Up In The Air is easily one of the best movies released this year, even if there’s not that much year left to spawn new contenders. For a while now, when it comes to serious adult-oriented dramas, the cinema has come up lacking. It’s been a banner year at the movies with Inglorious Basterds, Up and District 9 showing us that studio-genre films can still surprise you and indies like (500) Days Of Summer, Hurt Locker or The Brothers Bloom offering up some left-of-center entertainment. Up In The Air stands alone outside of this year’s Oscar Race because it never seems like it’s gunning for a statuette. Director Jason Reitman and stars Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick and George Clooney have offered up something special, a story I’ll revisit from time-to-time as the years march on.

George Clooney slides into Ryan Bingham effortlessly. Bingham’s job is to fly around the United States and fire people when the managers and executives of any given company don’t want to do the job themselves. The economy being what it’s been this year-of-our-Lord, 2009, business is looking good for Bingham. He’s flying all over, racking up frequent flyer miles, trying desperately to get to a big, round number: 10,000,000 miles. Only 7 people in the world have ever reached that number. You get your name on the side of a plane and a personalized card. Ryan Bingham loves cards. He has them to get in and out of hotel rooms, check in and out of red carpet clubs, I’m fairly sure there isn’t an old-fashioned key-access door in this whole movie.

We pick up with Bingham as he’s giving a motivational speech, his side job where he preaches his “backpack” analogy, telling people in the audience that they must keep moving if they are to reach success. Part of this constant personal motion involves leaving behind personal relationships, something Ryan is very good at.

Enter Vera Farmiga’s Alex who has a similar obsession to Ryan, an obsession with status and the cards representing that status. Alex and Ryan get along well because they are both just into the sex. They plan layovers and reschedule flights to end up in the same city for a couple of hours and neither seems to be all that concerned with the other when they are apart. At least not initially.

Nothing really challenges Ryan’s worldview until Bingham’s boss (played by Jason Bateman) pairs him with Anna Kendrick’s Natalie. A young, 20-something go-getter who has proposed that Ryan’s firing business go online to web video so they won’t have to send agents on month-long air trips around the US. Needless to say, Bingham’s not for this idea and his attempt to stop it puts him in the uncomfortable position of teaching Natalie the ropes in the field even when the best case scenario is that she will make Ryan obsolete.

Up in the Air is a three character film, at the most. Clooney gives another great performance as Ryan Bingham, making him lovable in an Ocean’s 11 kind of way even though the man’s attempts at changing himself for the better aren’t always motivated by the right things.

Clooney aside, this movie belongs to the two supporting actresses who will be duking it out amongst themselves for noms in a few weeks. Anna Kendrick will be making a name for herself with this performance, coming out from the shadow of her Twilight casting. Vera Farmiga might have my favorite female character committed to film thus far this year, and I spent most of the movie getting the interpretation of her completely wrong.

Outside of three fine performances holding Up In The Air together, Jason Reitman might have stumbled across the first movie that provides an accurate cultural snapshot of the recession. I don’t think the filmmaker was aware that he was doing it, at least interviews I have read ad conducted with him don’t mention it, but the isolation that each of these three characters feel and how they deal with it rings true to me. Granted, Bingham and his girls are isolated from the rest of the world by a busy work schedule and the organized chaos of air flight, but they are also socially isolated when they are on the ground, using electronic devices to communicate. Ryan texts Alex, Natalie calls her boyfriend on her cell, people are fired via webcam, technology is in this story providing false connections, but this theme isn’t highlighted. It’s just there.

That combined with the particulars of national airports that we’ve all been inside and seen designed, stocked, crowded, then inconvenienced by post 9-11 security makes a world that is relatable to most people living in the modern condition during this economic downturn. You never get the feeling that there are a lot of functional groups of people in this movie, we see shining moments of hope at the wedding of a Bingham sister and large groups of people at self-help seminars, but everyone in this film starts their screen time isolated, confused and alone.

And – surprisingly – some end the film that way.

This is Jason Reitman’s third film after Thank You For Smoking and Juno, and while I can’t say Up In The Air is the best film I saw all year, I can say that Jason Reitman has made three solidly “good” movies. The man isn’t the second coming, but he makes complete films that seem like a unified presentation from how it’s shot and scored to how it’s written and performed.

I don’t know when Up In The Air is released near you (perhaps check the official site?), but I highly recommend you see it. I know it will have a place in my home video library in the future, in case I ever want to remember how confusing it felt to be living at the tail end of the first decade of the 21st Century.

Yahoo! got themselves a new poster for The Men Who Stare at Goats. The film stars George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey, J.K. Simmons and goat (who’s real name cannot be revealed due to an ongoing legal dispute between the Goat Actors Guild and the Association of Hoofed Beings).

The film is ‘inspired by a real story’ and follows reporter Bob Wilton (McGregor) who is in search of his next big story when he encounters Lyn Cassady (Clooney), a shadowy figure who claims to be part of an experimental U.S. military unit. According to Cassady, the New Earth Army is changing the way wars are fought. A legion of “Warrior Monks” with unparalleled psychic powers can read the enemy’s thoughts, pass through solid walls and even kill a goat simply by staring at it. When the programme’s founder, Bill Django (Bridges), goes missing, Cassady’s mission is to find him.

Click here to watch the trailer!

George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey, and J.K. Simmons are in a movie together. It’s called The Men Who Stare At Goats, and it looks quite good. The film is ‘inspired by a real story’ and follows reporter Bob Wilton (McGregor) who is in search of his next big story when he encounters Lyn Cassady (Clooney), a shadowy figure who claims to be part of an experimental U.S. military unit. According to Cassady, the New Earth Army is changing the way wars are fought. A legion of “Warrior Monks” with unparalleled psychic powers can read the enemy’s thoughts, pass through solid walls and even kill a goat simply by staring at it. When the programme’s founder, Bill Django (Bridges), goes missing, Cassady’s mission is to find him.”

If you look closely you will see Stephen Lang, who plays Col. Quaritch in Avatar, and Glenn Morshower who played General Morshower in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Nice bit of military typecasting there.

The Men Who Stare At Goats will be released on November 6th in the US and January 22nd in the UK.

The trailer for Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox is now online. It’s actually quite refreshing to see a kids movie that isn’t all CGI’d with wide eyed animals. It’s got a retro feel to it. When I first watched the trailer it kinda freaked me out a little, especially the rat, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it gave a few kids nightmares. However, after I watched it a few more times it gradually grew on me.

As the trailer shows, the film has quite a lot of cool actors providing their voices, people such as George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Michael Gambon, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe, Brian Cox and Adrien Brody. Fantastic Mr. Fox will be released on November 13th in the US and October 23rd in the UK

French site Filmsactu got their hands on some new images from Fantastic Mr. Fox. The film has quite a lot of cool actors providing their voices, people such as George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Michael Gambon, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe, Brian Cox and Adrien Brody.

Directed by Wes Anderson, the stop-motion film is based on Roald Dahl’s classic children’s story and centers on the clever Mr. Fox who must outwit three mean, dimwitted farmers who try their hardest to hurt him and his family.

Fantastic Mr. Fox will be released on November 13th in the US and October 23rd in the UK and we should be getting a trailer by the end of July.

Click here to see another image!

In case you haven’t followed the ridiculous process of Amy Pascal of Sony and Columbia Tri-Star suddenly putting a full halt and turnaround on the baseball pic Moneyball, I direct you to post number one HERE and post number two HERE.

Now, we’re hearing the end of this argument and some details about what exactly went wrong with the script to make Pascal halt the $58 million dollar production mere days before the project began filming with Brad Pitt in the starring role. The word on the digital street was that the script that director Steven Soderbergh delivered was so tonally different from the Pascal-approved draft written by Schindler’s List scribe Steven Zaillian that she ground the movie to a halt. At that point, Sony had already pumped an estimated $10 million dollars into the development of the script.

What were the script details that caused Pascal to boot Soderbergh off the flick, and why is Sony so eager to save money on Brad Pitt films while risking money on George Clooney films?

The Big Picture LA Times Blog actually talked to Pascal about why Moneyball didn’t get started:

“I’ve wanted to work with Steven forever, because he’s simply a great filmmaker,” Pascal told me today. “But the draft he turned in wasn’t at all what we’d signed up for. He wanted to make a dramatic reenactment of events with real people playing themselves. I’d still work with Steven in a minute, but in terms of this project, he wanted to do the film in a different way than we did.”

Soderbergh’s last-minute revisions represented a huge change from the shooting script I read when I was working on a story about the film during its pre-production. The script, written by Oscar winner Steve Zaillian, was a baseball movie, but it was loaded with great comic moments and dazzling dialogue that captured the frenetic energy of Beane, a strikingly good-looking former phenom who washed out after a brief stint in the majors, only to resurface as a general manager who operated more like “Entourage’s” Ari Gold than the buttoned-down insiders who normally run big-league teams. Beane was a born hustler, always wheeling and dealing, staying one step ahead of his rivals as he scouted unlikely unknown minor leaguers to replace the high-priced free agents a small-market team like the Oakland A’s couldn’t afford.

Soderbergh wouldn’t talk to me about all this, but it seems clear that he became obsessed with authenticity, replacing many of Zaillian’s inspired scripted set-pieces with actual interviews with the real people who were involved in the events. The Soderbergh aesthetic, according to one source close to the film, was simple: If it didn’t happen in real life, it wasn’t going to be in the movie.

Summation: Steven Soderbergh went for an authentic re-telling of real-life events and Pascal wanted the Brad Pitt, A-List, possible Oscar nod movie she signed up for.

This would be an interesting creative vs. business argument if there wasn’t another side to the story: the Soderbergh-working-with-Major-League-Baseball side. In an interesting Left Coast/Right Coast bit of reporting dialogue, it was The New York Times that added the new piece of the puzzle:

One reason was to win the approval of Major League Baseball, which was not happy with some factual liberties in Mr. Zaillian’s version. Such approval is crucial in a baseball film that intends to use protected trademarks.

“Typically, on a film like this, we look at it for historical accuracy,” said Matthew Bourne, a vice president of Major League Baseball for public relations. “We’ve been in touch with Soderbergh and Sony, and they’ve been receptive to our requests.”

What baseball saw as accurate, Sony executives saw as being too much a documentary. Mr. Soderbergh, for instance, planned to film interviews with some of the people who were connected to the film’s story.

The executives, who had just seen disappointing results from “The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3” and “Year One,” rebelled. Ms. Pascal and Matt Tolmach, co-president of Sony’s film operation, personally told Mr. Soderbergh of their dissatisfaction.

Summation: In one corner we have Steven Soderbergh and Major League Baseball and in the other we have Sony, feeling the hurt of Year One and The Taking Of Pelham 1 2 3 underperforming as DVD and home video sales decline.

I can understand not wanting to launch a $58 million dollar Brad Pitt film unless you’re damn sure that you will make your money back, but there’s one more piece of news that seems to contradict this fiscally-responsible attitude Pascal seems to be relying on.

Namely, Sony has acquired George Clooney’s production company Smokehouse Pictures after Clooney and production partner Grant Heslov left Warner Brothers. Which is odd, because if Clooney’s flicks were making bank, Warners would have put up a fight, right?

Not to mention some interesting inclusions in the press release:

The Smokehouse Pictures team includes Senior Vice President of Development Nina Wolarsky, and creative executive Alex Meenehan. The company is currently in development on the following projects with Warner Bros:

THE CHALLENGE
Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin. An adaptation of Jonathan Mahler’s nonfiction book chronicling the historic Supreme Court case in which two lawyers sued the Bush administration on behalf of accused terrorist Salim Hamdan.

OUR BRAND IS CRISIS
A satirical comedy about American spin doctors competing in the same Presidential election in Bolivia. Based on the documentary by Rachel Boynton, with a script by Peter Straughan (MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS).

FARRAGUT NORTH
An adaptation of Beau Willimon’s critically acclaimed play, set during the Iowa primary of a presidential race.

ESCAPE FROM TEHRAN
The true story of how the CIA used a fake movie project to smuggle hostages out of 1979 Tehran. Chris Terrio is writing the screenplay.

THE TOURIST
A contemporary spy thriller about a spy who risks everything to reveal a conspiracy after he’s accused of a murder he didn’t commit. Based on the bestselling book by Olen Steinhauer. Tony Peckham is writing the screenplay.

THE INNOCENT MAN
Based on the bestselling nonfiction book by John Grisham, the true story of murder and injustice in a small town in Oklahoma. Adapted by David Gordon Green.

Any of those movies sound like a sure-fire hit to you? Probably not. They all sound interesting and intellectually challenging, as is the wont of Smokehouse Pictures, but marketable? As Will Smith would say: “Naw.”

As of now, Moneyball still exists as a project, though Soderbergh has been booted and Pitt is the only name attached. Pascal still has her finger on the Moneyball money button, since Steven was unable to drum up any other studio support for his accurate film while the script was in limited turnaround.

So here’s the question: What is Amy Pascal doing? Is she going to save money, make money, or simply refuse to roll the dice on a project based on creative integrity alone?

Guess what, Amy, you just made my watchlist (though you’ll never usurp the top Most Hated spot from NBC’s Ben Silverman).

Brad Pitt and George Clooney are at it again! No, it’s not a flashy title for the next Ocean’s movie, nor is it a buddy heist romp. Burn After Reading is the story of what happens when some slackers find a disk of secret CIA information, and what they do with it–THEY TRY TO SELL IT.

As you can see, the film stars heavyweights such as Brad, George, Tilda Swinton, John Malkovich, J.K. Simmons and Frances McDormand. Filming has already completed and the movie is slated for a September 12 release!