Word: airings
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...film broke down at the evening screening, Clooney serenaded the audience with a comic-opera rendition of O Sole Mio that wouldn't make Placido Domingo envious but did wow the crowd. This weekend he's in Toronto with two films, Goats and Jason Reitman's Up in the Air - which, to end the suspense right here, is one of the festival's and the year's best movies. At a press conference yesterday, when asked why he doesn't have a Facebook page, Clooney smilingly answered, "I'd rather have a prostate exam on live...
...difference between Clooney in kooky farces like O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Goats and Clooney in more realistic movies like the Ocean's series and Up in the Air is the intensity of his playing. In the farces, he wears his heroic grin with a subversive idiot twist; his steely-eyed certitude reveals just a flick of lunacy. Otherwise, Clooney is reasonable, understated, channeling his charisma without really trying. When he tamps down the movie-star magic and just lets it seep out, it glows all the brighter...
That's quite a feat in Up in the Air, since his character, Ryan Bingham, is a management consultant hired by other companies to tell their employees they're no longer employed. He's a fire-man; he keeps his job by relieving other people of theirs. And he does so with such ostensible sympathy and sincerity, with helpful suggestions on other lines of work, that the victims often leave the interview not wanting to give Ryan the Death Touch. He's a head chopper acting like a grief counselor...
...they're the bosses who haven't the nerve to ax their employees face to face. Still, a movie about a guy who fires people, released at a time when at least a tenth of the workforce is out of work, is utterly nervy. And wonderful. Up in the Air is not primarily an issue movie, banging home its thesis with reductive characters and heavy melodrama. It's a romantic comedy, as Ryan finds a soul mate - if either of them has a soul - in the sultry Alex (Vera Farmiga), another high-flying executive with an itch...
...dream will come crashing, if Natalie (Anna Kendrick) has her way. Fresh out of business school, with a psychology minor, she sells the company president (Jason Bateman) a scheme to save millions of dollars in air and hotel bills: just fire people from the home office, over a picture-phone device like iChat. Ryan is stricken. Natalie's plan threatens not his job - he can stay in Omaha, Neb., and make the kill calls - but his way of life. No more first-class treatment; no familiar salutations from hotel clerks and flight attendants who are his equivalent of friends...