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

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.

iirc we only ever saw his opening bit and never saw where he was going with it, ie nowhere

"yall need a good backpack"

i didn't pay that close attention, and it's been a while, but wasn't the lecture meant to be a business-world-self-help version of his business-world-accumulated wisdom about living without attachments, traveling lightly, whatever? every extra person or thing you're attached to weighs you down because it's like you're carrying it around, best limit yourself to no more than fits in a backpack (conveniently on-stage as prop)?

but who cares about that, people in this thread are not putting enough stress on more important things, like staring at vera farmiga.

....But it wasn't her ass!

that truly is a downer

if Juno was conservative, what does that make Knocked Up? blee.

....But it wasn't her ass!

magic of film.

Love this thread.

Hate this thread.

Revived because while rewatching a bit at my parents' house earlier it reminded me why I like hotel bars more than most people.

Practically forgot I saw this until I watched 50/50 and remembered how painful it is watching Anna Kendrick on screen.

i love dr morbs in this thread so much

I wonder if there should be an anticipation thread for that new Cody/Reitman joint...ya know, for the discussion (i.e. lolz).

Revived because while rewatching a bit at my parents' house earlier it reminded me why I like hotel bars more than most people.

― Anakin Ska Walker (AKA Skarth Vader) (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, September 23, 2011 11:09 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i kicked it in a hotel bar the other day; hotel bars rule

Young Adult is really a pretty loathsome movie

I hope the Fannies made a shit-ton of money off of it tho

nah -- Charlize Theron was terrific.

As for The Other Movie, watching it again a few months ago reenforced the absurdity of the Farmiga plot thread. Why on earth is she written as someone who might spend her life with Clooney. If she's supposed to be a same-time-next-year lay why the fuck would she consent to spend a weekend with Clooney's family? It makes the "surprise" at the end of the movie even more preposterous and loathsome.

my issues are more with the overall construction of the movie - the story arc, the setting, the rote staging ("insert scene where main character stares meaningfully at the detritus of their life while innocuous indie-film-score music plays" etc), the predictable ending, the lack of actual jokes

xp

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.