Come Anticipate Up in the Air: Jason Reitman, George Clooney, sad songs

except it's used for 3 things in the film. 1.) zach galifanakis 'lols' 2.) depressed woman who winds up killing herself and 3.) for him to inspire somebody to be a chef and show his younger protege that there's something important about their job.

Charlie Sheen crying and handcuffed is more emotionally effecting than Clooney watching his sister married to the tune of bog-standard indie guitar plucking

Hmmm. No.

I want to agree with you, but Sheen is such a moist towel. Timothy Hutton woulda been better casting, or -- God help me -- Tom Cruise.

it's juicy, trashy fun

Alice Cooper in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the new-wave pedigree of Queen's The Game, and the importance of RBIs--for the fourth time on this board, you folks have worn me out. It's Friday night, and the TV calls--so let me duck out on a statement I agree with 100%.

I want to agree with you, but Sheen is such a moist towel. Timothy Hutton woulda been better casting, or -- God help me -- Tom Cruise.

― Gucci Mane hermeneuticist (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, September 17, 2010 11:53 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

should have started that sentence with an "even"

gah, cutting off. I should have started that sentence with an "even"

i can't imagine what might incline one to defend, much less champion, this film, clemenza. the one bright spark in it (clooney as a romantic lead) was given very little screen time, and what we got instead was shallow, silly, borderline offensive mush. everything was spelled out in such ridiculously bold and simplistic capital letters. he loves hotels and corporate spaces. his apartment is absurdly spartan. he keeps his family at arm's length and cares about no one. he is empty inside. I GET IT. though terrified of intimacy, he craves it. he is a child evading the familial responsibilities that "naturally" accompany adulthood. responsibilities and emotional connections that he secretly craves. I GET IT.

and it's easy to refudiate any movie by describing it in those sneering terms, but i never believed anything about this movie. i never believed in clooney's ryan bingham. he seemed far too neatly circumscribed, too socially graceful for the shrivelled life he'd chosen. i never believed that his nihilistic motivational speech could appeal to anyone. i never believed in his chipper/naive new assistant. as charming as anna kendrick may have been, the character remained a shallow, tiresome cliche. there were moments of honesty and insight (mostly in the family dynamics, e.g., his sister's reaction when ryan offers to give her away), and again, i loved the flirtation/seduction scenes between ryan and alex. but the rest was as relentlessly empty as ryan's object-lesson life.

boo

^ would rewrite

I suppose I should be grateful for a concession or two there--vomit and pedophilia now have moments of honesty and insight to keep them company. I swear I've never seen such mortification heaped upon such a relatively genial film.

I noticed tonight that the pull-quote on the DVD box is from Tom Carson (hopefully not taken out of context). Carson's beautiful Leave Home essay is probably my favorite piece in Stranded. He's someone whose writing I really used to value--I want to hunt down his review and see if we were both duped by the same things.

i heard he did that blurb as a joke

Had to scroll up and read my own comments to remember whether I liked this movie. Turns out I did!

I went back and read your post, Guayaquil--I could have done without Yosemite Sam Elliot's moustache, otherwise agree with it all. Broken Flowers, yes. Bill Murray has to be completely numb in Broken Flowers, of course, because it's a Jim Jarmusch film. (I love Stranger Than Paradise. Sixth time around, as someone above might say, I GET IT.) Your comment also led me to Morbius's "moral stench." In all this back-and-forth the past two days, I've had this nagging sense that something's missing, a mysterious void...now I know what it is.

i heard he did that blurb as a joke

Joke, right? I can't tell anymore. I found the original review--there's a link way upthread--and apparently the film's sledgehammer messages didn't land on Carson, either:

Not until it dawns on the audience that Ryan's budding second thoughts about his life choices don't necessarily mean he'll be redeemed--he's still got to reshape his world to suit his new priorities, and the world may or may not feel like obliging...

Disappointed to find out he doesn't like American Beauty, though, which I love. But let's not open that door.

wise decision

you fucking people

It sucks to be right.

rmde if yall didn't think there was an implicit judgement on what clooney did for a living, if you didn't see the self loathing in his deliberate alienation from human contact, if you saw some kind of pat moral lesson in the ending

aw man what happened to rmde.gif

can't remember if I did or not...it wasn't really good enough to stick in my mind for more than 2 days...
xp

aw man what happened to rmde.gif

It was swallowed by our hate for this film.

lol

just watched this tonight obv and i didn't love it or anything but the river of bile in this thread is astounding

i saw an incredibly condescending & conventional film written by jason reitman

was flipping channels recently and resaw the part where Vera Farmiga tells himself to "be an adult" about her double life. Having him be clueless about her having a family was hands down the stupidest thing in the movie. How could they have spent so many nights together without her ever calling her little kids? They went to a damn wedding together!

Not to mention she's clearly made to look like she's angling into his personal life. Such a weird "twist" to throw in.

it's an awful awful movie and reitman is an awful awful filmmaker and human being.

j0rdan otm go watch michael clayton (yeah the end is dum but it's 10x anything up in the air could hope to be)

i saw an incredibly condescending & conventional film written by jason reitman

― truly blunted rhyme fiend (J0rdan S.),

otm, but you forgot lazy

Not to mention repulsive, vomit, and pedophilia--don't forgot those!

nah, didn't forget em, movie didn't elicit any such strong emotions tbh.

It could've been worse: Reitman says if Clooney hadn't worked out, he wanted Steve Martin in the role to make another Lost in Translation. And even worse than that, someone could get the idea from that and cast Clooney and Danny McBride in a Planes, Trains and Automobiles remake.

All that said, I liked About Schmidt better.

Clooney and Danny McBride in a Planes, Trains and Automobiles remake.

would watch

I've seen this twice now and really enjoyed it both times. I wouldn't say it was amazing but I found Clooney's character compellingly conflicted. The talking heads were a little shoehorned but the top-down city/landscape establishing shots were beautiful. It was just a nice bit of morally conflicted, not-actually-happy-ending fluff.

Those establishing shots were really great.

again i say, just watch michael clayton

Just watch Koyanisqaatsi.

I liked this well enough as I was watching it, but the more distance I get from it the more uncomfortable it makes me. There's some good stuff in there though, not quite understanding all the hyperbolic reactions. I didn't see the twist about Farmiga's character coming at all, it floored me even if it was kinda cheap - and the ensuing scene (Clooney talking on the phone with her, the look of hurt on his face, her blame-shifting "well I'm an adult" response) was pretty devastating and real to me. I liked the initial portrait of Clooney as a guy who was actually delighted with his lonely, itinerant existence - that's something I haven't really seen in a movie before. Sam Elliott rules.

I sorta feel like it's a trap to start talking about Reitman, but I've disliked him a lot ever since I read an interview with him in a roundtable with some other directors and he came off like an ass (and also since I saw Juno LOL). It seems a lot of people here feel similarly, and I wonder if it makes some of you predisposed to tear apart a movie that you would ordinarily only find mildly distasteful. People make fun of his quotes about The Insider upthread, but I kinda see what he's saying (it's just that The Insider was a wildly inappropriate example for him to use). I like stories that humanize people with... morally... questionable careers, but having watched Thank You For Smoking not long after this (it was really excruciatingly bad) it seems more like he's really willing to let himself be seduced by that type of character to the extent that he'll go to bat for their most grotesque flaws, so long as they're really smooth and charismatic.. he's just not very honest about his anti-heroes. Goodfellas seems like a better model for how to do that kind of thing.

Way too much mopey acoustic guitar music.

Fucking hate Juno, fwiw.

The movie is distasteful enough without knowing Reitman's CV.

I thought "Thank You For Smoking" (a crypto-conservative adaptation of a crypto-conservative novel) was fun at the time, and worth it all for the Rob Lowe smoking-in-space bits, but when said crypt-conservative makes three crypto-conservative films in a row, is it possible to separate the crypto-conservatism from the final products? Like, doesn't it just make him seem all the more cynical?

Next up is apparently another adaption, of the novel "Labor Day," and possibly an adaptation of a short story about football or something.

Joyce Maynard, I guess.

The dog days of August . . . All summer long, thirteen-year-old Henry kept hoping that something different would happen, but it never did.

Then, just as the Labor Day weekend gets under way, in the Pricemart where Henry′s mother, Adele, on one of her rare forays out of the house and into the wider world has taken him to buy pants for school, a bleeding man approaches Henry and asks for help.

Frank is a man with a secret, and a man on the run. Adele is a wounded soul whose dreams of family life and romantic dancing died years ago, even before her husband left her and their son. And Henry is a "loser" and a loner, a boy on the cusp of manhood who, over the next five days, will learn some of life′s most valuable lessons: how to throw a baseball, the secret to perfect peach pie, and the importance of placing others--especially those you love--above yourself.

what is crypto-conservative about up in the air again?

or juno?

im kind of sick of the idea that if character can have an abortion in a movie and yet doesnt, that makes it conservative. or the idea that family life can be like, good for a person. calling that shit "conservative" just seems like liberal hyper-sensitivity to me.

i mean i can obviously see how those ideas could fit into a conservative program, but they're not conservative on their own.

totally. i'm cool with abortions killing babies, but abortions killing films is where i draw the line.

Agreed s1ocki.

i saw this last night.

what exactly was the message of his backpack lecture? why would people pay to hear it?
how did he know vera's home address? i guess we assume he did some creepin on google or something?
how did he know where to mail anna kendrick's recommendation?
how is it remotely realistic that a dude with his schedule would fly one airline?
why did they decide to gank sam eliot's big lebowski scene and do it worse?

i mean i'm with yall on some of the contemptible messaging in this film but DAMN it's appalling that writing this lazy rarely gets called out like it should.

^ real talk

what exactly was the message of his backpack lecture? why would people pay to hear it?

this one really bugged me, think i mentioned it upthread.

Those are great points! I never figured out the point of those lectures either.