Between seeing Up in the Air during its original theatrical run and tonight's viewing at home on Blu-ray, I read Walter Kirn's novel. I went into his novel from the perspective of having seen Jason Reitman's film version and now I've come back to Reitman's film having seen it already and read Kirn's source material.

The upshot of all this is that I'm very impressed by Jason Reitman's sensibilities as a screen adapter. Kirn's novel is intriguing, but more from the perspective of getting a rare glimpse into Mormons than for anything else. Reitman has a keen sense of the importance of the universal and how to make stories accessible to us on an intimate level.

Here, for instance, his film invents the character of Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), who serves partly as a point-of-view character but also as a barometer by which we measure the evolution of Ryan Bingham (George Clooney). Ryan's arc itself is changed in Reitman's hands. Kirn's Ryan is a guy who more or less proves to himself that his thesis about insulation being the key to happiness is right. Reitman's Ryan learns instead something that Ian Fleming had a character say to James Bond in Casino Royale:

"Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles."

Much was made at the time of Up in the Air's release of its timeliness given the collapse of the economy and the need for the average person to feel that someone recognized the brutality of a system where some people profit and prosper at the expense of everyone else. It's still a valid theme, but what struck me more this time through was the emphasis on loyalty.

Every plot point that runs through the film comes back to the issue of loyalty, whether it's the betrayal of the loyalty of employees fired by proxy through Bingham or his own faithful allegiance to rewards programs.

Perhaps the most poignant commentary of the film is actually through Natalie, who learns firsthand that even in the horrific "business" of firing people, there are limitations on how distant the process can be made. Ryan himself is quick to nail her on her own ironic/hypocritical indignation at being dumped by her boyfriend via text, given that she's the one who introduced the "glocal" tele-firing concept. Later, we learn she quit her job via text before returning to San Francisco to pursue the life she originally wanted. It's hard to believe that she didn't fully learn the value of breaking up/firing/quitting in person, so we're left to interpret that as her way of telling the company just how despicable she finds what they represent.

There's also the limited relationship between Alex (Vera Farmiga) and Natalie, which gives us that terrifically awkward and frank discussion of what a woman in her early 20s seeks in a man and what a woman in her 30s will accept in one. Again Reitman uses Natalie to remind us how our values evolve with not just age, but with experience. Though Ryan condescends her, Reitman never does. She's naive about how hurtful people can be, but she's also the one who sees the value of strong relationships.

I'm reminded of one of the passages I still recall most vividly from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which I read in a single setting and actually caused me to have an anxiety attack. There's a scene where Guy Montag's neighbors are discussing with him their views on how society devolved, and one thing they cite was that home builders stopped making front porches. There were stoops, but they were so small that they discouraged or outright made impossible the habit of sitting outside facing your neighbors. Consequently, people went inside their homes or at best, sat in their backyards facing away from everyone else, often enclosed by a fence of some kind. It insulated people to the point that they stopped even thinking of their own neighbors as people but as abstract background for their lives - or worse, as potential threats. The net effect of all this was the collapse of meaningful personal relationships.

Reitman's film isn't actually about the decline of front porches, but it speaks to the same theme as Bradbury's famed novel. It was the prevalence of mass layoffs that made audiences see Up in the Air as timely in late 2009, but as I consider the present dominant debate in the United States about gun violence, I feel that it's even timelier today because it taps into that theme of the importance of cultivating strong relationships.

Up in the Air was re-ranked on my Flickchart to #52/1472

I dig Peter O'Toole so this was on my radar back when it was originally released but I missed it. A friend has it on DVD and I borrowed that from him - admittedly, some time back at the end of 2011 - and I finally got around to it in the wee hours this morning.

The cast is terrific, particularly O'Toole and Jodie Whittaker. The story itself feels predictable and familiar but there are enough little touches and attention to detail that ring true to keep it engaging. In the DVD bonus featurette, "Venus: A Work of Beauty", O'Toole describes the film thus:

"It's about a dirty old man and a sluttish young woman. That's what it's about, really."

I was made very uncomfortable with the extent of Maurice's forwardness, which clearly constitutes sexual assault. Pepe Le Pew is on the borderline of my threshold for that kind of behavior and Maurice is well beyond that charitable level. The film doesn't treat him as being a harmless flirt who doesn't know any better, so at least he's not portrayed as a romantic hero per se, but he's ultimately rewarded for his relentless leering and groping which does validate the behavior. The only reason it works at all is that we learn quickly enough that "Venus" is shrewd enough to exploit his infatuation with her. In the aforementioned featurette, someone remarks that "The only thing that keeps it from being perverse" is that the exploitation is mutual.

I wanted to like Venus more than I did, but the predictability and the extent of the boundary-crossing soured me somewhat, though there are enough charming moments to rescue it from being a film I disliked.

Venus entered my Flickchart at #586/1473

I can still vividly recall the first time I saw Dances with Wolves. My uncle, who rarely came out our way in those days, for some reason spent the afternoon at my mom's house with just me. I have no idea where my brother was or why my uncle had nothing else to do that day, but we rented it and watched it in the living room. It wasn't until after we'd watched and returned it that we learned we'd checked out the expanded edition and that there was a theatrical cut an hour shorter than the cut we'd watched.

A few year later, my U.S. History teacher in high school showed us the theatrical cut in class. Because our classes were 50 minute blocks, it took an entire school week to watch and finish. Those are the only two times I've ever seen the film, so it's been a good 15 years.

Tonight, I was amazed how vividly I could recall the film while watching it. There was only one scene that felt unfamiliar to me; where Dunbar (Kevin Costner) cleans up the abandoned outpost. I don't recall previously watching him round up deer carcasses. Otherwise, the film was exactly as I remembered it, as though it was one that I re-watched often rather than one I'd only seen twice and not at all since the Clinton administration.

The biggest knock on Dances with Wolves has always been that it's ham-fisted about manipulating our emotions. It's a fair criticism to level against the film, because very clearly, white people are evil. They're wasteful, selfish gluttons whose obsession with mindless violence makes them not only appalling, but dangerous.

The funny thing is, we're so used to various minority groups being stereotyped that we forget what that there is a stereotype of white Americans...and that stereotype is exactly what's shown in this film. It is reductive and simplistic, especially the outpost officers at the end of the film, but sometimes we need to be reminded of how reputations are acquired. The truth is, white Americans have historically been selfish, wasteful and prone to senseless violence.

I don't know what it says about me as a viewer, but by far the most emotional scenes in the entire film are killings of Cisco and later Two Socks. Those scenes are heartbreaking to witness, which of course is the point. They're downright Spielbergian, really, and especially hard to stomach once we find out that the diary Dunbar so foolishly left behind in the first place and that drew him back to the outpost wasn't even important to anyone.

The cast is solid, though for some reason once Costner shaves his mustache halfway through the film, I find it distracted me and took me out of the movie. At that point, I just saw Kevin Costner as he appeared in the early 90s with that big hair mullet thing he had going on. Because of that one thing, the first half is a film set in the late 19th Century; the second half is a film made in the early 90s. Mary McDonnell's uncertain articulation of English is still a bit distracting and borders on being unintentionally funny, but there's an earnestness to her performance that buys my patience.

I do wish Fox had released the Blu-ray with a branching option to show either of the two cuts because 236 minutes is a tremendous investment of time to be asked to make. The theatrical cut's 181 minutes are demanding enough as it is.

Dances with Wolves was re-ranked to #66/1473 on my Flickchart

I first saw this short film in 2010 when I checked out a compilation DVD of the shorts nominated in the 75th Academy Awards in the Animated and Live Action categories, and I've come back to it now because I checked out that DVD again since I didn't get to anything other than this short three years ago.

We don't really talk about how racist/nationalistic other societies are, but of course it's an ugliness found wherever there are people. Still, it's surprising to me to think of the Danes as being as xenophobic as, frankly, my neighbors. (I'm a Kentuckian so I mean that in the literal sense.)

Der Er En Yndig Mand (This Charming Man) plays almost like an episode of Seinfeld. The premise is simple enough: A guy who just wants to get back to work finds himself the victim of a clerical error that mixes him up with a Pakistani immigrant. This in turn leads to the mounting frustration at the maddening nature of bureaucracy. Danish, American, whatever; the runaround game is as unavoidable as it is infuriating.

What Lars discovers is that without the attendance of the Pakistani man with whom he's been conflated, the class will be considered a waste and canceled. Besides, Lars needs to atone for carelessly erupting in frustration at a receptionist by slandering her as a "peasant", an ugliness witnessed by Ida.

What makes this work so well is that we don't see Lars debate his scheme with anyone. He learns that Ida's class will be scrapped if the immigrant doesn't show up, and in the next scene, he's dyed his hair and is applying a fake mustache. We don't need to watch the light bulb go off over his head. We simply need to know that it did, and we're able to get on with the story. Whether this is a storytelling choice dictated by the short film format or a reflection of Danish storytelling sensibilities or even just a decision on the part of this short's writer/director Martin Strange-Hansen or his co-writer, Flemming Klem, I don't know. I just know that the economy of storytelling makes this short work when it could easily have tripped over itself.

Der Er En Yndig Mand is a Danish short film but unfortunately its thematic content is universal. There are xenophobic bigots in every society. What makes this short and its commentary on the matter so compelling is that it distills it to the immediate without being reductive. That is, you don't have to get into matters of changing the views of an entire country. You simply need to be mindful that you don't participate yourself (such as when Lars is caught by Ida belittling the receptionist), do not encourage others to be bigoted (not laughing at Niels's horrific jokes) and to be a positive participant (Lars helping Omid). This is how each of us in our daily lives encounter bigotry.

Der Er En Yndig Mand entered my Flickchart at #665/1474