UP IN THE AIR

UP IN THE AIR
Movie (2009), 108 min (Canada; unknown USA)
Director: Jason Reitman (Juno, Thank You for Smoking)
Screenplay: Jason Reitman, Sheldon Turner

"Up in the Air," called in Japan "Mileage: My Life," is about a guy who fires people for a living, fogging up each axing with platitudes on how losing a job is like being given a chance to do something one's always wanted to do, or how it's a thrilling second chance, or how it's a wakeup call. I believe we're supposed to laugh, either at the glib verbiage or--I hope not--the people being let go. Surely not. Yet there is a sort of snooty condescension pervading this whole "dramedy" that put me off.

But I wasn't too put off to enjoy George Clooney as Bingham, the ax-man, looking as much like a Dapper Dan slickster (remember "O Brother Where Art  Thou?") as ever, but trying for some dramatic chops as he falls in with Alex (Vera Farmiga), who's as footloose as he is and as commitment phobic--"footloose" as in, Bingham does so much traveling and firing that he's going for 10 million frequent-flier miles, has never married, and never wants to.

Meanwhile, back at Bingham's home office in Omaha, his boss has hired a bright young graduate in psychology, Natalie (Anna Kendrick), who proposes using video-conferencing for firing people, thereby slashing travel costs. Kendrick looks a bit like Kendrick playing Amy Adams (whose perfect lite role this might have been), as she travels with Bingham, trying to learn the firing ropes. She also tries, unsuccessfully, to convince Bingham he needs a relationship, commitment, reality.

Along the way, Bingham and Alex get caught up in each other, and the story perks along too predictably. The ending surprised me, and I had not predicted it. Nice to have at least a small twist to finish a standard Hollywood plotline.

"Real" people--people who've actually gone through downsizing or reorg'ing (as reorganization is sometimes called in corporate hallways), or who've simply been "let go" from jobs of varying but always substantial duration--star in the firing scenes. They are superb, honest, stunned, angry, disappointed, surprised . . . Superb. A couple of actors are in there in the lineup, notably J. K. Simmons as Bob, who is smashing as he reacts (or not) to Bingham's florid corporate folderol.

Are you a frequent flier and traveler? This picture may make you airsick. "Up in the Air" is like an ad for American Airlines and Hilton Hotels. The product placement is not just placement, but a plastering of billboards. Despite all that, the cinematography is beautiful and the editing crisp. Tired old rock? folk? songs make up a forgettable soundtrack. All in all, though, this is a thoroughly enjoyable movie. It was nominated for six Oscars and won none, but it did garner many other awards for 2009.

At the end of the movie, Bingham stands before an enormous flight-schedule board, no doubt from one of the major U.S. airports--it's that big. His face is blank. Where's he going? It doesn't matter. He's going up in the air to earn his 10 millionth mile and to ruin the lives of a few more striving employees somewhere in the perceived emptiness of flyover country.

P.S. If you missed "O Brother Where Art Thou" (2000), you missed a rollicking good time, with George Clooney as an escaped convict in the deep south, presumably Mississippi, since Parchman is mentioned. With two fellow escapees, he tries to find some hidden swag as he makes his way back home. The Coen brothers based this one on, of all things, "The Odyssey." It's a charmer, and the backwoods music of the wonderful soundtrack is perfectly what it is.

A GOOD QUESTION

WHERE DOES IT ALL END?

The following is the concluding section of a blog post of April 13, 2010, from Victor Davis Hanson, who is, among other things, the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.

He talks sense. You'll find a link to VDH's blog at the end of this excerpt:

Where Does it All End?

I confess this week to have listened in on many conversations in Palo Alto and at Stanford, read local newspapers, and simply watched people. So I am as worried about the elite upscale yuppie as the poor illegal alien. The former have lost almost all connection with physical labor, the physical world, or the ordeal that civilization endures to elevate us from the savagery of nature.

While many were fit, and seem to work out, bike, ski, and hike, none understood the mechanics that lie beneath the veneer of the good life — the chain-sawing, hammering, drain-unplugging, tractor-driving, irrigating, and welding that allows a pleasant afternoon Greek salad and cappuccino on University Avenue — the disconnect between those Pennsylvania “clingers” and Obama’s arugula-eating crowd.

So much hinges on impressions. I listened to two young attractive women bemoan housing prices in Menlo Park — $1,000,000 for a modest 2 bath-3 bedroom older cottage in a “good” neighborhood. For that amount, each would be royalty in Fresno, perched on the bluffs over the San Joaquin River in a massive 5,000 sq. foot estate, with a half-acre yard.

A strange elite I suppose likes and pays for the ambience — that is, living among people like themselves — of upscale university-centered communities. Why? I have a theory. It allows them to be liberal and progressive in the abstract, without having to live the logical consequences of their utopianism, or deal with the underbelly of American life. Take the most sophisticated Palo Alto dweller, and a week outside of Laton on a farm would make her, well, “seasoned” so to speak, and challenge much of her assumptions about wealth and poverty.

As I watch this teeming recession-era energy — thousands leaving squalor in Mexico for the life raft of the U.S., thousands in the middle buying as birthright what a few decades ago would be considered the playthings of the aristocracy, and thousands living in a progressive bubble disconnected from the grime and mess that fuels it — I hope there are still enough around to keep all this going. I say that because a new Microsoft program, a better search engine, another recent arrival from Chiapas, and someone out of work and still at Best Buy simply are not going to get us out of this recession, find the energy to keep the country fueled, and create the money to pay off a soon-to-be $20 trillion debt. In short, from this week’s observations, I think our so-called poor need to read a bit more, and our assumed elite to read a bit less.

Visit Victor Davis Hanson's blog at:

http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson041310.html

DEPARTURES (OKURIBITO)

DEPARTURES (Okuribito)
Movie (2008), 130 minutes
In Japanese with English (and other) subtitles
Director: Yôjirô Takita
Screenplay: Kundo Koyama


This beautifully composed film won an Oscar in 2009 for Best Foreign Language Film, and only a few minutes into it one can see why. The spare loveliness of Japan's plains, rivers, and mountains is set against the totally mundane struggles of a thirty-something cellist, Daigo (Masahiro Motoki), whose orchestra shuts down and leaves him jobless. At about the same time his mother dies in his faraway home town, so he and his wife, Mika (Ryoko Hirosue), move into his old home--where memories of his long-gone father linger.

Realizing that he's not much of a cellist, anyway, Daigo starts over in a new job. He answers an ad in the local newspaper for "Departures," believing he's applying to a travel agency. Daigo gets hired straight away by his new boss, Sasaki (a taciturn, if not morose, Tsutomu Yamazaki), and he soon learns that the job is about departures, all right, but of the funerary kind: He will be preparing bodies for their "departures" from life. The English subtitles referred to his profession as "encasketing," and some call it "encoffining," but what the job amounts to is prepping and dressing the deceased before cremation.

At first Daigo is reluctant to keep the job, and when Mika learns of it she is repulsed. Gradually, though, Daigo begins to comprehend the simple beauty of the rites he performs and the effect of his work on grieving families. Relatives observe him as he ceremoniously dresses and composes the bodies of the departed, making them as beautiful to look upon as he can, in the moments before they're consigned to the crematory oven. Wry humor often lightens the mood, but Daigo's work is solemn, respectful, careful, and almost devout. It's a cultural side of Japan I've never imagined, and so the film is enlightening in its way. And Daigo doesn't forget his cello. He plays for Sasaki, for Mika, and, I suppose, for the comfort of the familiar.

Some reviewers have called "Departures" whimsical, but you could have fooled me. There's humor, yes, and maybe I took the whole thing too seriously. But when the aging operator fires up the crematory oven on the casket of the town's beloved bath-house keeper, his secret love--and when Daigo lovingly dresses out his re-found but dead father--I don't get the whimsy.

The relatively long run-time for "Departures" put me off at first. Long movie, smallish stories within. But the minutes serve the long ceremonial rites shown. The film doesn't rush the rites but plays them out, in a hush, letting us take time to observe and love both the encasketer and the encasketed. Maybe we're supposed to smile about how much time the Japanese can take for such rites. I can't think why.

This is a beautiful film, with sweet overtones--speaking of the cello--of hope and discovery.

For the trailer, visit http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi3454469145/

THE LOVELY BONES

THE LOVELY BONES
Alice Sebold
Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company, 328 pp

Now this is peculiar. Just in recent weeks, I've read two books that portray a person murdered, ascended somewhere from life, observant of the people she's left behind, and fascinated by all. The first was Amy Tan's Saving Fish from Drowning (more on that another time). The second is The Lovely Bones, now a major motion picture, as they say.

What a commanding point of view a "ghost," or spirit, character gives the author. Here a 14-yeaar-old girl named Susie tells the story of her own brutal rape and murder and then, from a sort of heaven, views events and times from the present back into the distant personal pasts of her fellow life players. Susie studies the dreams and desires of her family, her friends, and her killer, immersing herself in all their stories, told and untold.

Conversations come to her intact, from any age and any person: the day Harper's mother left his father, for example, and is seen fading away into a barren desert landscape. Susie also peers into life's small mysteries, such as the source of a certain dress, borrowed by the surviving sister, Lindsey, from Susie's closet after her death, though Lindsey has no idea of the dress's origins (the dress belongs to dead Susie's friend, Clarissa, who will never get it back). Indeed, a spirit narrator gives new meaning to what we call the omniscient point of view.

On the surface, "The Lovely Bones" is sad, tragic, a chronicle of one life stopped way too short in its tracks. But as Susie's family works through the pain and grief of losing her, her spirit hangs in the background spurring them on, hoping for the best, almost willing them to happiness.

The New York Times Review of Books called the book mesmerizing. I'm sorry to say I often found it stultifying. Great concept, well-drawn leading character, and one thousand more details about small events than I could cope with. I found myself skimming paragraphs about 50 pages in, then scanning pages, then multiple pages.

Some people skip to the end, but I never can. Gotta see what the author is going to do with the characters. The book drew me in but didn't hold me. I couldn't stick with the self- and other-analytic meanderings. Also, the style some called lyrical I saw as over-blown, with adjective-crammed descriptions teenagers write and see as beautiful. OK. The narrator is 14 years old. So I guess I can give Sebold the benefit of the doubt.

Actually, I give the author much more than the benefit of the doubt. Sebold is a crackerjack story-teller and, along with a complex story, has created a version of heaven that's intriguing and promising. Like every other reader, though, I wanted Susie back--back in school; back on the school staircase with her almost-boyfriend; back with her father, building ships in bottles; back and growing up. And she's dead. The way Sebold serves up hope with the sadness is a small miracle of her writing craft.

Oh, and a note to the publisher: Spare us, please, the "reading group guide." How kindergartenish do you see us that we need little questions to guide us to understanding a book? Who is reading the book? Some goof somewhere who doesn't know her or his own questions to ask? I had plenty and I'm sure other readers have plenty. Green up, guys! The ghost of a tree just told me you are wasting paper.

FANTASTIC MR. FOX

FANTASTIC MR. FOX
Movie (2009), 87 min
Director: Wes Anderson
Screenplay: Roald Dahl (novel), Wes Anderson & Noah Baumbach

The top reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/) gave this one a 100% rating. "Wry, witty, quirky, wonderful!" said the critics.  I can only suppose I'm missing something; actually, I'm missing a lot.

The stop-motion animation is lifeless, the dialogue is pretentious and stupid, the story--well, I can't say. I left this movie 15 minutes in. The "hero" (Mr. Fox, voiced by George Clooney) and his wife (Mrs. Fox, voiced by Meryl Streep) move from their poor foxhole to a tree on a hill. Soon they have a visit from their son's cousin, Kristofferson (voiced by Eric Anderson). He does a perfect dive into an inflatable pool, and Mr. Fox's son gets jealous. Lifelessly. Then, rejected, I guess, Kristofferson sobs quietly on his pallet in the night. The son gets up and turns on an electric train to soothe him. A real train runs by the hillside at night. Gripping.

OK, that's where I quit. If you can watch this for free, say, at someone else's place, you'll get your money's worth.