like Ryan in life only in female form. Ryan enjoys being with her so much is seems that he is reconsidering his whole theory on not being attached to other people. Is it possible that Natalie and Alex can change his whole outlook on life? That's obviously where this movie is headed.

So what is this movie all about? It's about life. Pretty simple but yet very complicated. There are two philosophies on life presented in this movie. There is Ryan who believes that relationships are the heaviest objects you can put in your backpack. Relationships weigh you down in life. There's too much negotiations and compromise that you have to do. You can't be truly happy with all these attachments with other people. As he likes to say, if you are not moving you are dieing. In a way we can see he is right. Relationships can be hard; you have to work hard at it. It's a drag sometimes. The people you are the closest too end up hurting you the most. We've all felt this at sometime in our life. We see in Ryan's life that he has no close relationships. He has no girlfriends, he has no plans to ever marry or have children, he has no close friends, he hardly has a relationship with his two sisters, he fires dozens of people daily and feels nothing for them, and he seems just fine with that. Natalie on the other hand can't help but being attached to other people. She has fond dreams of being married someday and having children. In fact she believes her life is not complete without this. You also see this when she has to fire people. She can't help but feel very bad for these people and can't detach herself from the situation of seeing these peoples lives destroyed right in front of her.

So at the end of the movie you have to ask yourself, are attachments and relationships worth the effort. The answer I came to be is yes, they are. At the end of the day what keeps you going in life. Is it your possessions or is it the love of your family? For me nothing can compare to the love I get from my family and friends. It's unmeasureable.. As they say you can replace your possessions but you can't replace your loved ones. This philosophy is even more evident in this movie when you think about the people who are fired in this movie. They are devastated by this turn of events but they also realize that they couldn't get through it if it wasn't for their family. You can lose everything but as long as you have a family to go home to you can be happy, you can have hope for the future. Without these relationships you are alone and have no one to help you through the bad times. So I would think about your own life and be grateful for all the people in it.

Grade- B

Rated R- Lots of use of the F-word and other cuss words through out the movie, 2 seconds of nudity of Vera Farmiga, lots of sexual innuendo and vulgar talk between George Clooney and Vera Farmiga.

I really liked the movie, it kind of invites you to bring your own wine. There's a lot of probing into modern life and relationships, and it's up to you what you take from the film and what you feel for each of the characters. I was quite grateful for having seen Reitman's Thank You For Smoking (2005) previously, because both movies are really arch in the way they set up people in thoroughly pariah job roles and then get you to warm to them. So it didn't really come as a shock to see Clooney as an HR consultant (Ryan Bingham) whose job is to fire people in redundancy exercises where the management are too yeller, instead it rated an amused and knowing eyebrow raise.

Although a lot of the movie concerns the workplace, the disconnect between the interests of corporates and the interests of society (a link that was present historically in America, but which has been irrevocably decoupled), and how to work in that environment, the interest for me was more to do with relationships. From my male perspective there are some fairly poisonous insights into the female mind (though it may be unfair to generalise), the young Cornell grad Natalie Keener (played by Anna Kendrick) talks about her preconceptions of the man she will meet, the kind of name he will have, apparently the only thing he will love more than her is their "golden lab". The slightly older perspective from Alex Goran (played by Vera Farmiga) is that the man should be taller, should earn more, and come from a good family. To go with the aeronautical theme of the movie, the theatre should have provided some sick bags.

The main theme is, for me, pure Frank Borzage, it's about earning the right to love and be loved. In common with 80 years ago when those movies were being made, it's an onus that only weighs upon the male of the species, which makes the film a little hackneyed.

My favourite ambiguity of the film would have to be the backpack lectures that Bingham (Clooney) gives. He has a whole metaphor about everything in your life, the people, the trinkets, all the stuff you can collect, being in a backpack and weighing you down. He says that people aren't swans, they're not meant to be together forever, that they're actually sharks, who have to keep swimming continually, weighed down by nothing. I think there's an element of truth to both poles, I can see both arguments. I just love going to a Hollywood movie and not having an opinion shoved down my throat.

I had a slight problem regarding the level of realism in the film, I felt that the air-commuter lifestyle that was being shown was over-slicked, like I was watching something of a feather with The Consequences Of Love (or Giulia Doesn't Sleep At Night, two of the great modern hyper-stylised films from Italy). Nothing wrong with stylisation, except that I think Jason was trying to go for a film that had a lot of resonance with Recession America. I felt it was awkward to introduce real-life folks at the end, and also realistic looking termination assessments (or whatever they're called when you can someone), when the actors such as Clooney and Vera Farmiga were just so damned suave, as if from a different universe.

And this is to Claire.

Based on the novel by Walter Kirn, George Clooney stars as corporate downsizing expert Ryan Bingham, who is hired to help ease the transition of long-term employees to the unemployment line across the country. Taking his job very seriously and loving the 290 days away from home—the only problem with that is the 70 days at home in his empty apartment—his world gets turned upside-down when a young upstart in the company threatens to ground the company to fire people via the internet. Not standing for a change in his life, nor the chance for his life goal of total airline miles to end, ("Let's just say I have a number and I haven't hit it yet"), he goes on a mission to prove how personal his job is and how key a face to face meeting can be to talk down an emotionally unstable person and really do the victim a service in an otherwise horrible moment in his life. Along the way, he and the recent college grad, of which the boss loves due to her budget slashing game-changing idea, Natalie, played by Anna Kendrick, both find out what has been lacking in their lives and how to become better people, opening up to love, heartbreak, and the need to grow up.

Clooney's Bingham is the loner businessman whose only relationships exist from random meetings with attractive females at the multiple airports he frequents. His wallet of plastic has become his lifeblood—credit cards from airlines that accumulate his mileage, hotel status perk cards that let him cut the disgruntled travelers and go straight to the front, and numerous room keys that never seem to be thrown out, causing him to always use more than one before finally opening his hotel suite's door. Detached from his family for years as the brother that exists but cannot be counted on for anything, he contemplates whether he should, or really wants to, attend his sister's wedding—the little girl of the family and someone he should have been involved with after the passing of their father. A series of style cramping incidents for him begins with a phone call from his other sister and the request to take a cardboard cutout of the happy couple, (Melanie Lynskey and Danny McBride, in a role that might actually show some nuance for a guy that usually flies by the cuff), and photograph it in front of famous places he travels to for work "like that French gnome movie,"—I love the Amélie reference. Then comes the threat of being taken out of the air, his home for decades, in order to impersonally let go more people more efficiently; the challenge of taking Natalie on his next schedule of jobs to prove to her why the new system won't work; and the addition of a love interest in Vera Farmiga's Alex, a woman who describes herself to him with "just think of me as you with a vagina"—one of many great lines.

There is a lot of subtlety and intricate weaving of plot lines throughout the story, details and sequences that need to be seen fresh to get the full benefit of the film. What you might initially think is a witty comedy about a jerk of a guy who not only thinks he's better than everyone else, but actually is, that either finds the error of his ways or gets dropped down a peg or two, eventually becomes a tale chock full of heart and emotion. The real success story of the film is a revelatory performance from Clooney who really knocks this on out of the park. He always showed the charisma and chops to play confident and successful, but here is allowed to also branch out and express the pent-up frustration that comes with isolated loneliness, the passion one can have for a job that seems horrible, yet, when treated carefully, is a job to take seriously, and the compassion for humanity on the whole, softening enough to realize that there are people around him that need help besides his laid off strangers, help that only he can provide. The evolution he undertakes is really pretty amazing and I credit Kirn, Reitman, and Clooney for pulling it off with grace and laughter.

Every single actor is unforgettable—even the bit parts like Zach Galifianakis and especially J.K. Simmons as two corporate employees who's jobs have been eliminated. Jason Bateman is hilarious as Clooney's smug boss, fully embodying the take no crap nonchalance he made famous in "Arrested Development"; Farmiga is gorgeous and competent to be able to go toe-to-toe with Clooney in the detachment and power-hungry attitude of flying in style for half a year or more; and, if George's reinvention of character is revelatory, then Kendrick's naïve Natalie is masterful. This girl was top in her class, able to get a job in her field wherever her heart desired, yet settled for this firm specializing in firing people so as to not dirty the workers' real superior's hands. Young and confused about life in the big world of adulthood—set on a plan for marriage and children to occur as though set times on a clock—her eyes are opened to the intimacy and fragility with which a person's mental state can be affected by mere words. When you put them all together, Up in the Air resonates on so many levels; deserving of any praise and accolades to be bestowed upon it. Hilariously funny every second of the way, it is still unafraid to dig into the dark moments of life and treat them with respect and relevancy, going places you wouldn't think it would have the guts to go. You really can't say too much about the film, a top ten of the year entry for sure. Reitman proving to be a force to reckon with and Clooney that he just keeps getting better with age.

This film is about a man who fires people for a living. His world becomes upside down when his job is radically changed by a newly recruited young fresh graduate.

"Up in the Air" is a well made film. The plot focuses on character development and emotional changes of the characters. It is not easy to make characters interesting and memorable, but "Up in the Air" does just that. Both the characters of George Clooney and Anna Kendrick have strongly divergent attitudes and personalities, but they have great chemistry and change each other slowly but surely. How they radically shake each others core belief is engagingly told. I enjoyed watching "Up in the Air" a lot, as it tells an engaging story of self discovery.