One of the year's best!

Rating: 10/10 (3 April 2010)

My Take: An intelligent, down-to-earth dramedy with strong lovable performances and an intelligent script. One of the year's Best movies.
Although it was his screenwriter Diablo Cody who got all the praise (and the eventual backlash) for his hit JUNO, director Jason Reitman deserves just as much praise for bringing that lovable quirky hit to life. Following the success of JUNO and THANK YOU FOR SMOKING, his latest film UP IN THE AIR is yet another likable and clever story with a perfect balance of quirky humor and some relevant issues and real down-to-earth humanity. It's also one of the year's very best films and probably the year's wittiest comedy.
I love a little mindless escapism as much as the next guy, but sometimes I just want to see a movie where a couple of down-to-earth human beings sit around ad talk to each other in the wittiest ways possible. George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, whose job is to travel around the United States of America to fire people. Since his boss (Jason Bateman) and the company he works for is, as he described it, too cowardly to do it themselves. He enjoys the life on the open road anyway, and he's already used to living his life on his suitcase (he gives speeches regarding the subject). But just when he is about to reach 10 billion Frequent Flyer miles, his life takes a turn. He meets a woman (Vera Farmiga) he might possibly like intimately and his company finds a possible way to fire people via internet and therefore grounding him on Omaha for good.
UP IN THE AIR is not just a another quirky comedy with a Capra-esquire premise and where the lead character is some guy whose been missing out on what's important in life, the characters here are real and relatable, and it's also a movie that is made at the right time where the issues and current events are still relevant. Released at the time America plummeted into economic recession, the issues in UP IN THE AIR are still hot and topical and the movie deals with it realistically instead of giving it the typical Hollywood dumbing-down. Reitman didn't just make a great film, he's made a great film on the right time.
After being the first Oscar favorite upon release, I wonder why it couldn't have won at least one of the six Oscars it was nominated for. A win for Best Adapted Screenplay would have been deserving. Reitman's script (co-written by Sheldon Turner; based on the novel by Walter Kirn) is loaded with wit as well as serious drama and some situations that feel like a reality slap. His movies, UP IN THE AIR among others, aren't just quirky comedies; they have this reality in them. Clooney gives one of his best performances (as is the talented Vera Farmiga, here at her spunkiest and most refreshing) while Anna Kendrick gives a career-making one as the newly-hired Natalie Keener. She's not in a lot of movies these days (she was in TWILIGHT), but after UP IN THE AIR, she's should expect a lot of them lining up. If JUNO acknowledged his presence in the movie-going public, his later films like UP IN THE AIR might just put his name on the map. Funny, quirky, but grounded in reality, UP IN THE AIR is another future minor classic alongside Reitman's successful "little" movie. By all means do not miss one of 2009 very best and smartest movies.
Rating: ***** out of 5.