UP IN THE AIR (2009) - Jason Reitman

We live in times which are rich for satire. It’s easy to poke fun at the state of the world, but sometimes satire can wander into the territory of cliché. Yet Jason Reitman’s latest film, Up In The Air manages to be satirical without ever being patronising. It’s a film that is perfectly timed for the world today. A world of unemployment, foreclosures and a society struggling for identity and direction.

Ryan Bingham has possibly the worst job in the world. He is the person companies hire in order to fire their employees. All he sees every day is people on the verge of nervous and emotional breakdown. And yet, he loves his life. He is constantly moving, working out of a suitcase. He travels the US, lives in hotels and counts air miles as achievements. And yet, he is alone. He barely talks to his two sisters, and has few friends. But his life is on course for a change. His company are introducing video conferencing, which would allow it’s employees to fire people from one central location. This threatens Bingham’s lifestyle. So he takes his company’s wunderkind, the developer of the video program, Natalie Keener, on the road to see what exactly it’s like to fire a person.



As I’ve mentioned, Up In The Air is the perfect film for these times. It deals with themes that many people can relate to right now. Unemployment is rife, companies are closing, and people just feel a sense of constant loss. It’s to Reitman’s credit that he uses real people to depict the people being laid-off by Bingham. Apart from a few actors who depict more plot-central characters, everybody Bingham fires are people who recently lost their jobs. Reitman instructed these people to tell the camera what they would have liked to have told their former employers, and the emotion really carries over. It adds gravitas to the film and makes the emotional impact more palpable.

George Clooney has found the role he was born to play. Ryan Bingham is suave and charming. Yet he seems detached from proceedings. It’s isolation he’s chosen, and perhaps, being a movie star and not interacting with ‘normal’ people like the rest of us, Clooney brings some of himself to the role. It’s a great performance from him, and indeed, the rest of the cast. Newcomer, Anna Kendrick plays Bingham’s charge, Natalie Keener. Keener is straight out of college and has something to prove, and yet is incredibly vulnerable when it comes to personal issues. She breaks Bingham’s isolationism down as he shows her that people aren’t just statistics. They’re perfectly cast against each other and lend real credibility to the film.



Jason Reitman’s career has taken off very well. His first three features, Thank You For Smoking, Juno, and Up In The Air are commercial and critical successes that deal with issues people can relate to. Up In The Air is probably the best film he’s made so far. It manages to capture the mood of the average person, while managing to tell a well-rounded personal story. It’s a very very good film, and worthy of the nominations it has received.


9/10

THE HANGOVER (2009) - Todd Phillips

You’ll have to excuse the briefness of this review as I’m writing it, and my thoughts on Transformers both in one sitting, and I’m just dying to get onto Transformers. The Hangover is a comedy from Todd Phillips, the writer-director of Old School and Road Trip. In a way, The Hangover is like a melding of those two films. It’s part road movie, part grown up guys having a good time with consequences film, although in this film, we only see their partying.

Doug is due to get married. Two days before his wedding, his best friends, Phil and Stu, and Doug’s soon-to-be brother in law, Alan take him on his bachelor weekend in Las Vegas. Phil is a married teacher and wants to party hard before he has to settle for good. Stu is a man on the verge of proposing to his girlfriend, a thundering bitch who keeps tabs on him twenty four seven. And Alan is a bit of an idiot, but well-meaning at the heart of it. Things go awry when Phil, Stu and Alan wake up after the party with no memory of what had happened and no sign of Doug’s whereabouts. So they must begin an odyssey to find their friend before the wedding.



There’s not much that can really be said about The Hangover. It’s a really entertaining, genuinely funny buddy comedy that relies less on gross-out humour and more on situational comedy. It’s too easy to just gross the audience into laughter in comedies these days. But rather than rely on that, Phillips lets his characters and the messes they get themselves into create the laughs. Ed Helms, who is a central character on The Office seems most at home when it comes to comedy. He’s a very funny performer, and while Stu, his character in the Hangover isn’t as ludicrous as The Office’s Andy Bernard, he still handles the situations very well.

Zach Galifianakis plays the idiot of the piece, which, along with Bradley Cooper’s pretty asshole character, is a staple of these types of comedies. It’d be too easy to mess this character up, but Galifianakis gets some pretty big laughs throughout the film. He spends most of the film with a blank expression on his face, but the is part of his schtick, and carries the character.



The most uncomfortable part of the film is a cameo by Mike Tyson. It’s impossible to separate Tyson from the controversies that have dogged him throughout his career. And when he does turn up, you can’t help but feel he’s going to lose it, step out of the screen and punch you right in the face. However, seeing Tyson singing and air-drumming along Phil Collins’ ‘In The Air Tonight’ is worth the price of admission alone, and much more entertaining than a drumming ape in a chocolate advertisement.

A very solid and entertaining comedy, The Hangover shows that resorting to lowest common denominator laughs isn’t the only way to garner a chuckle from the audience. Far better than Phillips’ other two hits, The Hangover is a quality film amidst a swathe of really terrible summer blockbusters.


8/10