Let’s talk about Up in the Air, and what it all means. To me anyways.

Ryan Bingham looks like a happy man. He spends a large majority of the year flying around the country firing employees of people too scared to do it themselves. He enjoys this life immensely, relishing the artificial hospitality he receives, the connections he imagines between him and his airline.

We all hope the connections in our lives are real, but we don’t know what other people think, the facades people put up. Ryan does it everyday, meeting perfect strangers and helping them find solace in the unemployment he brings to them and he is very good at that job as scene after scene demonstrates; he always manages to bring people back from the brink, they leave the room comforted if not sated. Bingham’s job is giving false comfort, so he’s surrounded his life with a world of the same.

But then he meets Alex. They bond over which car services are shitty, what hotels offer what perks, and whose flown more in what is, to my eyes, a laughably — and intentionally — superficial meet cute through which they form a simulacrum of a relationship. It never goes beyond that for Alex, but Ryan cares more than he knows. And the movie follows through on that slow burning realization.

The movie works on basically every level, with great performances from all the cast. Clooney played the lead role brilliantly, using his natural charm to convince us of the wisdom of his baggage-free life, up until the final cracks appear, though I think the real surprise is Anna Kendrick. A full third of her film credits right now are from Twilight which doesn’t bode well, but she brings a really great performance.

I’d go see this one. I think it operates mostly as an empty vessel for each viewer, but that doesn’t mean its impact is without value.

I’m still neck deep in NaNoWriMo and still hoping to get the requisite 50,000 words finished in the next week and a half, but before I go on, I gotta post this amazing video, a riff on Lil Wayne’s “Let The Beat Build” by Nyle.

The thing that takes this beyond being just a great song, which it is on its own merits I think, is that the video is all one shot and the audio was recorded live. As the beat builds (har har) each new instrument gets shown on screen as it gets introduced, building it all up until you have this huge choral routine at the end. It’s just great.

Aside from that, you can really tell that the people involved are just having a lot of fun. All the little moments in there are great: when Nyle walks in front of the trombonist and almost gets hit by slide and nobody misses a beat, they’re all just having so much fun with it; the way the taller violinist bounces around to the rhythm when she’s not playing; the nods of approval when that random dancer slides into the shot at the group outro. I’ve watched this video a dozen times today, and I just keep enjoying it more each viewing.

I just finished watching Speed Racer, so I thought I’d jot down a few notes about it. First of all, I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. Some of the pleasure was at the badness of it, but overall it was a good little movie. The critics are right though, it’s mostly a mess. A pretty mess though.

The reasoning of the bad guys is never fully fleshed out — there’s some sort of merger in the works but why it’s so essential that Speed Racer not win the final race is really left unclear — but for the most part that’s not crucial. The movie might think it’s better than it is, but as long as you ignore that conceit you get to watch some really colourful and crazy car racing.

The visual style is distinct and consistent, it’s just really fucking insane at the same time. While talking back and forth during a race there’s a particularly interesting set of shots where the (virtual) camera quickly pans from Speed to Trixie who is behind him. It’s a little disorienting, and almost certainly would’ve caused some nausea from those susceptible to that sort of visceral reaction to visual insanity, but it’s also refreshing to see a director exploring what novel visuals can be accomplished with green screen filming rather than simply using it as an excuse not to build sets.

Frankly, the movie is weakest when nobody’s racing. There’s a scene here and there outside of the races that handles itself well enough — Racer X’s discussion of why he continues to race despite the unending corruption in the racing industry in particular that’s reminiscent of some of the themes of the final season of Angel, though obviously not as well done — but overall this movie is mindless but pretty racing.

But racing is what Speed Racer is all about, right? Did anyone go into that movie expecting anything beyond a paper thin plot designed to get Speed into the Mach 5 as many times as they could? If they did, they probably hated the movie. Luckily, I had lower expectations. I wanted pretty racing, and I got it in spades.

The races often confused due to rapid and frequent jump cuts which have become common in fight sequences over the past decade, and the vomit of colours on the screen certainly didn’t help comprehensibility, but it still made enough sense to enjoy the races. As I sat slightly tensed with Speed edging toward the finish line I had to wonder if NASCAR fans see those 3 hours of turning left they enjoy so much as exciting and tense as the races of this movie.

Ultimately though this movie is forgettable; not offensively bad or impressively good, a little too long for its own good, but perhaps worth the time to see it once for the impressive visuals and unique driving style the virtual cars employ.