Up in the Air

Part three of the George Clooney Christmas blitz is not as weird as "The Men Who Stare at Goats" or "The Fabulous Mr. Fox" but it appears to be destined for the same weak box office numbers, which again leads to the question "Is Clooney box office?". He's certainly a movie star, but with the exception of the "Ocean" movies and perhaps "Michael Clayton" he's made movie after movie ("Burn After Reading", "Leatherheads", "The Good German", "Syriana", "Good Night and Good Luck", "Solaris", "Syriana") that audiences seem content to see when they come to DVD. And "Up in the Air" seems to be another destined to be in your Netflix que.

Men Who Stare at Planes

This time Clooney stars as Ryan Bingham, a termination specialist whose job it is to break the bad news to employees that they are being fired. He flies from town to town. spending most of his year on the road, doing the dirty job that companies don't want to do themselves. To cope with the sorrow and pain he's inflicting on a daily basis he's detatched himself from emotion and created a protective coccoon around his life--no attachments, no commitments, no family, no real friends. He enjoys life on the road (his apartment is a bleak studio void of personality) and dreams about the day he'll log 10 million miles on American Airlines.

** 1/2

Based on a novel by Walter Kim

Screenplay adaptation by Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner

Directed by Jason Reitman

On one of his trips he meets his female opposite ("Think of me as you except with a vagina") named Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga) who he begins a zesty sexual relationship with. Suddenly his boss (Jason Bateman) pulls him of the road. The termination firm has decided to try teleconferencing as a way of cost cutting. Instead of flying from town to town to fire people, they can do it from a computer back in Omaha. This is the idea of young wunderkind Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) who is long on brains but short on experience and looks like she's 12. To teach her how to handle actual people Bateman sends Keener on the road with Bingham to learn how its done.

Yes there is nudity including a completely gratuitous (yet welcome) shot of Farmiga's bare bottom!

"Up in the Air" is not a bad film. It's just not a particularly compelling one. The script seems to have no sense of what's gone on before either. There's a taste of it when Bingham returns to Milwaukee for a family wedding, but there's no sense of it in his growing relationship with Vera. I mean Bingham's been on the road all this time. He must bang a waitress or stewardess in every town he's in, right? Does he suddenly stop when he starts up with Vera? Or does he see other women in addition to her? Can a leopard change his spots?

Vera herself starts out as an interesting character but then the script sends her into the predictable cliche offramp. While I applaud Ivan Reitman's son Jason's directing ability, I think he might have worked on the script a little more. Perhaps the entire movie might not have been better told from the POV of the young Keener instead. Maybe if we had found out more about how Bingham got to where he is it would have made the film more satisfying. And that's not to say this is a bad film. It's not. It works as a small indie film that becomes more of a major release because of the star power of Clooney (he gets media attention at least, if not box office).

Since the academy awards have expanded their Best Picture catagory to 10 for "Up in the Air" to be on the list.

Finally I have to mention that one of the most distracting things I found about the film was how much Anna Kendrick looked like a young Tom Cruise. It might not show that much in the picture below, but throughout the film it looked like a young Cruise in drag. That's not to say she was not good in her part. She was. But all her expressions and looks seemed very Cruise like. I kept waiting for her to yell "Show me the money!" or to try and recruit the people she was firing to scientology.