Reviews by Matt

Some actors are bigger than the characters portray on screen. In some cases this is bad: Nicholas Cage has had a string of bad movies where the actor is more present than the character. Sometimes it is just funny; Christopher Walken has been playing himself for years now. Then there are the actors where it does not matter that you see him on screen, he still delivers an amazing performance. The actor in question is George Clooney.

Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) works for a company that fires people. He flies all over the country and fires people at other companies. He spends most of the year in the air and has not really made many relationships, but he is happy with his lot in life. His closest relationship is with Alex (Vera Farmiga) a woman he meets in an airport bar. The two strike up an intense relationship revolving around syncing their schedules. After Natalie (Anna Kendrick,) a new hire at his office, comes up with a way to fire people via videoconference, Ryan is asked take her with him on his travels to give her some experience.

Clooney is amazing in just about everything he has done in the past few years, even if you cannot separate him from the character, and this is one of his best. This is most evident in the scenes where he is firing people. Ryan doesn’t just fire people, he offers them help for whatever comes afterwards. The following is a minor spoiler for the movie, so read on with caution or skip to the next paragraph. In one scene, he lets a man named Bob (J.K. Simmons) know that he is being let go. Bob is distraught and has no idea how to support his family with no job. Ryan mentions that on his resume, Bob put down that in college he minored in French Culinary Arts and that he bused tables at a French restaurant to put himself through school. He tells Bob that this is a chance to follow his dreams, and to do it for his kids.

The other star is Anna Kendrick. She shares some great scenes with Clooney and is able to be just as good as he is. Kendrick has gained fame for her part in the “Twilight” movies. She can do so much better than those movies and it shows here. Natalie is just out of school and is naïve when it comes to the real world. She comes in and has a great idea to save the company tons of money; firing via computer. She poses a threat to Ryan’s loner way of life and when she gets a dose of what he actually does it startles her. She is asked to fire someone via computer and she does it, but it takes a visible emotional toll.

One quick thing before I wrap this up. With the exception of two firing scenes, all the people fired were real people who had been laid off. The filmmakers placed ads in the paper saying they were doing a documentary on the recession. Those who showed up were told talk to the camera like it was the person who fired them and they could respond as they did, or say what they wished they had. This made those scenes very real. These are real people who went through one of the hardest things someone can face. It adds more to those scenes and is another reason why I love this movie as much as I do.

See this movie. The performances alone are worth it. It has won a bunch of awards already and is sure to get some Oscar nominations in Feburary. Look for another best actor nod for Clooney as well as best supporting actress nominations for Kendrick and Farmiga. Jason Reitman is sure to get a best director nomination to go along with a best picture nomination.

9 out of 10
Rated R for language and some sexual content.
109 min

Hype.

Most major movie releases have some. Summer movies get more than most just because the summer is a huge time for the movie studios. This hype can be avoided by most of the population. They may hear/see something every now and then, but they can remain unaffected. Then there is the hype of a movie like “Avatar” which can only be classified as unavoidable.

Think of “Avatar” as “Dances With Wolves” with big blue catlike people. A man, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is picked to deal with a group of natives, in this case the Na’vi, in order to exploit something they have; the comically named “unobtainium.” To do this, his brain is linked with an avatar or a body grown from a mix of human and Na’vi DNA. While following orders he ends up falling in love with one of the native people; Jake falls for Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and fights against his people to help the natives.

Story wise, this movie is complete crap. There is nothing new and nothing innovative is achieved. So why then was this placed at No. 7 on my list of best movies from the year? Simple. The effects are simply stunning.

Part of the reason why the budget for this movie is rumored to by $500 million is because director James Cameron had to invent new technology to make this movie work. He invented a way to see a scene with rough digital effects right there on set.
Normally it would take some postproduction work for a director to see what the effects would look like in the shot. This new technique allowed him to make changes on set as needed to make things work better. The effects are great and when about 65 percent of the movie is computer generated, it has to or the movie would fail. The detail in the backgrounds of the jungle scenes is stunning. The look of the characters is great and they look a lot like the actors who play them.

The big thing everyone is talking about is the 3-D. A lot of the current 3-D movies use that extra dimension to add gimmicks like stuff flying at you. “Avatar” uses it to enhance what is already there. Things like dust that looks closer to the viewer or people moving in the background seem farther away add a depth to the scene that one cannot get in the traditional 2-D movie. The advantage to this type is that there is less of a chance of motion sickness because the 3-D is not as obtrusive as with other movies.

The movie has already made over $1 billion worldwide so clearly the hype helped. The movie might lack in story, but it makes up for it in breath taking effects. The only way to see this is in the theater. I have no intention of seeing this on DVD because nearly everything I liked about the movie will be lost when it goes 2-D and small.

7 out of 10
Rated PG-13 for intense epic battle sequences and warfare, sensuality, language and some smoking.
162 min