Up In The Air Feature Article rough draft

After two critically acclaimed films, Juno and Thank You for Smoking,
writer and director, Jason Reitman’s third film Up in the Air hits
home during one of the country’s worst rescissions ever on record. The
story is about Ryan Bingham(George Clooney), a cooperate downsizing
worker, whose job is to travel around the world and fire people and in
the process, try and complete his on goal of 10 million airline miles.
In his travels, He also holds motivational speaking engagements of on
his philosophy called “What’s in your backpack?” which tells his
values of his way of life is freeing people of their relationships and
unimportant things in life.

The film was adapted to screen by Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner,
from a Walter Kirn novel of the same title. While the novel was
released in 2001, the film is especially fitting today, as Americans
try to fight through one of the worst times in the American economy
since the depression. Plus with an unemployment rate of about 10.7, on
average, when the film was released, the movie was really imperative
for these times, and according to its critical fame and box office
success, America thinks so too. Claudia Puig, a film critic from USA
today, may have put it best saying “It's tough to capture an era while
it's still happening, yet Up in the Air does so brilliantly, with wit
and humanity.”

Just coming of its sweep of wins at the golden globes Writers guild
awards, BAFTA awards and its total of 6 nominations at the academy
awards, the film was just released to DVD on March 9. While the story
of Ryan Bingham (Clooney) and his life of travel makes the movie an
excellent example of an honest story, what makes it more honest is the
films use of real people who have actually, recently, been fired.

While filming in Detroit and St. Louis, the film crew and Jason
Reitman put an ad out in several papers in both of the cities calling
for people who have recently lost their jobs to come in for a
documentary. They said documentary so not to attract actors looking
for work. When they came to the set the film makers would ask the
people questions about their experiences for about ten minutes and
then at the end of it they would set up a camera and actually fire
them again. They would tell them to say whatever they said when they
got fired or whatever they wished they would have said. They had about
100 people respond and they chose about 60 and at the end roughly 22
of those people appeared in the film.

With the struggling economy and high job loss percentages,” it was
interesting to hear the story from the other end of it (the people
doing the firing).” Mitch Deinhammer, an Eastview High School
Sophomore, told me when he spoke on his thoughts of the film. “I also
really believed what happened in the film, which doesn’t happen that
often” and whether he was talking about the real people who got fired
in the film or the acting done by George Clooney and the list of other
well known actors who worked on the film, his overall thoughts of the
film was that it was extremely “honest.”

“I thought it was good but sad” is what Jordan Koplitz’s, an Eastview
High School junior, deliberation of the film was, However, just as
Mitch Deinhammer had put it as well as numerous critics, it seems the
defining consensus of the film is that it was very “real” for these
times.

Another key factor that may have contributed itself to the film’s
success was its connection with Walter Kirn’s original work in his
novel. It seems that in the past, time after time, great pieces of
writing done by hard working authors have been turned into
unrecognizable films by uncaring film makers, however not in Walter
Kirn’s case. In an interview conducted in 2009 by Perri Nemiroff,
Walter Kirn had an abundance of terrific comments about the film that
had originated from his 2001 novel. “When I sat down to see it, I was
not only honored and delighted but surprised by the transformations
that had taken place in my own material and some of the potentials
that I left untapped" Kirn told Nemiroff.