At the movies: Up in the Air.

It's a difficult endeavor, trying to find humanity in someone whose job it is to mass-fire a company's workforce. It isn't their fault per se; if anything, they indict the spineless higher-ups who seek outside help to keep their own hands from getting dirty.

But these people exist, and Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) is one of the best. A gifted salesman (who here sells the possibility of freedom rather than the despair of unemployment), Bingham spends most of his life on planes, in hotels, engaging with concierges, the future unemployed, and always the disembodied image and voice of whoever is the next level up. Imagine a luxury first-person shooter American version of Demonlover, and you’d not be too far off.

So his company, under the encouragement of up-and-comer Natalie (Anna Kendrick, better known as Bella's best friend from the Twilight movies), decides to start moving into the field of termination by videoconferencing. The lone wolf operative Ryan's come to represent nears obsolescence, and he finds himself having to show the new kid the ropes, knowing he is sealing his own end the whole time. But family drama has a way of intruding, and Mister Happy-On-His-Own finds himself trying to find something meaningful, while at the same time helping his sister get married and possibly building something with his occasional sex buddy (Vera Farmiga, with Meg Foster eyes and hair that speaks volumes as to ideology).

Already surfing in on a giant wave of awards and hype, Up in the Air is the kind of movie that could get by just on being well-made and entertaining; but it also manages to capture the prevailing emotional currents in this country and get at the major sea change in the way people are viewing their jobs and personal stability. Critics’ groups and the blogosphere are already awash with love for the film, and it’s hard to begrudge that- well-crafted films that deal with grownup issues are becoming rarer than unicorns.

Director/cowriter Jason Reitman avoids most of the foolishness that kept his last film Juno so at odds with itself, and in Clooney, he has a game persona to really explore some of the darker sides of the current recession. Add in a guest appearance by Young MC and a two-scene cameo by national treasure Danny McBride, and you've got an accessible, fairly deep film that serves up a few laughs and insights with its look into the state of the American individual. Awards will come in abundance, but it's the quality that matters, and certainly endures.

At the movies: Land of the Lost.

LAND OF THE LOST

The kind of mess that can only come from an established brand name and a movie star with too much clout for their own good, Land of the Lost is almost worthwhile as an example of big-budget filmmaking with no clear purpose. Sid and Marty Krofft, who created the 70s television show that gives rise to this strange effort, helped produce this new film version, and in the interest of full disclosure, they succeed in recapturing the "what the?" vibe of that show.

With a few tweaks here and there, we find Dr. Rick Marshall (Will Ferrell, unbound by directorial restraint or the slightest hint of taste), a disgraced scientist with a radical theory reagrding spacetime, colliding with the lovely Holly (Anna Friel), a former Oxford student whose interest in Marshall's theories have gotten her drummed out of that venerable institution. Together, they seek to utilize tachyon energy to open a stable timewarp and avenge Marshall's humiliation at the hands of Matt Lauer.

When they find themselves, along with fireworks salesman and would-be entrepreneur Will Stanton (national treasure Danny McBride), in a pocket dimension populated by dinosaurs, primates, big bugs, and the lizardlike Sleestak, then we're still in keeping with the overall tone of Krofft's previous vision. But there's so much sexual innuendo, poo humor (though not as much, strangely enough, as in the truly execrable My Life in Ruins), drug talk, and casual swears that one begins to wonder if there hadn't been some horrible miscommunication in the making of the film.

There's something genial about this film, an 'anything goes' sensibility that goes a long way in establishing some sort of contract between the viewer and the viewed. Much of that comes from McBride, who elevates much of the material he's given, and production designer Bo Welch, whose sets and critters are so nifty and enthralling that I can almost forgive him for directing 2003's cinematic crime against humanity The Cat in The Hat. Farrell is uneven, sometimes excruciating, sometimes inspired.

Make no mistake, Land of the Lost is, at best, a mental margarita. Any time I started getting superannoyed with it, they would throw in an interspecies polysexual three-way or bring back "I Hope I Get It," from A Chorus Line, which is certainly unexpected and appreciated. But it's not consistent (or transgressive) enough to be truly special, though I expect it will have a long and weird videostore life.

At the movies: Observe and Report.

Seth Rogen is one of the country's most reliable comic actors, and he luxuriates in the emotional mess that is mall guard Ronnie Barnhardt. Though the part screams out for writer/director Jody Hill's muse Danny McBride (who has a brief and glorious cameo), Rogen's affability helps lead the audience into dark and beautifully-messed up paths. McBride is one of the more intriguing screen personas of recent years, and between his remarkable screen debut as Bust-Ass in David Gordon Green's All The Real Girls and last summer's Pineapple Express, he's crafted a fascinating body of work. But he can't really bring across empathy, and that's one of the reason that Rogen works so well in the role.

Look no further than enduring treasure Celia Weston as Ronnie's long-suffering mother to find this film's glorious blend of the meaningful, the misconceived, and the monstrous; her scenes with Rogen are remarkable acheivements in taking the grotesque and making them sweet. Weston is like a Flannery O'Connor character, a female Harry Dean Stanton, and she (and Collette Wolf as the crippled baristress Nell) provide the first truly iconic female characters to Hill's cinematic universe.

Barnhardt (Seth Rogen) is a bipolar mall security guard longing for an unattainable blonde (comic goddess Anna Faris) who decides to clean up the filth of the mall by any means necessary, while also defending a young, put-upon woman from exploitative management scum. So we pretty much have Taxi Driver as a screwball comedy, with the added glistening layer of pharmacology that operates in symbiosis with mental illness. Also, it may have the funniest use of heroin I've yet seen in a film.

Regarding this film's more transgressive moments, I have this to say: Observe and Report does not endorse date rape any more than it endorses going off one's prescription medications or beating up children. It's a messed-up film that depicts messed-up behavior, and it's rightly R-rated. It's also a fascinating portrait/indictment of our national fascination with the 'loner who does good' archetype, because Ronnie Barnhardt is emotionally disturbed, and his actions are disturbed. Does the end justify the means? Certainly not, but like Taxi Driver, society seems to think so if all loose ends get tidied up. So where are this film's arrows targeted?

Hill's last film was the near-unwatchable The Foot Fist Way. But in the interim, he and his North Carolina associates have upped their game, giving us the exceptional HBO series Eastbound and Down. And now, with Observe and Report, he's given us the first great major motion picture of 2009. Acerbic, open-hearted, deeply troubled, and walking a fine line between madness and glory, if it starred Nicole Kidman or Bryce Dallas Howard, it could beautifully conclude Lars Von Trier's USA Trilogy. Your friends who'll hate it aren't really your friends.

At the movies: Pineapple Express

Director David Gordon Green has been making great films since his 2000 debut George Washington, and he’s been crafting a thoughtful and distinctive career making smaller, contemplative films about American lives that we don’t often see. So it’s intriguing to see what happens when he, having already hewn out a distinctive approach to character and visual mood, joins forces with the armies of current comedy godhead Judd Apatow. The end result is a scruffy and beautiful stoner amble through genres past, capable of combining bleary-eyed 70s guffaws with car-chasing, property-exploding 80s-styled thrills.

It’s a remarkable achievement as a film, if for nothing else than letting James Franco be funny again. Everything since Freaks and Geeks has found our man James stuck in brooding mode (one of the pleasures of the overly-maligned Spiderman 3 being Franco’s turn during Harry Osborne’s goofy amnesiac scenes), so to find him let loose with comedic gold like drug dealer/future civil engineer Saul Silver is pure pleasure. Star Seth Rogen gets to work his flusterable everydude thing, and that’s all well and good, but the film belongs to Franco and costar Danny McBride. As Red, a middleman who ties Saul to shot caller/murderer Ted Jones (Gary Cole, looking like he’s ready to file some TPS reports on the world’s ass), McBride hearkens back to his bigscreen debut (as Bust-Ass in Green’s 2001 masterpiece All The Real Girls) and banishes all memory of his near-unwatchable ‘comedy’ The Foot Fist Way from earlier this summer.


Pineapple Express is literally the specific strain of marijuana that ties process server Dale Denton (Rogen) to the scene of a murder. The plot, courtesy of Rogen and writing partner Evan Goldberg (who wrote last year’s Superbad) is a meandering thing that spans seventy or so years, a lazy-assed conspiracy, and a small-scale drug war, but one that nevertheless ranks with 2003’s Shaun of the Dead in its insights into the vicissitudes of male friendships. The ace in the hole with this film, though, is the visual grace that Green and his ace cinematographer Tim Orr bring to the proceedings- this is easily the best-looking film that has ever emerged from Apatow Productions. Here’s to more fruitful collaborations along this line, and much respect to all involved parties for maintaining their respective integrities.