Up in the Air and the Chipettes

Jason Reitman directed Juno, and if you didn't know that before you saw Up in the Air, you'd have a sneaky suspicion after the second or third familiar face.

I'm exaggerating a bit. On second thoughts, I can only remember two actors who were in both Juno and Up in the Air. However, those two are Jason Bateman, who played Mark Loring, and J. K. Simmons who played Juno's father, which made it that much more jarring when they popped up here (as Clooney's character's boss and a random extra named Bob, respectively).

You'll notice that I said 'Clooney's character' and not (googles) Ryan Bingham, and that's the other problem with casting famous actors.

Well, technically it's the same problem. It's that much harder to fully enter a state of suspended disbelief.

Anyway, moving on to the actual film. Honestly, I expected it to be far more of a romantic comedy kind of thing. This was before I knew who directed it, incidentally - it's generally not something I look up beforehand. That's why I'm recording director's names on my stats page, so I can see if there are any accidental patterns.

So, yes. It looks like it should be a romantic comedy, but that's not entirely the case.

Ryan Bingham (Clooney, who looks much younger clean-shaven) is in the job of firing people. Other companies hire him and his coworkers to do their dirty work for them. Honestly, I find that that automatically makes the film more interesting. It's a little harder to find a character in that line of work sympathetic, although Clooney does quite a good job of remaining likeable. Reitman's on record as saying that Clooney's charm is the reason he was cast, as the film wouldn't have worked otherwise. I'm inclined to agree.



Ryan Bingham has no ties, and he speaks at seminars teaching other people how to cut loose from their own. His goal in life is to reach ten million frequent flier miles, so it certainly helps that his job requires him to fly all over the country. But then, a young ambitious coworker (played by Anna Kendrick, who also looks rather familiar, although a glance at her imdb page doesn't pinpoint why) comes up with a way to completely revise how his job works, and he's threatened with being grounded. Arguing that she doesn't fully understand the job, his boss tells him to teach her, and Bingham is forced to take her along.

...yes, the film does delve into "your way of life is wrong and lonely, let's teach you about family". Bingham is happily childfree and relationship-free (incidentally, Clooney is childfree too, so there's another bonus to the entirely purposeful casting), but, despite being happy, he's obviously wrong to feel this way. Don't you know that the only way to be happy is to surround yourself with people you care about and support? No? You obviously haven't seen enough films.

There's nothing really bad about this viewpoint, I guess - I just hate the way it's forced down everyone's throat, constantly, as being the only right way to live.

Incidentally, the film never really does answer the question of "what's the point?". Unless you want to count "because everything's better with someone else there", that is.

I do like the non-traditional way the Ryan and Alex's relationship unfolds. Not at the beginning, Scrooge McDuck and Goldie did the whole "too alike" thing years ago, and much better at that. No, the ending. It was unexpected, it was new (as much as anything can be), and it was interesting. To be honest, I spent the last half an hour or so of the film (I don't know exactly how long, I lost track of time) praying that it wouldn't be traditional, that it would be something new, that Ryan wouldn't end up renouncing his entire personality with a "one year on" clip of him and a pregnant wife. I may have seen too many romantic comedies, because I was sure that was how it was all going to go down. But, I was wrong. Yay!

That said, many other aspects of the ending - such as Natalie's arc - were very traditional and predictable. But I didn't mind, since they'd managed to surprise me a little with the ending, and not sell out the character quite as far as I'd feared.



I saw Alvin and the Chipmunks - the Squeakquel too, the other day. Really, it's not worth its own post, so I'm shoving it in here.

Now, I liked the first movie. I saw it when it came out, it was fun, it was entertaining, I spent weeks youtubing up Witch Doctor.

This one, however...well, the songs weren't as good for a start. It requires an even bigger suspension of disbelief, since everybody now seems not to bat an eyelid at the existence of not one, but two sets of singing chipmunk siblings. And it seems to be all set-up and no plot. In short, despite the length, it doesn't feel like a movie. It feels like the pilot episode of a new TV series.

A bit 'meh', really. Although I am very disturbed by the blatant sexualisation of small furry animals. I'm sure that's illegal.

Things Look Scarier from Three Feet High

This blog is called The Real Ratings because I don't always trust the BBFC, especially not in regards to children's films. I'm not a mother myself, but I'm an older sister, and I babysit. And, moreover, I remember what it's like to be a child, watching films, and I'm not sure that many of the classifiers do.

One simple thing should always be remembered, when deciding whether to allow children - your own or anyone else's - to watch a film. And that is that children are smaller, have much shorter concentration spans, and tend to feel things more intently.

When I was younger, watching a film used to seem like a huge commitment. Sitting still and paying attention for a whole hour and a half? That's a skill that comes with time.

When I was even younger than that, say three or four, films were an incredibly intense experience. And what I remember most about them, years later, is how scary they were. Like The Little Mermaid, for instance. My strongest memory of that film was the deep purple water during the storm at the end, when Ursula was taking revenge. And the golden signature Ariel made. That's what made the most impression on my young mind. It makes no difference that, together, they made up barely fifteen minutes of a ninety minute film - that was what I remembered.

Even worse was All Dogs Go To Heaven, which was released a year after I was born. I must have been three or four the first time I saw it.

The film was released with a G rating in America, and a U rating in the UK. This was after removing the word 'damn', cutting a few minutes from the nightmare in hell scene, and removing the shot of a car hitting the main character (a dog named Charlie B. Barkin, voiced by Burt Reynolds).

The first line of IMDB's plot summary is as follows; A dog returns from the dead looking for revenge on his killer using an orphan girl who can talk to animals.

Let me repeat that.

A dog returns from the dead looking for revenge on his killer using an orphan girl who can talk to animals.

...yeah.

There's also a crocodile, someone who is executed by being strapped to an anchor and lowered to some kind of snapping thing (possibly the same crocodile, it's been a while), begging to be released the entire way down, someone is hit by a car, and the devil comes for the hero's soul at the end.

Also, the voice actress, Judith Barsi, who voiced Anne-Marie, was shot around a year and a half before the film was released. Which isn't really relevant to how scary the plot is, but adds an extra surreal effect when watching it as an adult.

So, yeah. Childrens films are scarier to children than they are to adults. And All Dogs Go to Heaven is to children's films as Heathers was to teen movies.

Which isn't to say that I don't adore All Dogs Go to Heaven - just that it utterly terrified me, far beyond the range of what an adult might have expected.