Up In The Air

Ryan Bingham has the bliss life, the kind we all think we would want, the one where we can live out of our suitcases and fly anywhere we wanted to, piling up frequent flier miles and staying in swank hotels.

In Up In The Air, Bingham (played with ever-easy charm by George Clooney) lives this life at a cost: He works for a company that other companies hire to fire people. And Bingham does his job very well, giving speeches about people who built empires who started right where Mr. or Ms. Laid-Off Worker is sitting.

It is a cold job he does with dignity and to do that job, he lives a disconnected existence.

And everything is swell, until his company decides that it would be cheaper to do the firings via video conference rather than in person. That threatens Bingham's out-of-suitcase lifestyle.

Plus, love, in the form of another corporate downsizer named Alex, also shakes up his obligation-free life of arrested development.

As directed by Jason Reitman (who gained enormous critical acclaim with his Oscar-nominated film Juno), this movie flits from sexy comedy to a screen version of the book Bowling Alone, which detailed the collapse of the American community.

Critics have hailed this as Clooney's best performance. That's hype, but it is a good performance, one that taps into Clooney's persona as the never-going-to-marry bachelor. The brilliance of his performance is he shows through Bingham the dark side of such a persistently solo existence.

It is only when he falls in love with Alex (sexy smart Vera Farmiga) that he realizes maybe the way he has gone about his life was wrongheaded and wronghearted.

Reitman, thankfully, keeps the movie from getting all mushy, and part of that comes from the real-life people who play the employees who get fired, their emotions red-hot. That decision grounds the movie, so to speak. He manages to sneak in a message or two about the devastation our ever-shrinking economy is having on every day Americans in a story about our increasing isolation from each other, the ease in which we hurt each other primarily because we've lost that need to connect in a meaningful way.

We're all about text messages and Facebook friending and twittering our lives instead of living our lives. And in the end, all that flying, all that living out of the suitcase, gets old and empty.

It is a important message that Reitman delivers without preachiness and with plenty of humor. And it makes me think I should probably fly more.

Book of Eli

Book of Eli is a parable parading as an action flick, a mediation on the importance of literacy buried beneath decapitations done in silhouette.

And it is all cool and never preachy.

This is the first feature from the Hughes Brothers in nine years, the creative forces behind Menance To Society and From Hell.

Allen and Albert Hughes, in their new movie, decided to go western and apocalyptic, the result of some mysterious nuclear holocaust 30 years prior.

Denzel Washington is the titular Eli, a lone warrior in the tradition of Mad Max, armed with a gun, a blade and the last Bible on the planet. He has walked deserted roads and burnt-out landscapes littered with the remains of a world no one knows anymore.

Thirty years ago, a voice (presumably God) told Eli to head west with that Bible so that it may one day do good and be the key to mankind's salvation. And he has kept that path and cut the hands off anyone who dared touch him or what he simply refers to as the book.

We've seen apocalypse on the screen many times, men and women reduced to savages killing each other over scraps of food. The recently-released The Road covers much of the same ground the Hughes Brothers deal with here.

But the difference here is that it is not just water and food that are scarce resources; books no longer exist. And the villain, Carnegie (played by the wonderful and often creepy Gary Oldman) is the only other person in the film who knows and appreciates the power of books and the knowledge contained within.

Carnegie is the would-be dictator of a small town into which Eli enters, and once Carnegie finds out that Eli has the only Bible in the world, he sets out to do whatever it takes to get that book, knowing that he might be able to use it to control people.

Given the subject matter, it is surprising that the movie isn't as ponderous as one might think. The Hughes Brothers make ample room for humor and for cool action sequences that show Eli is rather deadly with his blade.

The cinematography is evocative, as one would expect from the Hughes Brothers.

And there is a twist at the end that won't be revealed here that, at least for me, deepened the movie.

No, the movie isn't all that deep but I found it fascinating and thought-provoking, a cool action flick that easily pleases those who love to think and those who just love a good knife fight and those who happen to love both.