Up in the Air

Well, I gotta say that it has been a little while since my last post. I have an excuse! Being the overachieving high school student that I am, I decided that I would take part in the spring play which has practically taken over my life. I also wanted to make this really awesome post that included pictures and what not but unfortunately, Adobe Photoshop will not download onto my computer and so I have no spiffy pictures to show from the movie or anything of that sort which is quite sad, I must say.

Anyway, I didn't really know anything about Up in the Air when I started watching it. I knew that it involved airplanes of some sort, George Clooney was in it, and the first Twilighter to get an Oscar nod was in it. Other than that, I really didn't know much about the movie at all.

I'm not really sure what to say about the movie. It's about this man named Ryan Bingham whose goes around firing people for a living. He loves being on airplanes and in airports and thinks of it as "home." He isn't into family matters and doesn't really believe in "relationships." All of a sudden, twilighter Anna Kendrick comes in as Natalie and proposes a new, more technological method of firing people for his company. He shows her the ropes so that she can gain experience. Also, some romance is thrown in there with Vera Farmiga as Alex.

Did I believe George Clooney deserved an Oscar? Probably. I thought he was just as good in this movie as he was in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and you can't go wrong with the Coen brothers in my opinion. He portrayed the lonely character of Ryan Bingham very well and I'm not sure if it was just me or if I'm reading too much into this but Bingham seemed to possess both sophisticated and child-like qualities. It's in his relationship with Farmiga's character that his lack of growth and childishness really comes through. Clooney did a great job of portraying those contradictions within his character if that was what his character was about. There's also that sense of reality in something that was meant to be cheerful in a way. Characters try to escape their lives because they're always on the move. They never have to clean up any messes they make because they're gone before you know it. There's a quality of reality in this cheerful escapism.

I did generally enjoy the movie, but I wouldn't want to watch it again. I like movies that are generally happy and have good endings rather than ones that seem like the characters are making progress only to end up back where they started. I would say you should watch it though to compare with the rest of the movies of 2009. Moon, Inglourious Basterds, District 9, Avatar, and the Hurt Locker were all better than Up in the Air in my opinion and it's not really surprising to see why. Also, I didn't think it deserved its Best Picture nod but the rest were deserved to a certain degree. They should have put Star Trek instead of Up in the Air in! Oh well. Next up... Precious.

Sandy