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

blah blah fuck you

good review of any Jason Reitman flick imo

eazy is your friend the one reitman talks about giving him a song on cassette tape in his fresh air interview?

It's the guy who did this song -- I think the cassette one is a different one, in the closing credits.

Eric, why did I think we'd find common ground on this?

I am anti- this movie, after all. I just give it credit for being a slick fraud.

I think I really fucking hate this guy

I mean I wasn't gonna see this anyway but the political subtext of his previous two really bothered me (not to mention their smarmy, unearned "feelgood" undertones) and this sounds no different. plus I am tired of Clooney's schtick.

btw the indie music soundtrack to this movie is pretty bad and not even really appropriate to what's going on on the screen.

this is really that bad ?

It's surfacy and kinda diverting; what's underneath is contemptible.

I was very confused by the Fresh Air interview with Reitman when he said he was people kept telling him that after being laid off, they felt they lacked purpose in life. Call me shallow, but my complaint with unemployment isn't that I'm bored or directionless, it's just that I'm broke. That's all, really. That's the only reason I even remotely WANT a job. I fucking hate jobs.

Anyway, if the movie has undertones of equating unemployment with being single, and that both conditions mean you lack purpose, then I don't think I have any interest.

No, it's Clooney's hardcore solitary bachelorhood that the film uses to encourage the audience to judge him badly (not so much the fact that he flies around the country terminating people).

i thought this was aight. not a bad performance in the whole thing, anna kendrick esp. terrific. really bad music tho.

No, it's Clooney's hardcore solitary bachelorhood that the film uses to encourage the audience to judge him badly (not so much the fact that he flies around the country terminating people).

― Feingold/Kaptur 2012 (Dr Morbius), Saturday, December 12, 2009 8:08 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ya the movie never really addresses that his job is ruining people's lives, it even sort of puts him on a pedestal for doing it with some charm

and ya the music honked

and how bad was the scene where ** SPOILER **

he goes to vera farmiga's house? it was tipped like a mile away. and then when he goes away all sadface and you hear her off-camera hubby go "who's that" and she's all "just SOMEONE WHO'S LOST"

argh

Definitely want to see this. Have to wait till next month before it's released here though.

I don't think I've seen this Anna Kendrick before, but at best she should be categorized as best supporting perky chipmunk.

SPOILER

"just SOMEONE WHO'S LOST"

Should've had AUTHOR'S MESSAGE blinking at bottom of screen.

well, the tip is when she's telling Natalie that "selling" is not "losing." I ctually didn't anticipate that twist because at the time I thought it was beyond stupid that they'd suggest those two characters could be a couple.

^oops, "seTTLing"

about how willfully single people are subhuman. Marriage Is All You Need.

I don't think this is entirely fair - Clooney's main trespass in the movie is cutting his family out, not his singlehood.

also not 1/100th the smarminess of Away We Go in effect IMO.

argh I hate that I am siding with the lame critics on this one

this fucking movie.

Clooney's main trespass in the movie is cutting his family out, not his singlehood.

They're sort of equated, but the matelessness gets way more attention: Kendrick hectors him about it, and the whole punchline of Farmiga's character points to the black hole in his soul.

The last forty minutes are so condescending and soul-sucking that I almost threw my cellphone at the screen.

I was very confused by the Fresh Air interview with Reitman when he said he was people kept telling him that after being laid off, they felt they lacked purpose in life. Call me shallow, but my complaint with unemployment isn't that I'm bored or directionless, it's just that I'm broke. That's all, really. That's the only reason I even remotely WANT a job. I fucking hate jobs.

i heard this bullshit, too and i kinda wanted to reach through my speaker and throttle this dude. anyway, Kenan otm. seriously, if you need some workaday bullshit job lining the pockets of people who could give two shits about you (& let's face it, that's got to be about 97% of everybody ever) to have a "sense of purpose" well, son, that's pathetic.

I liked how suddenly the firee was a 'real actor' as soon as some Phony Themes needed to be sounded (ie, the JK Simmons scene, the weeping Detroit guy).

i mean you should just go join a church full of assholes ffs. oh, wait...

xpost

i heard this bullshit, too and i kinda wanted to reach through my speaker and throttle this dude. anyway, Kenan otm. seriously, if you need some workaday bullshit job lining the pockets of people who could give two shits about you (& let's face it, that's got to be about 97% of everybody ever) to have a "sense of purpose" well, son, that's pathetic.

also heard the interview, the "sense of purpose" stuff was condescending bullshit but there is some psychological value to the 9-5 gig aside from the paycheck.

i'm sure jason reitman knows full well the struggle of people without a solid foothold trying to make it in a difficult business

(can you tell i'm having an A+ day at work?) x-post

tbh based on this film (I skipped his first two) he has the slick bullshit down pat regardless of dad's name

'thank you for smoking' had some ok bits but it was smug in this bullshit libertarian way, and 'juno' was better than i expected but still kinda useless imo

tom carson loved this (and hated juno and smoking) and that's good enuf for me

this movie sucked pretty hard

Tom Carson is the most well-known hairstyle & salon photographer in the world. Tom's photos appear in today's top hairstyle magazines and travels all over the world shooting photos for today's top salons.

http://www.gq.com/contributors/tom-carson

Tom Carson is the most well-known film critic in the world. Tom's reviews appear in today's top men magazines and travels all over the world watching movies for today's top publications.

this movie was borderline condescending and also had really predictable plot developments and one-dimensional characters

it wasn't as bad as 'away we go' at least...

Really hated this.

"just SOMEONE WHO'S LOST"

I groaned very audibly at this.

more like laudably

Criticisms here well-taken but I gotta say this was still in the 90th percentile of movies. "Someone who's lost" -- I agree this is a bad line but that's why you hire good actors! She sold it. Lots of good small things in this movie. Excellent sound work in early scene where Clooney zips his suitcase a lot. Strange and totally successful moment of Lynch-like hyperrealism when the chief pilot sits beside Clooney. His mustache should be nominated for best supporting actor.

Also of course the point of the "someone who's lost" scene (or this scene combined with what follows) is the exact opposite of the "all must succumb to pair bonding to be fulfilled" message Morbs identifies -- that is there, but this scene complicates it. No one in the movie actually LIVES the monogamous pair-bonded life except potentially Clooney's youngest sister -- and that couple is clearly set up for ruin by the movie (otherwise why take the time to detail fiance's sinking of life savings into doomed real estate scheme?) If anything the take-home message of the movie is "nobody has a perfect fulfilling pair-bonded life, you just muddle through and try to find out what works for you" -- which for Alex is nice house in the city + mess-around on the side, and for Clooney is the ungrounded life he's established for himself, and to which he returns at the end of the movie, for good.

I also liked the less complicated and unabashedly pro-pair-bonding "Away We Go," by the way, and agree it's appropriate to compare these two movies.

Maybe also "Up in the Air" against "Broken Flowers," a somewhat similar but much worse movie. Clooney is able to DO something while he's looking out the window at nothing; Murray just looks empty.

Clooney is able to DO something while he's looking out the window at nothing; Murray just looks empty.

I have become a Clooney convert. He knows how to put himself in front of a camera and fill up a scene. Reminds me of Cary Grant in that way.

Clooney is fine in it. The acting is certainly not this movie's problem.

I don't remember Broken Flowers having a moral stench.

Nothing out there is any good this year, so a halfway winning film about semi-recognizable adults is being oversold as Sturges 2.0.... tarted up with inexcusably mawkish, Laurent Cantet-for-the-USA Today-set inserts of "real" people (not actors!) addressing the camera and describing their emotions following the loss of their jobs due to downsizing. This spray-on gravitas is preposterous, not just because it's so clearly phoned in, but more importantly because these "real people" are there not to complicate The Ryan Bingham Story (what an actual art film would do with, you know, extra-diegetic nonfictional material), but to cement its home-and-hearth trajectory as American gospel.

http://academichack.net/reviewsDecember2009.htm

Hey Morbs, I checked out 35 Rhums on your rec and it was really good. Thanks!

glad!

yeah i thought the use of REAL FIRED PEOPLE was pretty disgusting

This fucking movie. Only the Academy would consider Anna Kendricks' kewpie doll performance nomination worthy.

what about Young Adult

lol

Slipping back to the original topic. Clooney and Vera Farmiga somehow or other made Up in the Air watchable. They didn't make it sensible, because that would have been impossible, but their being onscreen for roughly 98% of the time kept me from turning it off. This is a mystery about movie stars; they have the power to cloud your mind - but in a good way.

I really like this movie.

Encrypto conservative

Why does he need to learn the same lesson like five times in a row again and again near the end of the movie

I liked the Elliot Smith song, but having an entire film of saddos doing solo indie folk just mushed it all together. Why did we need to hear that sort of song when it switches back to hand-held again when they're breaking into the school other than "oh is this supposed to be an indie movie or something"?

So, they stayed long enough at the closed school to see everything and get into all the locked internal doors and then the basketball team shows up to find two adult strangers just sitting on the bleachers?

Your (ten?) million-miles status has nothing to do with the number of frequent flyers miles you have to spend, which he was never going to use anyway, so by doing the obvious thing that the film sets up for him to do by giving a trip to his sister he's sacrificing absolutely nothing, tho it was a nice gesture.

I travel way too much and was able to recognize at least the DFW airport from the overhead shot, and where they'd filmed bits inside DTW.

The speechifying bits were just when things started getting worse and worse so that we knew what was going to happen when he gets to her place.

I took the "what's in your backpack" to be a riff on "what color is your parachute," which makes far more sense since he's a guy who fires people.

Sam Elliot's cameo really was straight out of Big Lebowski. Also, commercial pilots don't get that old, since they retire or wash out medically long before then, right?

anyone seen his new film Men, Women & Children? it's had a right kicking and the trailer has no dialogue which seemed suspect from the get go.
but i was still intrigued.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5aKdBxlmIc

it was savagely reviewed, even by reitman standards

labor day was not really good, but not entirely awful

didnt realize it was based on a joyce manard novel and if she was the pie maker consultant in residence as this photo seems 2 suggest, she made a good contribution. never really considered i wanted josh brolin to purposefully teach me how to bake a peach pie but the heart wants what it wants i guess

http://static.rogerebert.com/uploads/blog_post/primary_image/interviews/joyce-maynard-on-labor-day/primary_MaynardBrolinWinslet.jpg

*maynard

Dennis Haysbert as Secretluvur

I was trying to think of something that you could plausibly blame for everything that's rotten about the world right now, and I immediately thought of this.

Not true--but I did watch it last night for the first time since the first time. Same reaction: not bad. I really liked Clooney's sister (the one divorcing, not the one getting married). And now I know Anna Kendrick better: liked her. I wish they'd dropped all the backpack speeches. I felt sad for Young MC.

okay so I've been to a bunch of tech conferences, not ONE was anything like it was in this movie. that's a peeve of mine, when a movie has the obligatory BIG PARTY scene and it's over-the-top and lavish instead of Miller on tap and maybe a store-bought cake. suddenly they're on a giant cruise? and then the boat breaks down? what was the point of that? this party must have cost $500 a head (plus or minus Young MC's fee) and they don't even check IDs?

other than that I thought this was okay. first half was pretty fun, second half pretty much blew. I thought the twist with Vera Farmiga was telegraphed a mile away. like everything in the movie. "who wouldn't want a picture in front of this....historical airport!?!?" Danny McBride getting cold feet for basically no reason ("but I'm gonna die someday!") was just the dumbest thing. Ditto for Clooney turning all saddo despite spending half the film talking about how much he loves not being tied down. The backpack thing was pretty dumb too. Felt like the film was just stumbling around in search of meaning but couldn't really find anything to say but "shucks, why wouldn't you want a family?"

I guess it was decent

Jason Reitman gives Alexander Payne a run for his money these days as one of the worst directors around

men, women and children was a ten years too late in its exploration of teens into sex and the controlling parents that love them.

Some of his earlier movies are fine but at best (young adult) he makes b movie schlock that wouldn’t be out of place on a hallmark film of the week

I remember watching this movie and liking it but literally nothing in frogbs's summary rings a bell w me so I guess it didn't make much of an impression, e.g. from the discussion here it sounds like there was a backpack in it which i don't remember at all

i did not like this at all

i felt bad for young mc

I felt mad for Young MC.

This film calls to mind a discussion we had on the board a month or so back about film's being forgotten once their Oscar runs are finished, sort of like the awards-bait version of "Forgotbusters." This is a prime candidate: I doubt I've thought of it once since seeing it (forgot about Young MC until just now!) and this is the first time I've seen anyone bring it up in years.

yea sorry

it was on Netflix and we were just like, "I heard that was good"

I actually liked it up until the bit where the cardboard cutout came in and it was pretty obvious this couple was gonna be framed as the polar opposite of Clooney's life and wind up teaching him an unexpected lesson or two

reitman's got a new movie with charlize theron - i'll watch it just for her. tbh his movies are comfortable pap for the most part

Unless there’s a big name attached (Spielberg, Clooney), I don’t know if political films ever make money any more. (Meaning films about actual politicians, or famous political stories attached to them.) Maybe that’s always been the case, I don’t know. I’m not even sure if The Post or The Ides of March did especially well. Everybody knows everything by now, and nobody needs a movie to pull back the curtain on anything.

I thought The Front Runner was okay. The book was better, not surprisingly--Matt Bai’s central argument, that Gary Hart’s ’88 implosion was qualitatively something new, was framed persuasively. The film catches some of that, most effectively when J.K. Simmons’s campaign manager pleads with Hugh Jackman as Hart to address the runaway story, and Hart--beyond the fact that he’d simply rather not respond--seems to genuinely believe that it’s a non-story not worth addressing, one that will run its course in a day. Reitman tries hard for fly-on-the-wall war-room atmospherics, to the point that sometimes you’re left watching the camera glide past people sitting in a room mumbling, and the film stops dead. Jackman’s pretty good, though they let Hart off easy--I remember him as much more hapless and empty than the seriousness he’s given here. There’s a good moment where, after exploding at a staff member for prying into his private life, the same question comes at him during a key press conference, and he turns diffident and evasive; it’s like a rough draft of Michael Dukakis’s robotic capital punishment answer at the debate a few months later. The film tries to be fair to Donna Rice but completely bypasses any and all interaction between her and Hart--a big mistake, I’d say (legalities, I suppose).

I always mention how much feel for period these kinds of films have. I know that that kind of thing can get really clunky and intrusive if you overdo it, but I think there ought to be some attempt to place the events in a historical moment. Except for a brief television clip of Jim and Tammy Bakker (which was not unrelated to Hart’s story) and glimpses of some really large cell phones, The Front Runner doesn’t even try.