I have seen a couple of mainstream movies this week. Up, a Pixar robocartoon, and Up in the Air, an odd romance starring George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, and Anna Kendrick.
I had serious reservations about Up, owing to the fact that I am allergic to animated, talking animal movies. My idea of Hell is eternity in a theater showing nothing but animated penguins performing Chorus Line. But I like the idea of flying around in a house with balloons attached, so I sat down to watch it when the Netflix DVD arrived.
As it turned out, my instincts were sound. Up wasn't all bad, except as cinema. It began with a very touching story of a friendship that became a life-long marriage. I like that sort of thing. And I can suspend disbelief enough to ignore a house held aloft by helium drifting somehow steadily south to Angel Falls in Venezuela. But when the talking dogs flying biplanes showed up, I briefly wished that I was in Venezuela. Go see Up only if you like watching an unusually animated Ed Asner and an overweight boy scout towing a floating house, pursued by dogs with squeaky voices.
Up in the Air, by contrast, was a very well made film. I have reservations about George Clooney, but I can't deny that he is an excellent actor. Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a man whose life consists of hotels, airports, and his job, which is firing people. I travel by air frequently enough that I can easily imagine all but the last part. He is good at his job, and he likes the airborne life precisely because it is so tenuously attached to life on the ground. He has all the magic cards that get him quickly through each gate and into each VIP club.
Bingham is a man who is happy being shallow, with no other purpose in life than to reach a magic number of frequent flyer miles. Of course he encounters someone who punctures his comfortably self-maintained cabin pressure, just at the moment when a family crisis forces him to confront a situation for which he has no script. I won't spoil anything here except to mention that Vera Farmiga's Alex Goran is deliciously sexy.
Up in the Air does something that mainstream movies only rarely do. For the most part, you have to read to get a realistic and well-marbled bite of a different life. I don't know if there anyone flies around giving unfortunate folks their walking papers, but I am sure there are people who spend most of their lives between airports and card-keyed hotel room doors. I like that taste of a different life. Up in the Air has it. I give it a thumbs up.
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