I’ve just seen the most eloquent, affecting and altogether best film of 2009…so far. Yes, better than my beloved The Hurt Locker. If it doesn’t win the Best Picture Oscar next February…well, okay…I’ll live. Jason Reitman will live, George Clooney will live, Paramount publicity will live, Brad Grey will live, your family and friends will live, and the sun will come up the next day.

(l. to r.) Vera Farmiga, George Clooney, Anna Kendrick in Jason Reitman’s Up In The Air.

But Up In The Air really has it all — recognizable human-scale truth, clarity, smart comfort, the right degree of restraint (i.e., knowing how not to push it), and — this got me more than anything else — a penetrating, almost unnerving sense of quiet.

This is one of the calmest and most unforced this-is-who-we-are, what-we-need and what-we’re-all-afraid-of-in-the-workplace movies that I’ve ever seen. From an American, I should say. (The Europeans have almost made job-anxiety films into a genre — i.e., Laurent Cantet‘s Time Out, etc.) But I would guess that Up In The Air will play very, very well in Paris. It’s a film that walks and talks it and knows it every step of the way. Work, adulthood, asking the questions that matter, compassion, family, stick-your-neck-out, etc. The whole package. With an almost profound lack of Hollywood bullshit and jerk-offery. And a kind of Brokeback Mountain-y theme at the finale — i.e., “move it or lose it.”

Up In The Air doesn’t tell you what to feel — it lets you feel what it is. All the best movies do that. They don’t sell or pitch — they just lay it down on the Oriental carpet and say to the viewer, “We’ve got a good thing here, and if you agree, fine. And if you don’t, go with God.”

You know what? The hell with that attitude. If you really watch and let this movie in and then say, as a friend of a good friend said after watching it in Telluride a few days ago, “I don’t know…it’s nice but it’s more like an okay ground-rule double than a homer,” then due respect but you’re the kind of person who likes candied popcorn and Strawberry Twizzlers and feel-good pills. No offense.

Variety‘s Todd McCarthy called it “a slickly engaging piece of lightweight existentialism.” That’s an unfair and inappropriate characterization. There’s a difference between lightweight and having the goods and taking it easy and laying it on gradually.

The thing that puts Up In The Air over is that it’s about right effin’ now, which is to say the uncertain and fearful Great Recession current of 2009. Reitman has been working on it for six years, and if it had come out last September — just as the bad news about what those greedy selfish banking bastards had done was being announced and everyone started to mutter “uh-oh” to themselves — it wouldn’t be reflecting the cultural what-have-you as much as it is now. And yet it never alludes to anything that specific. It doesn’t have to.

We all know about the story by now. Ryan Bingham (Clooney) is a kind of lightweight Zen smoothie who specializes in gently firing people when their bosses are too chicken to do it themselves. He doesn’t just like travelling around in business class seats and staying in nice hotels — he relishes the sense of belonging and security that he gets from being constantly in motion and never digging into a life of his own. And it’s easy to spot the arc — i.e., will Ryan find some way to let go of skimming along and maybe go for a little soul infusion?

The basic story propellant comes from two women who represent a certain kind of change/growth/threat element — Alex (Vera Farmiga), a fellow traveller who’s an exact replica of Bingham save for her sexuality, and with whom he strikes up a nice groove-on relationship in the film’s beginning, and Natalie (Anna Kendrick), a hamster-sized junor exec type who ‘s sold Ryan’s boss (Jason Bateman) on whacking people through a video conferencing system rather than face-to-face.

But I don’t want to get into the story more than that. What happens, happens for the right reasons. The main thing is that none of the developments feel the least bit ungenuine. And I will square off with anyone who says the ending isn’t sufficiently “happy.” Anyone who doesn’t realize that Clooney is quite another man and open to the next good thing at the finale simply hasn’t been paying attention.

There are many witnesses in this film a la Reds — real-life people who’ve been laid off and are facing the abyss in more ways than one — and I’ve already read complaints that Reitman overplays this card. I respectfully disagree. The clips appear symmetrically (i.e., at the beginning and end), and have an added weight at the finale. “Repetition” doesn’t necessarily mean “repetitiously.”

I’m really glad I caught Up In The Air at the beginning of the second wave — i.e., immediately post-Telluride. By the time it comes out on 11.13.09 it’ll be something else, and by that I mean the movie that snarkers will be looking to shoot down just to do that. Snarkers are so reprehensible. They pummel and flatten things down and rob them of their fresh-soil beauty.

Nine and a half years ago I flipped for Karyn Kusama‘s Girlfight, one of the most street-authentic and emotionally believable female empowerment sports sagas ever. (I tried finding my Reel.com Sundance review, but it’s hiding.) Last week I saw Kusama’s latest film, Jennifer’s Body, and I was aghast.

Never in my life have I noticed such a massive disparity in the tone, spirit and content of two films by the same director. A talented young woman with guts and heart directed Girlfight. A woman who has sold her soul to Satan directed Jennifer’s Body. I have a screening about to start so I’ll add to this later, but Jennifer’s Body is empty repellent extremist crap. And Megan Fox really and truly has no soul. She has all the natural soul-charisma of a porn star.

“While not exactly lifeless, Jennifer’s Body sure could be fresher,” writes Variety‘s Justin Chang. “Even with Megan Fox ideally cast as a sharp-fanged succubus with a lusty appetite for young male (and sometimes female) flesh, this high school horror romp tackles its bad-girl-gone-really-bad premise with eye-rolling obviousness and, fatally, a near-total absence of real scares.

“Fox Atomic item will stir interest as a post-Juno outing for scribe Diablo Cody, whose whippersnapper sensibility can be heard in the occasional snatches of self-consciously clever dialogue. But even auds primed to see guts and other exposed body parts will be disappointed by a Body less bawdy than advertised.”

I don’t know it it’s legit or not, but a “Private Dinner for Five with Sarah Palin” is up for bidding on EBay. I’m thinking it could be legit since it says that “this listing is restricted to pre-approved buyers only — email the seller to be placed on that pre-approved list.” And because it says that 100% of proceeds will benefit Ride 2 Recovery. 16 bids have come in so far and it’s up to $38,166,600.

“I cannot dismiss Antichrist,” Roger Ebert has written. “It is a real film. It will remain in my mind. Von Trier has reached me and shaken me. It is up to me to decide what that means.

“I think the film has something to do with religious feeling. It is obvious to anyone who saw Breaking the Waves that von Trier’s sense of spirituality is intense, and that he can envision the supernatural as literally present in the world. His reference is Catholicism. Raised by a communist mother and a socialist father in a restrictive environment, he was told as an adult that his father was not his natural parent, and renounced that man’s Judaism to convert, at the age of 30, to the Catholic church. It was at about the same age that von Trier founded the Dogma movement, with its monkish asceticism.

“If you have to ask what a film symbolizes, it doesn’t. With this one, I didn’t have to ask. It told me. I believe Antichrist may be an exercise in alternative theology: von Trier’s version of those passages in Genesis where Man is cast from Eden and Satan assumes a role in the world.”

The aggressive marketing of the Beatles catelogue remasterings (including those dozens of favorable reviews that have been appearing for the last week or so). The sound is unmistakably improved over the 1987 CDs, like everyone’s been saying. To my ears the bass and drums are the most enhanced. Plus you can hear dozens of little other little grace notes and consonants and tonal effects much more clearly.

The sum effect isn’t stunningly different — you’re not going to be staggering out into the street going “what happened? I just listened to the remastered Revolver and I lost all sense of tiem and space!” — but the CDs (individually or in a package) are surely worth the purchase. And I’ve been telling myself for the last two or three years I’ll never buy another CD again. Never say never.

I’ve seen Jennifer’s Body and wouldn’t submit again with a knife at my back. I’ve seen Antichrist, of course, but I’m thinking I might watch it again in deference to that basically-bullshit, contrarian-for-its-own-sake Larry Gross argument (i.e., the Cannes critics over-reacted). I saw Pedro Almodovar‘s Broken Embraces in Cannes and loved it 90% (“I didn’t want it to end…it just won’t stop caressing and knocking you out.”) so I may duck into this if the second Antichrist viewing is too much to take.

Today’s TIFF press screening schedule — Thursday, 9.10, 6:25 pm

The three biggies today are (a) the 2:30 pm showing of Jon Amiel‘s Creation, which is the festival’s opening night film-with-an-afterparty (which no one of any taste or consequence ever attends); (b) the 5 pm showing of Grant Heslov‘s The Men Who Stare at Goats (which received a dicey Hollywood Reporter review out of Venice, thus compromising the effect of the ecstatic rave by Variety‘s Derek Elley); and (c) George Hickenlooper‘s Casino Jack, which I erroneously thought was going to show last night.

No need to interpret the expression on Rep. Joe Wilson (Republican, South Carolina) as he shouted “you lie!” during President Obama ‘s health care speech last night. But look at those two reptilian guys sitting next to him. Talk about an utter absence of God’s light. Why don’t Hollywood casting agents ever find guys with faces like this?

I didn’t even watch Obama’s health care speech last night, but I watched most of it this morning on YouTube. 65% sermon, 35% political boxing. Precise, frank, blunt-spoken. An excellent finale: “That is our character.” And the Edward M. Kennedy quote. But he threw the public option under the bus by not declaring it to be a win-or-die proposition, and that doesn’t sit well with me.

How many times do you think they rehearsed this thing? God, I love anything that doesn’t use CG and just plain old acting, writing, camera movement and choreography instead. It’s perfect. The last time I felt a charge from Robert Carlyle‘s acting was in 28 Weeks Later, or roughly two years ago. This, for me, is the best he’s been since Trainspotting.

This morning I read three Esquire magazine “What I’ve Learned” quotes that I love. They’re from actor Elliott Gould, and can be found on page 160 of the current issue. (a) “A Freudian psychiatrist once asked me if I considered myself to be omnipotent. I said, ‘I don’t know if I know what that word means.’ He said, ‘All-powerful.’ And I said no. But English wasn’t his first language — he was from Hungary. I think what he meant to ask was, ‘Are you aware you’re oblivious to reality?'”; (b) “When Bob Costas asked me if I had a drug problem, I said ‘No, I don’t have a drug problem. I have a problem with reality.'”; (c) “I don’t want to be impressed. It distracts me.”