In Contention

Tag: Juno

  • Reitman, Cody reteam on ‘Young Adult’

    Jason Reitman announced shortly after last season’s “Up in the Air” bonanza that his company had acquired the rights to Joyce Maynard’s novel “Labor Day.” But it turns out that, while he’s hard at work on drafts of that adaptation, another original script from “Juno” scribe Diablo Cody is what’s on deck for the director.

    Mike Fleming reports at Deadline that Cody’s “Young Adult” is being set up through John Malkovich’s Mr. Mudd production company for Reitman’s next gig behind the camera. 2007’s Oscar-winning “Juno” was also set up through Mr. Mudd.

    Charlize Theron is set to star as “a ghostwriter of young adult novels who realizes she has no identity with her pseudonym and plots to reclaim her identity,” Fleming writes. “Her campaign involves going back and rekindling a relationship with her high school boyfriend–who’s freshly married, is a new father, and wants no part of her.”  Reitman, meanwhile, compared the material to “To Die For” when we exchanged emails.  Sounds exciting.  He plans to go right into production on “Labor Day” after this project.

    Check out the rest of the story at Deadline.

  • LONDON: ‘In the Air’ tonight

    George Clooney in Up in the AirTo use the umpteenth bad aviation metaphor in connection with the film, “Up in the Air” landed in London this evening with a gala festival screening — though this time it came unaccompanied by George Clooney, who had skipped off to the Rome fest after doing double-duty at the LFF earlier this week with “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and “The Men Who Stare at Goats.”

    (Given that “Up in the Air” is plainly his prime 2009 work, I’d have shuffled things around to ensure he could make it, but never mind.)

    Given the raft of glowing notices from Telluride and Toronto — not least Kris’s own elated take — my expectations for Jason Reitman’s third film couldn’t have been any higher as I settled into the press screening this morning. And as the lights came up 100 minutes later, they’d been satisfyingly met in one sense — and left frustratingly dangling in another.

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  • INTERVIEW: Jason Reitman

    Jason ReitmanTelluride Film Festival

    Four days ago, Jason Reitman finalized his latest film, “Up in the Air,” by making one final song change. Two days ago he unveiled it to its first-ever first audience, his nerves shot. Today, somewhat more relaxed in the wake of a warm reception to the film, he’s sitting outside at a cafe on a sunny day, the famous gondolas of Telluride swinging around and up the hillside to Mountain Village behind him as he thinks back on the experience.

    “It felt really good,” he says. “I’ve never had that short a period of time between finishing a film and it showing for the first time. I’m used to having a few weeks to get nervous, but I was really making creative choices up until the last second. It was almost surreal, it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m watching it with an audience.’ And there’s this moment when you give up the movie. It stops being yours and starts being everyone else’s. It’s unusual. People laugh at a certain point or they’ll find something moving that you didn’t expect. They start telling you what the movie was. I didn’t expect that emotional experience for myself. A lot came together Saturday.”

    Reitman began conceiving the story of “Up in the Air” — which strays considerably from the film’s source material, a 2002 Walter Kirn novel — six years ago. (Sheldon Turner, who shares screen credit on the adaptation, penned a draft early on, but Reitman came from his own place on things.)  He began turning over its themes in his head, considering them in their barest form.. “They started coalescing further a few years ago,” he says, “and then, really in the year leading up to the movie, right after ‘Juno,’ it suddenly felt like, you know, this was a question I really needed to ask. I go through the same questions that the main character does.”

    In the film, George Clooney stars as career transition specialist Ryan Bingham, a hired gun terminator. It’s an element of the film that skims the zeitgeist but its the personal journey of the character that Reitman wanted to dig at, notions of one’s responsibility to engage with the world around you, with one’s family, and the idea that no man is — or at least no man should be — an island unto himself.

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  • Is Jason Reitman the new Billy Wilder?

    Jason ReitmanThat USA Today profile on Jason Reitman, penned by IC friend Anthony Breznican, was still simmering in my mind recently when an acquaintance mentioned an intriguing comparison Breznican made on his Facebook page. “To me, this guy is the next Billy Wilder,” Breznican wrote of Reitman. “His films are hilarious, but also peer uncompromisingly into our darker sides.”

    I turned it over in my head a few times and, ultimately, I couldn’t think of a reason to disagree.  One of Wilder’s most defining characteristics was his versatility, so it’s a bit early to draw a parallel there.  That having been said, “Thank You for Smoking” is an entirely different film with drastically different themes than “Juno,” and “Up in the Air” looks to take things in a new direction yet again.

    Wilder may have exhibited less flash than Reitman, but he also placed a considerable emphasis on the screenplay.  Despite Reitman’s panache (which is by no means overstated), his films, so far, have been very much made in the writing.  And I’m with Breznican.  It’s hard to argue that Reitman isn’t in some way interested in what lurks beneath the surface of daily niceties.

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  • Is Wes Anderson corroding the cinema?

    Rachel Weisz in The Brothers BloomI should say at the top that I have not yet seen Rian Johnson’s “The Brothers Bloom,” but I was an absolute disciple of the director’s 2005 debut “Brick.”  That said, “Bloom” has always had a particular sheen to it that has obviously kept it from being a must-see since the first screenings began back in September of 2008.  Elbert Ventura, writing in Slate, may have pegged the reasoning, at least as it pertains to my taste:

    Rian Johnson’s caper comedy The Brothers Bloom begins its nationwide rollout already burdened with a reputation as an imitation of an American original. If Johnson’s terrific debut, Brick, crackled with the borrowed brio of the Coen brothers, early notices for The Brothers Bloom have identified a new muse: Wes Anderson…

    But The Brothers Bloom is only the latest addition to a burgeoning subgenre. Over the last few years, Anderson’s movies have become touchstones for indie culture. In the 1990s, it seemed every NYU graduate and Sundance contender was making his own Tarantino knockoff. These days, the Tarantino imitators have been replaced by the Wes wannabes. A popular strain in recent American indie cinema has been the Andersonian quirkfest, a tendency that runs through movies like Juno, Napoleon Dynamite, Son of Rambow, Charlie Bartlett, and Garden State, among others.

    The appropriation doesn’t stop there. Anderson’s trademarks—poker-face eccentricity, affection for the oddball, fastidiously arranged clutter, an affinity for the precocious and childlike—have now become conventions in the larger culture. You can glimpse his style and sensibility in TV shows, music videos and—a true sign that you’ve arrived—commercials.

    Of course, I like one or two of those films, but as someone who considers nearly the whole of Wes Anderson’s portfolio to be incredibly disposable, and as a guy from the film school generation Ventura indicates (and therefore, witnessed the development of this new “wannabe” culture), allow me to simply say: God help us. I won’t pass judgment on “The Brothers Bloom” until I see it, of course, but items like this make it difficult to drum up enthusiasm.

  • PAGE TO SCREEN: “Up in the Air” by Walter Kirn

    Cover of Up in the Air by Walter Kirn“Airworld” is novelist Walter Kirn’s term for the impermanent realm of regional American air travel, a sleek network of bland local airports and adjacent beige hotel rooms, linked by the plush grey trails of business-class flights. It forms the scattered but otherwise constant home to thousands of American corporate drones, and is the simultaneously alien and mundane setting for “Up in the Air” – soon reaching your screens courtesy of writer-director Jason Reitman and star George Clooney.

    Droll, dry and ultimately rather heartless, it’s clear that Kirn (“Thumbsucker”) positioned his novel as a kind of “Bonfire of the Vanities” for post-millennial readers, a work that diagnoses the ills of corporate America and chimes in with a wider sense of social malaise.

    The novel, however, had the misfortune of hitting the shelves shortly before the events of 9/11 forever shifted the rules of his own Airworld. By the time it appeared in paperback, not only had Kirn’s milieu rapidly dated, but few readers were keen to enter that territory, and “Up in the Air” never took off as was perhaps intended.

    Whether by accident or design, Reitman’s adaptation of the novel also comes along at a time when the material couldn’t be more touchily topical, albeit for different reasons. Its anti-hero of sorts is Ryan Bingham, a 35 year-old human resources exec and first-class Airworld citizen, whose field of expertise is “Career Transition Counseling” – in other words, someone brought in by companies to tactfully fire employees, a self-proclaimed Grim Reaper to white-collar America.

    It’s a nervy subject for a feature film in the midst of a global economic recession that is providing plenty of business for men like Bingham, if few others; but whether audiences will be any more willing to embrace this than they were Kirn’s novel remains to be seen, and will largely depend on the warmth and lightness of touch Reitman and his universally liked leading man can bring to the material.

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  • Oh, Jennifer

    Jennifer Garner in Ghosts of Girlfriends PastI have a horrible confession to make: I am probably going to see “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past” at some point this weekend. As if that wasn’t mortifying enough to admit in public, I’ll go further: I am doing so voluntarily.

    This time, no friend or manipulative relative is dragging me into the theatre as a helpless victim of counter-programming. On the contrary, I’m desperately seeking an ally to spare me the humiliation of sidling up to the ticket booth and mumbling “One for ‘Ghosts of Girlfriends Past,’ please.”

    I have no takers yet, and I understand why -– the film looks fucking dreadful, after all. The trailer cheerfully kills a little portion of my soul every time I see it. And every time a London bus emblazoned with the film’s hideous poster art and godawful title passes my living room window (which is to say about every quarter-hour), I have to resist the urge to hurl a rock at Matthew McConaughey’s bronzed, charisma-vacuumed mug. So why am I punishing myself in this manner?

    Two words: Jennifer. Garner.

    We all have a list of actors who we really know we shouldn’t love, who do terribly little to earn our devotion with an ever-more-dodgy resume — but who, like a really toxic ex, somehow manage to lure us back for their latest effort, however unpromising. And, nestled somewhere between latter-day Jude Law and another Jennifer with TV roots, Jennifer Garner is one of mine.

    Garner has, for me, that indescribable movie-star ‘it’ quality that keeps her empathetic and interesting even when the film around her is going down in flames. I’ve never not liked Garner in a film. (OK, “Elektra” came close.) But I rarely like anything she appears in.

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  • Harwood and Oliver share Humanitas Prize

    To revisit some old friends from the 2007 awards season, the Humanitas Prize in the feature film category has been jointly awarded to Ronald Harwood, for “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” and Nancy Oliver for “Lars and the Real Girl.”

    The prize is a screenwriting award aiming to honour achievements that “explore the human condition and reveal our common humanity.” (Previous winners include “Crash,” “You Can Count on Me” and “The Shawshank Redemption.”) Under those criteria, both winners strike me as worthy — even if I find Harwood’s script a rather more substantial achievement.

    Amusingly, the tie leaves Diablo Cody as the lone unrewarded nominee in the category — somewhat appropriate given the lack of maturity or insight she recently displayed in her online hissy-fit. Oh well, to borrow her words, at least she still has her fake name engraved on an Oscar.

    Elsewhere, the Sundance Feature category was awarded to the TV-movie adaptation of “A Raisin in the Sun” over Tom McCarthy’s “The Visitor,” which strikes me as a little odd. But humanity isn’t exactly a quantifiable achievement, is it now?

  • Is ‘Slumdog’ really a slam dunk?

    It’s no secret that Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire” is shaping up to be one of the indie darlings of 2008. The film was the uncontested hit of the Telluride festival, bowing to sensational reviews, of which Todd McCarthy’s (key phrases: “a blast;” “fantastic energy;” “a vital piece of work”) represents the consensus.

    Almost immediately, Oscar buzz began building around the film, with pundits suggesting that the film’s combination of gritty sociological themes and ultimately uplifting narrative would prove irresistible to voters seeking to annoint this year’s ‘little film that could.’ (Glib comparisons have been made to “Juno,” based on, well, nothing really — except it’s a small film that audiences like.)

    Now, the latest to board the “Slumdog” train in Toronto are Tom O’Neil and Jeffrey Wells. In this video from Gold Derby, O’Neil says the film has the “passionate rooting factor” that a film needs to get those first-place votes on the nomination ballot. In closing, O’Neil and Wells agree that the film is “without question” one of 2008’s five Best Picture nominees. Article continues after the cut:

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