I KNEW IT.
Last night, I went to see Up in the Air with the homeboy, after plates of cumin-scented beef and cucumber in scallion sauce at Grand Sichuan St. Marks, the latter of which has become a new favorite menu item for its ectoplasmic neon green color and a kind of toasty gazpacho flavor. Try it, you’ll like it.
A few notes on seeing Up in the Air with another person: Don’t. It’s not really all that great, but it is heartstring-pully as hell, and you will feel visually assaulted by the unemployment porn and how rough shit is in 2009 and by George Clooney’s age lines, which are sexy, granted, but also kind of offensively craggy in a woah-there-HD-camera kind of way. And all this combined, along with a mildly-bad acoustic guitar song at the end that some unemployed person wrote for Jason Reitman and that the director included in the credits (with the “sigh, I lost my job, but I pulled it together and wrote this! voicemail”) just to drive the point home, will manipulate your emotions and leave you all soggy and unable to aptly communicate why you were at all affected by a film that goes on for 2.5 hours to conclude that laid-off Middle Americans are going to be a-OK after all (save those that jump off bridges). It leaves a weird limbo feeling, between “that’s it?” and “yes, that’s it!”, and it’s not really a mood for, as my grandmother might have hissed through her teeth, com-pan-eee. So. See it solo?
BUT there is one great part about the film (ok, two: Vera Farmiga is always great), and that is the 23-year-old gunner employee imp played by Anna Kendrick, who learns the ropes from Clooney and also, you know, a little bit about life and love, etc. She was intense and weird and mousy and stole a scene from Clooney, which takes a Fagin-like capacity for theft. I recognized her face, but…from where? And then last night right before dreamland, it hit me (I could have IMDB’d it, but was out of sorts from the aforementioned gloveslap). She was the usurper villainess from Camp (teens @ drama camp—a.k.a. Glee-pre-Glee), who drugged and pushed a girl off stage and took over the Elaine Stritch solo from Company.
“She’s fucked, I’m ready, and the damn show must go on.”
Of course I’m going to like this girl.
