Illusions and Recycled Air

The 40 something executive in a customised designer suit who zips through check in, while you wait it out behind the four parent, six screaming kids nightmare of a family returning from a ski vacation. The woman who clocks in sixty thousand odd air miles, managing a career, a family and two children. The hotshot young manager who comes up with a way of cutting 85% of the cost to company, two weeks into her first job. 

Ryan, Alex and Natalie are the key protagonists in the film in writer/director Jason Reitman's "Up in theAir", during the course of which he effortlessly takes these and other hallowed examples of what constitutes a  successful human being in modern society, and manages to get the viewer to see beyond the cliche. - Ryan has lost any semblance of human connect, Alex has "settled", and Natalie hasn't realised that she can't have it all.


Through the course of the film, the characters reveal their cynicism ("Think of me as yourself, only with a vagina" - Alex) and their essence ("How does it not even cross your mind that you might want to have a future with somebody" - Natalie), with effortless wit and irony, and, at it's end, you leave not feeling sorry for any of them, but rather reflecting on (as Ryan would put it) what you, if anything, would really  "put into your backpack before you set fire to it."

There are many metaphors for the decline of substance and real human connection in this film, one of them perhaps is also that it has been pitted with the likes of Avatar in race for the Oscars. While it is unlikely that it will triumph over the flash and dazzle of technology, the money making juggernaut, or the political correctness of other contenders, in itself, it is a quirky little gem, with some great acting (a shoutout to a brilliant Vera Farmiga and a merciful lack of schtick from George Clooney), brilliant writing and the pluck to stick to what filmmaking is all about - that sleight of hand that makes you engage and reflect while thinking that you are being entertained.

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Avatar - the modern drama

The Chinese government has pulled Avatar out of an estimated 1500 theatres in China, substituting the film with a biography of Confucious. While arguably, cinemagoers are better off with this switch, the motives behind the move are more sinister; many commentators believe that it is an attempt to nip in the bud any unrest that might be building up as a result of popular association of the Avatar storyline with the struggles of Chinese against land grabbing real estate developers. (China's Avatar restrictions cause a stir - Wall Street Journal)

Elsewhere, the L'Observatore Romano, the Vatican mouthpiece, slammed the film as endorsing a return to "neo paganism" , or the worship of nature over God, a view that they say is endorsed by the Pope (the Pope watches movies?? who knew!!.) Not to be outdone, the American conservative media has also jumped on this bandwagon, one reviewer calling the film anti  American in its "... hatred of the military and American institutions, and the notion that to be human is just way uncool.." (John Podhoretz, The Weekly Standard)

Seriously?? We are talking about the film with the giant blue people right?? The one you needed to wear those comical cardboard glasses to watch? The one with flying mountains, dragonlike creatures for transport, lack of substantial clothing for the main protagonists and a giant tree as the main point of conflict? The real green metaphor in the film is the amount of moolah that the producers of the film have generated, and the colour of envy in the faces of the competition.

 

The only real risk that this film poses to mankind is the prospect of a lineup of sequels and a slew of knockoffs in which we will be forced to endure cliche-ed storylines and even more dazzling special effects as substitutes for great storytelling and real human emotion.

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