{"id":764,"date":"2010-01-16T00:04:30","date_gmt":"2010-01-15T14:04:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/?p=764"},"modified":"2010-01-16T00:04:30","modified_gmt":"2010-01-15T14:04:30","slug":"up-in-the-air","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/?p=764","title":{"rendered":"Up in the Air"},"content":{"rendered":"

Critical darling Up in the Air<\/em> is a movie that could stand to get me into a lot of trouble. This is largely because I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand why it was the favourite of so many critics in the last year; it is a well-made movie, and a good one, but to me it had none of the emotional resonance that I expect from something like this.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) spends most of the year traveling. He loves it, and is good at his job: firing people on behalf of their employers.\u00c2\u00a0 When young upstart Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) proposes a webcam firing system, Ryan takes her on the road to demonstrate why the more personal touch is a better option. At the same time he has to negotiate the impending nuptials of his sister and the feelings that he develops for Alex (Vera Farmiga), a person exactly like him \u00e2\u20ac\u0153but with a vagina\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/p>\n

Clooney and Farmiga are very good in their roles, and their chemistry is believable; the fact that they exist only in a travel bubble rather than a tangible reality is not a problem. They work well in a scene designed to parallel an exit interview with Natalie, and they are largely taxed simply with co-existing. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the film\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s most compelling and paradoxically honest note.<\/p>\n

A major stumbling block, for me at least, is Kendricks. I couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t \u00e2\u20ac\u0153like\u00e2\u20ac\u009d her character at all: the idealistic young romantic with grand ideas about her purpose in life (which, for some reason, means nothing unless she has a man). It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s fine to not like a character, but Kendricks can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t sell her. Her performance was flat and she does not carry the role. She\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been nominated for several awards for her performance, some of which she won, so I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m wondering if it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s something about me and not the film, that is ever so slightly off.<\/p>\n

Have I finally found a movie that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m too young for? I identify with so much that I see in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153personal\u00e2\u20ac\u009d movies that really have nothing to do with my personal situation, but Up in the Air <\/em>couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t quite crack my shell.<\/p>\n

I think that this, in part, is because we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re probably supposed to feel sorry for the protagonist\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s predicament: he prefers a nomadic life of solitude to staying in one spot and keeping the consistent company of others. So? It works for some people; it works for Ryan. There is the suggestion that he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s compromised part of his soul \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and he has, a part<\/em> – but a soul is different things to different people, just as a movie is.<\/p>\n

If a movie can be said to have a soul, this one is lacking a small but crucial part of it. That is an incredibly objective statement and one nearly impossible to quantify, but that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the impression that I got.<\/p>\n

Up in the Air <\/em>has been described as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153light existentialism\u00e2\u20ac\u009d; it seems to be faintly damning of how a man might choose to spend his life, if he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s happy with that. I always thought that Clooney had it good; I believe that maybe a man is allowed to be happy without somehow having been conned into simply believing that he is.<\/p>\n

What is a true romance, that between man and airline (and that which Reitman apparently shares), is rendered cold, impersonal and somewhat pathetic. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not allowed to believe that Clooney could possibly enjoy what he does, and that he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a bad man for doing so. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a judgment I could have done without.<\/p>\n

Up in the Air <\/em>is a good movie, but its plaudits mystify me: am I missing the truth of life that will be revealed to me once my body ticks over to a certain date? What is the final piece of the puzzle that didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t click into place for me? Was I simply thrown off guard by Jason Bateman\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s inappropriate facial hair? Was I suffering economy fatigue? (No, that is a fatigue triggered by Soderbergh).<\/p>\n

The editing is good, the soundtrack great (certainly better than Juno<\/em>\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s endless Kimya Dawson \u00e2\u20ac\u0153doo doo doo doo doo\u00e2\u20ac\u009d), and Jason Reitman is certainly talented. At the same time, I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think that Juno<\/em> was best picture material, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m just as mystified here.<\/p>\n

There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s something about Up in the Air<\/em> that stops it short of greatness for me. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a smile of a movie, rather than the profoundly moving experience I think it would have liked to be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Critical darling Up in the Air is a movie that could stand to get me into a lot of trouble. This is largely because I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand why it was the favourite of so many critics in the last year; it is a well-made movie, and a good one, but to me it had none of the emotional resonance that I expect from something like this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1HLZ6-ck","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=764"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":766,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/764\/revisions\/766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}