This Up In The Air trailer was posted yesterday, and it seems to be precisely the same one I was watching a month or so ago. The release-date shifts have thrown me off, so this is an opportunity to reiterate that the presumed Best Picture front-runner opens on 12.4.

Scott Foundas has written an eloquent opening for his Up In The Air review in the November/December issue of Film Comment:

“Contemporary Hollywood has steadfastly avoided the workplace — unless the jobs are particularly glamorous (Broadcast News, The Devil Wears Prada), or the workers unfairly exploited (Silkwood, North Country) or the fodder for gallows humor (the Mike Judge oeuvre). And so there’s an immediate and ingratiating novelty to the fact that so much of Jason Reitman‘s Up in the Air unfolds in cubicles and conference rooms in nondescript office buildings in Wichita, Kansas City, and other outposts of the great American in-between.

“Likewise, the people Up in the Air are neither the laugh-tracked eccentrics of TV sitcoms nor Michael Moore‘s congenitally oppressed proles. They are, rather, the white-collar career middle-managers, useful but ultimately inessential to their employers, who believed they had jobs for life — until a tough economy rendered them expendable. They may not be the stars of Up in the Air, but they are what gives the movie its soul.”