Your Donations support the Site

Buy Cranky stuff


Buy Movie Posters

Top Selling DVD     Books

        BLU-RAY DVDs:
Avatar
Bad Teacher
Batman Begins
Big Lebowski
Blade Runner
Conan the Barbarian
Cowboys and Aliens
Dark Knight
Fifth Element
The Hangover
James Bond 11 disc coll.
Lord of the Rings trilogy
Star Wars Saga
Super 8
Ultimate Matrix coll
X-Men First Class
X-Men Trilogy
X-Men Wolverine

BLU-Ray for Family DVDs
Alice in Wonderland (2010)
Bambi
A Bug's Life
Cars
Chronicles of Narnia set
Coraline
Ghostbusters
Harry Potter 1-8 collection
Iron Man 2 combo
Kung Fu Panda
Lord of the Rings Trilogy Pinocchio
Pirates of Caribbean trilogy
Pixar short films
Ratatouille
Shrek the Whole Story
Sleeping Beauty
The Smurfs combo
Snow White & 7 Dwarfs
Star Trek motion pictures set
Star Wars Saga (1-6)
Toy Story combo
Toy Story 2 combo
Toy Story 3 combo
Wall-E SE

Search engine by FreeFind

click to search site

      Now in Release:
Adventures of Tintin
Albert Nobbs
Anonymous
The Artist
Carnage
Change-Up, the
Chasing Madoff
Cook County
Crazy Stupid Love
The Descendants
The Double
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
50/50
Hanna
Hugo
Iron Lady, the
J Edgar
Joyful Noise
Killing Bono
Kill the Irishman
Machine Gun Preacher
Melancholia
Mission Impossible GP
The Muppets
Passion Play
Puncture
Rampart
Sherlock Holmes
The Son of No One
Super
That's What I Am
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Trust
Tucker and Dale vs Evil
What's Your Number
Winnie the Pooh
Young Adult

IN SHORT: Good dateflick about a despicable person.   [Rated R for Language and Some Sexual Content. 109 minutes]

In every corporation there is the Boss, usually the Chairman of the Board, and the lackeys that serve. It is the lackeys which carry out the orders, which include firing the people that the Boss wants fired. Then there are the corporation in which the Boss is nothing more than a super wuss and for these corporations there is Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), the man who is hired to do the firing of the lackeys the Boss-man, in this case Craig Gregory (Jason Bateman), doesn't have the ya-yas to fire. Bingham is the ultimate corporation guy. Handsome. Impeccably dressed. Able to counter any argument and handle any unpleasant situation the may arise when he appears and starts to fire people he has never met.

Bingham spends 300 or so days on the road, dispensing his particular brand of doom. He is closing in on his personal goal of achieving Ten Million frequent flyer miles, which entitles him to  a seat next to the greatest pilot living, one Captain Maynard Finch (Sam Elliott). That's one of the useless diversions in the film, driving home the point that destroying people's lives is a solo life that offers only the most useless of diversions. That is until Bingham happens to meet a female version of himself in, where else?, a hotel bar. She is Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga) and something incredibly hot and physical will ensue.

In the meantime, Bingham has to deal with a just out of grad school smart ass called Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), who has convinced the Boss that it would be cheaper, and faster, to terminate employees via the Internet. No more first class plane flights for Ryan Bingham. No more five star hotel stays for Ryan Bingham. No more lucky rendezvous for Ryan Bingham and Alex Goran. Simply put, Keener  has got to go. And so you have Jason Reitman's Up in the Air, which lets Clooney loose for a good hour or so of great lines and sexy looks, before it falls apart without a satisfactory ending.

We like George Clooney. He's perfected the kind of character that, to utilize an old salesman compliment, could sell refrigerators to eskimos. But where can you go with such a character? With an hour to go before the end of the film, two possible endings popped into our brain. We don't actively encourage our gray matter to do such analysis but what was coming was so obvious that, well what do you know? --- both possibilities came to fruition on the big screen. Both were bigger than the actual big finish and what that is we can't tell you. Else we'd be accused of spoiling things.

On average, a first run movie ticket will run you Ten Bucks. Were Cranky able to set his own price to Up in the Air, he would have paid . . .

$5.00

Up in the Air is a fine date flick in which George Clooney carries the film with charm and panache and all of that good stuff. It's almost enough that you can ignore the despicable actions that are the basis for the film's story.

	Click to buy films by Jason Reitman
	Click to buy films starring George Clooney
	Click to buy films starring Vera Farmiga
	Click to buy books by Walter Kim