The Missing Man.

I saw Titanic when I was 11 years old. Like most people in the planet I became truly obsessed with it. Curiously it happened around the same time when I'd become truly interested in films and wanted my life to revolve around them.

Part of my self-education consisted of me going to the video club and renting up to eight tapes to stay in with during the weekend.

One of my first missions was to watch every movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. One weekend I went home with Heavenly Creatures and Total Eclipse.

Watching Kate and Leo take on homosexual affairs after having watched them play the ultimate heterosexual couple was all sorts of shocking. Of course back then, I was aware of my own sexual orientation and like any prepubescent was both terrified and excited about the possibilities it offered me.

I remember watching Heavenly Creatures locked up in a room where to this day my parents probably thought was my porn space. It wasn't.

I remember thinking quite clearly that I assumed that any signs of homosexuality in the media I consumed would immediately point the people around me towards the feelings I had inside.

I vividly remember what then became my favorite shot in Heavenly Creatures,

It was the violent transformation of Pauline (Melanie Lynskey) into Orson Welles from The Third Man. I too understood why Juliet (Kate Winslet) saw this. I too was conflicted inside, I too felt like I needed to replace my own desires and fantasies with socially adequate figures.

The violent way in which Welles attacks her makes clear how Juliet is trying to fight something within her she doesn't understand.

I saw this movie for the first time almost fifteen years ago and this image remained burned in my subconscious ever since.
I never tried to commit a murder or developed violent tendencies, instead I chose to watch this moment as a life affirming instant, where Juliet's love for the movies expresses itself in such potent way that she fears its powers yet finds comfort in their magic, even if, in this case, it wants to kill her.

In the very same way the movies have remained with me and sheltered me from all fears, doubts and even sadness, they are the one thing in life I consider to be truly heavenly.

PS:

This,

reminded me of this...

This post is part of Nat's "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" series.

Up in the Air **

Director: Jason Reitman
Cast: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick
Jason Bateman, Melanie Lynskey, J.K. Simmons, Sam Elliott
Jim Miller, Zach Galifianakis

Star turns don't come more tailor made than George Clooney's Ryan Bingham in "Up in the Air". Ryan's job has him traveling across the country most of the year in order to layoff employees when their bosses can't do it.
Who else but Clooney, the eternal bachelor, could play a character whose asshole-ish qualities are compensated by undeniable, inescapable charm?
This life spent in airports and hotels has made him avert to any kind of emotional connections with other human beings including his own family.
That is until he meets Alex (Farmiga) a sexy frequent flyer with whom he begins a casual relationship only to have him doubt if his philosophy on bachelorhood is convenient.
He also meets Natalie Keener (Kendrick) an ambitious young woman hired by his company to revolutionize layoffs by going the cyber way. With Natalie Ryan becomes threatened of becoming obsolete, but she too has demons of her own to work with.
With a combination of comedy and drama, "Up in the Air" tries hard to be extremely likable, to the point in which every character becomes essentially a two dimensional representation of different kinds of people.
"I stereotype, it's faster" says Ryan to teach Natalie a lesson in efficiency. Curiously director Jason Reitman does the same to his movie.
While trying to evoke humanity and the day-to-day struggles of people living under a horrifying economy, he makes his characters as cold and detached as the computers Natalie wants to impose on Ryan.
The people in "Up in the Air" are completely mechanical in their behavior, even the people who are supposed to be "real" like Lynskey who plays Ryan's small town sister. The screenplay suggests her warmth and innocence by making her the kind of woman who makes a printout of herself and her fiancé (McBride) to have it photographed all over the country, "like the gnome in that French movie".
All because, you guessed it, she can't afford a real honeymoon and is happy with the photographs.
It's this kind of faux humanity that makes the movie so difficult to believe in. Besides this the movie also has some offensive gender politics; it pretends it's OK with women in charge of their careers but eventually patronizes them to make Ryan shine brighter.
Take Natalie for example, Kendrick plays her with enough vapid naivete to make us like her, but behind her tough facade lies a person so easy to convince that she would give up a life dream to be with a man.
When this comes and bites her in the ass, the movie proves Ryan was right about love sucking so much and people who fall for that trap being disposable.
Then there's Alex, who Farmiga imbues with sexiness and incredible confidence, but who is nothing more than your average maneater come the movie's end. Meaning that in this movie if you're a career woman you're either a bitter, disappointed lover or a soulless nymphomaniac.
Only women from Ryan's hometown have husbands who love them and the possibility of happiness.
"Up in the Air" is condescending towards lifestyle choices that don't fit its idea of living. The problem is that the movie is all appearances and doesn't even have an idea to back up its statements.
If problems only exist when their solution is available, then this movie shouldn't even be an issue.
Beyond its questioning of "loneliness" and relationships lies nothing more than a sleek corporate ad that tries to take you off the fact that they've been telling you all along that no matter what you do, you'll die alone.

Away We Go ***

Director: Sam Mendes
Cast: John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph
Catherine O'Hara, Jeff Daniels, Allison Janney, Jim Gaffigan
Carmen Ejogo, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Josh Hamilton
Chris Messina, Melanie Lynskey, Paul Schneider

Leaving behind his sterile formalism and working in a very relaxed style, Sam Mendes directs his first movie that feels refreshingly un-directed.
For someone that has specialized in the deconstruction of characters surrounded by pristine art direction and/or obvious camera moves, this tale of two people looking for a home, comes as a delightful surprise.
Burt (Krasinski) and Verona (Rudolph) are a couple in their mid-thirties who are expecting their first child. They live in a cottage in the middle of nowhere where they indulge in practices they have carried on from their college days.
But this won't do for their baby. With that in mind they set on a journey across North America to find the perfect place to settle.
First they go to Burt's parents (played splendidly by O'Hara and Daniels) who reveal they are moving to Antwerp and are just starting to live the lives people in their twenties desire.
Then it's off to Phoenix where they are greeted by Verona's former boss Lily (Janney) and her husband (Gaffigan). Lily calls herself a nutcase and insists that her little daughter is a dyke while her husband listens tolerantly.
After their awkward meeting they take a detour to see Verona's little sister (Ejogo) in Tucson with whom the film takes a turn for the purely bittersweet as the sisters remember their deceased parents.
After this they go to Madison to see Burt's childhood friend Ellen (a loopier, and oddly sexier, than ever Gyllenhaal), a college professor, who with her husband Rod (Hamilton), has taken to New Age-y parental practices that include them having sex in front of the kids.
They run away from this all the way to Montreal where they encounter college friends Tom (Messina) and Munch (Lynksey) who seem to have the perfect married life, but actually have deep pain.
Last, but not least, they go to Miami to see Burt's brother Courtney (Schneider, great as usual) whose wife recently abandoned him, leaving him alone to raise his young daughter (Isabelle Moon Alexander).
After life shows them all the possible people they can become, conveniently arranged in cinematic moral hierarchy, they have to decide where to move and who they most want to resemble.
As if they'd forgotten to decide the destination of their journey before leaving, they might always end up finding themselves where they began.
Luckily for such an aimless road trip, Krasinski and Rudolph keep the movie grounded and fascinating at every moment.
Even if the supporting characters are comprised of archetypes, weirdos and plain indie quirky clichés, they make Burt and Verona real people.
More than that, they make them people who are genuinely in love with each other ("I will love you even if I can't find your vagina" says Burt in a way that sounds breathtaking), for whom the problems of finding "the one" are done and over with.
When most movies settle for making the discovery of love the ultimate goal of life, this movie reminds us there's more than that and that life is a process.
"We're not fuck ups" they say at the beginning of the movie and they spend the rest of it showing us people who might as well be.
This comparison isn't condescending because truth is anyone watching the movie will try to empathize with them and see that after all they are not that bad.
In a lovely scene Burt proposes to Verona for the umpteenth time (she doesn't think marriage is necessary). She rejects him once more, but to ease his fear she ends up making promises from a list Burt comes up with spontaneously.
Mendes' delicate direction here isn't intrusive, but we know we are witnessing a making of vows more significant than anything we'd see at a wedding.
This is the film's best thing, not the big scenes with lots of characters, but the small intimate moments when we see Burt and Verona cuddle and lie quietly next to each other.
When they have to travel by train, they lie awake in their bunk beds, Ellen Kuras' spare cinematography suggests a void, and before long Burt has moved down to be with his girl.
Musicalized with Alexi Murdoch's lovely songs and with art direction that feels lived in more than anything, "Away We Go" is the kind of movie that indie filmmakers would die to produce, but has none of the pretentious resolutions we find in them more and more.
Perhaps a strike of good luck, or mere exhaustion (as the film was shot during a break Mendes took from "Revolutionary Road") we might leave not knowing if Burt and Verona found what they seeked.
But Mendes has finally achieved maturity.