Wow! I noticed the politics in Juno, but Up in The Air didn’t seem to have any overt political axe to grind. Liberals are psychotic, seeing EVERYTHING through leftist eyes.
Great post, can’t believe I haven’t seen Juno yet. Will check out Up in the Air too.
EXACTLY! It really is a disease.
It wasn't a political axe, it was a social comment. Basically, Reitman's POV is that anyone who chooses the impersonal life, the floating world of commercial relationships and faux familiarity, is a "dead man walking", a ghost. The difference between Clooney's character and a dead man is that he hasn't got his six feet of dirt yet.
It's an intensification of a sidebar message sounded in the older film Big Jake, in which John Wayne's character Jake McCandles, impressive and self-possessed as he is, keeps running into the tag line, "I thought you wuz dead!" The message is, until McCandles answers his ex-wife's (Maureen O'Hara's) family's call for help and reconnects with her and his sons and friends, he might as well have been.