"Up In The Air"

Another only good movie. The cast is pretty brilliant, and Clooney is totally good enough, maybe even very good (BUT NOT GREAT).

I'm going to use this review as a sort of framework to talk about what I want from movies and how that differs from what "critics" will call a great movie (or, more accurately, what a consensus of critics will love and what will therefore get Oscar attention).

Here's what I want from movies: I want them to impress me. That can happen from a story that is particularly interesting, from visuals that accomplish something beautiful or surprising, from a generally just super enjoyable film that doesn't leaver me wondering why the hell I watched it, etc. The common thread seems to be that I need to walk away thinking that the movie was WORTH IT.

And there are differing degrees of worth it. For instance, this movie was certainly worth it. It was well-made enough, and I laughed enough, and I liked the story enough. It was fine. A movie like "Julie and Julia" was maybe NOT worth it. About half of it was good enough, but the other half was lifeless and sort of pointless. That, in my mind, makes "Up In The Air" better than "Julie and Julia." "In the Loop," a movie that is almost perfect and accomplishes a lot of diverse, surprising, and actually interesting things, was MORE worth it than either of those films.

The bottom line: while it looks subjective, my system for evaluating the "worth-it-ness" of a movie is made out of a lot of definable standards. Like, did the comedic bits make me laugh? Did they fit with the rest of the story? Do the characters seem like real people? These are all things that, if a group gets together, they could hash out and arrive at a consensus. That consensus on the individual factors might give us a better idea of an actual consensus of quality of films.

Instead, what we get is a consensus made out of critics that are all basically fighting to be read. They want their opinions to be surprising or quotable or to reflect a sentiment their readers share. That's how you end up with something like "Up In The Air" being considered a masterpiece: the critics that review it all happen to agree that the movie was worth it (all of them to varying degrees), and they've picked up some talking points that they all share (George Clooney was amazing in it, the two supporting female actresses were super good, Jason Reitman is Oscar gold, etc), and an actually culturally relevant consensus gets muddled by these taste makers who hare having their taste made for them by their readership and by marketing directors of movie studios.

I know, that's a lot of assumptions and half-formed ideas, but at the very least, the average reader of my blog recognizes that the gap between "brilliant movies" and "critical darling / Oscar movies" is a big one. Even the gap between "most popular movies" and "critical darling / Oscar movies" is often pretty large. And my "taste" in movies is, I like to think, somewhat better correlated with what we might call "objectively good movies."

This post kind of got away from me. The bottom line is that my goal is to watch movies that are IMPORTANT to me (by being entertaining or affecting or beautiful or whatever), not just good enough. And "Up In The Air," like what seems like the vast majority of semi-Hollywood semi-indies, is just good enough.