Redford plays the same termination charactor.
Posted on 12/21/2009 3:51:52 PM PST by SeekAndFind
"Last year," Ryan Bingham says, “I spent 322 days on the road, which means that I had to spend 43 miserable days at home.” Home is an Omaha rental unit less furnished than a hotel room. He likes it that way.
Today, he is where he feels at home, in an airport — glass walls and glistening steel, synthetic sincerity and antiseptic hospitality. Today, he is showing Natalie, a ferocious young colleague, how an expert road warrior deals with lines at security screening:
Avoid, he says, getting behind travelers with infants (“I’ve never seen a stroller collapse in less than 20 minutes”). Or behind elderly people (“Their bodies are littered with hidden metal and they never seem to appreciate how little time they have left on Earth”). Do get behind Asians: “They’re light packers, treasure efficiency, and have a thing for slip-on shoes.”
Natalie: “That’s racist.”
Bingham: “I stereotype. It’s faster.”
Played with seemingly effortless perfection by the preternaturally smooth George Clooney, Bingham is the cool porcelain heart of the movie Up in the Air. It is a romantic comedy, although Bingham begins immune to romance and, after a brief and ill-advised lapse into feeling, ends the movie that way. And the comedy is about pain — about administering it somewhat humanely to people who are losing their jobs.
Bingham is a “termination engineer.” He fires people for companies that want to outsource the awkward, and occasionally dangerous, unpleasantness of downsizing. His pitter-patter for the fired — “Anybody who ever built an empire, or changed the world, sat where you are now” — rarely consoles. But with his surgeon’s detachment, he is more humane than Natalie, who says this:
(Excerpt) Read more at network.nationalpost.com ...
How to layoff people while minimizing their hurt. Some quotes from the movie — UP IN THE AIR :
“This is the first step of a process that will end with you in a new job that fulfills you. . . . I’d appreciate it if you didn’t spread the news just yet. Panic doesn’t help anybody.”
“Perhaps you’re underestimating the positive effect your career transition may have on your children. . . . Tests have shown that children under moderate trauma have a tendency to apply themselves academically as a method of coping.”
“You must remember this: In 2006, the last full year before this downturn, when the economy grew 2.7 percent and the unemployment rate was just 4.6 percent, 3.3 million people lost their jobs to the normal churning of a dynamic economy. This “creative destruction” has human costs but no longer is optional.”
Redford plays the same termination charactor.
Natalie was smokin HOT.
“Up in the Air,” topped the 2009 Golden Globes field with six nominations including best picture.
Charles Bronson rocks
All so young there.
Great flick.
That’s where Will stopped making sense to me.
>>>Bingham is a “termination engineer.” He fires people for companies that want to outsource the awkward, and occasionally dangerous, unpleasantness of downsizing.
They should have instead done the movie about The Two Bobs from Office Space.
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