Back at the end of March, we reported on the ambiguity of Juno director Jason Reitman’s next directorial work. At the time, he said that he was making another semi-political movie, but this time instead of taking on big tobacco, he was going to take on big business. “Think Thank You For Smoking, but instead of political it’s corporate,” he said. At the time, we were okay just knowing that Reitman was working on something in the writer/director capacity.
Well, now thanks to our friends over at Latino Review, it appears that we now know what mysterious book will be the source material for his new film: Walter Kirn’s “Up in the Air”. Having never read the book, I took to the halls of Amazon to find this synopsis:
The hero of Walter Kirn’s novel Up in the Air inhabits an entirely new state: Airworld, where the hometown paper is USA Today, the indigenous cuisine wilts under heat lamps, and the citizenry speaks a Byzantine dialect of upgrades, expense accounts, and market share. Airworld even has its own nontaxable, inflation-free currency in the shape of bonus miles, which Ryan Bingham calls “private property in its purest form.” Officially, Bingham is a management consultant, specializing in the lugubrious field of career transition counseling (i.e., he fires people for a living). But what Kirn’s airborne protagonist is really doing is pursuing his own private passion, his great white whale: accumulating one million miles in his frequent-flyer account. As Up in the Air opens, Bingham has set out on a final, epic traveling jag. He intends to visit eight cities in six days, thereby achieving his own vision of Nirvana somewhere over Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Looks like an interesting story, to say the least. I wonder if anyone out there in RejectNation land has read the book… Can anyone shed some light on this for us? Seeing as it is Reitman, I would expect the dialogue to be sharp, the story to be rather dark and the tone to be somewhat snarky without being annoying. But as always, that’s just speculation.
Sound Off: What do you think of “Up in the Air” as Jason Reitman’s next project?
