Two stories in one

Rating: 6/10 (1 January 2010)

The acting, cinematography, production values, and editing are first rate. There are gobs of good one-liners, even for more than one viewing. There are plenty of stellar views of flyover country, including those round irrigation circles in a square landscape. I've never seen so many different recognizable cities from the air. The shot of an airplane landing from the point of view of the airplane itself (not from the side of the runway) is even better than being there.
Lots of fairly detailed strands of different subplots are woven together very well. It's sorta a comedy, but sorta serious too. It's one of those where after watching the ambiguous ending you leave the theater laughing, but at the same time thinking "hmm...".
I was disappointed though that it's two different stories at once. There's the movie about the rootlessness of the frequent flyer, the connoisseur of tricks for faster boarding who uses his many club membership cards as a pick-up technique. There's also the movie about firing people, about sudden unemployment and what it feels like from both sides of the table. To a reasonable extent the two come together thematically: the emotional underpinning of the rootless frequent flyer is an awfully good base for firing people. As a former traveling software support person who became redundant, flying, computer technology, and layoffs all resonate personally with me. But those resonances don't dovetail in my mind like they do here; I'd prefer to see separate movies.