Jason Reitman's Up in the Air calls inveterate bachelor George Clooney to the stand to defend his enviable lifestyle to the civilized world. Alas, since this is mainstream Hollywood, where no undomesticated man goes unpunished, the jury's rigged. But first, the rest of it. Clooney's thinly-veiled alter ego, Ryan Bingham, is a corporate hatchet-man-for-hire who loves traveling and all the freedom from responsibility that implies. He's never been married, has no kids, and with business booming (thanks to our current economic crisis), it looks like he's not that far off from achieving his (only) long-term goal of getting enough miles under him to earn executive privileges from his airline. Then Natalie (Anna Kendrick), a new hire at Bingham's company eager to impress, proposes a revolutionary idea--fire people over the Internet using iChat--that would effectively bring an end to Ryan's jetsetting. Assigned to show Natalie the ropes on the road trip that follows, Ryan tries to prove to her the value of terminating someone's employment in person, partly out of self-preservation but also because he respects the sensitive nature of his work. (He may be commitment-phobic and a bit of a hustler, but he's no sadist.) The story's Nebraskan starting point and wedding-bound trajectory, plus the use of Ryan's white-trash roots as a self-evident punchline, made me wonder how Up in the Air escaped becoming an Alexander Payne movie, and truth be told the Clooney character could've used Payne's penchant for locating his protagonists' Achilles heels: Ryan is so free of neuroses that his inevitable comeuppance--er, epiphany--feels moralistic, if not outright cruel. Nevertheless, all isn't lost with the increasingly slick Reitman, who has the good sense to not slather every emotional beat in score and really seems to like his actresses. Vera Farmiga typically smoulders as Ryan's female counterpart ("Think of me as yourself with a vagina"), though it's the singular Kendrick who walks away with the movie--quite literally, as Natalie's premature departure from the narrative sends Up in the Air into a tailspin, pun intended.

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Bong Joon-ho's deliciously serpentine Mother (Madeo) is the story of a mom (Kim Hye-ja, awesome) who has supported her mentally-challenged son, Yoon Do-joon (Bin Won), into adulthood; monitoring him from afar while chopping roots, she's so watchful that she doesn't notice herself cutting off her own finger. She even sleeps in the same bed with him, though Bong doesn't sink to Bad Boy Bubby depths of depravity. When Yoon Do-joon is scapegoated in the killing of a schoolgirl, Mother makes it her sole (soul? Seoul?) mission in life to prove his innocence, which gradually transforms her into a distaff Kyle MacLachlan as she goes sleuthing in the city's Lynchian underbelly. (Much has been made of the murder victim's archetypal resemblance to "Twin Peaks"' Laura Palmer (she's the local teenaged Madonna/whore), but the picture's most brazen--and no less effective for it--homages are to Blue Velvet.) It's not as fun as The Host and not as unsettling as Memories of Murder, but its wizardly craft does provide further evidence that Bong is one of the most formidable filmmaking talents to have emerged this decade, and its vision of maternal instinct rings true. Mother also begins to throw some of the director's predilections and leitmotifs of Bong's work into relief, including a Hitchcockian distrust of law enforcement (Memories of Murder is essentially Zodiac starring the Keystone Cops, and in Mother, once the police are finally right, they're still wrong), vigilant parents, field imagery, unexpected humour, and, regrettably, a tendency to overstay his welcome. Just a smidge.

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At the outset, it worried me that The Hole (no relation to any of the films bearing that title in the past), the great Joe Dante's return to the big screen, has little to no marquee value. Silly, I know: it's not like Gremlins' Zach Galligan was or is a household name--and besides, this is one of Dante's kid-oriented pictures, which are never star-driven. Still, to go from "and Steve Martin" to "and Teri Polo" in six short years is pretty humbling; Dante long ago paid his dues in B-movies and, however happy he might be to get away from studio interference/oppression, I'm sad to see him back there--not just because he hardly deserves such a Wellesian fate, but also because he's a director whose imagination grew in proportion to his funding, and he seems no longer inspired but instead stupefied by a shoestring budget. (At least where his feature work is concerned.) In The Hole, teenaged Dane (Chris Massoglia) and his little brother Lucas (Nathan Gamble) are forced to call the suburban podunk of Bensonville home after being uprooted for apparently the umpteenth time by their restless mother (Polo). From an adolescent standpoint, their new place has two things going for it: a view overlooking cute neighbour Julie (Haley Bennett, who was sort of brilliant in Music and Lyrics); and a bottomless pit in the basement that's part Lovecraftian portal, part Nietzschian abyss. Needless to say, Dane, Julie, and Lucas bond over the titular chasm, literally and figuratively, whereupon all three start having encounters with physical manifestations of their worst fears. (Think Flatliners without the defibrillators.) Promisingly, Lucas is afraid of clowns, and we get a doozy of a jester doll to infect our collective subconscious. But the gag, in what proves a common complaint across the protagonists' nightmares, doesn't escalate; imagine Gremlins stopping at the in-between Mogwai. (Most disappointingly for the cinephilic Dante, the footage from a video camera lowered into the hole is left maddeningly unexploited.) Maybe Dante's miserable experience on Looney Tunes: Back in Action turned him off frenetic pacing and funhouse gauntlets, but it's worth noting that when a big dose of his signature anarchy would really be welcome (i.e., during the climax to Dane's arc), the picture becomes unauteuristically lumbering and heavy-handed. It's not a total loss, particularly if you're feeling nostalgic: The Hole resurrects the '80s tendency to abuse the PG prerogative to say "shit," as well as that decade's comfort with contemporary pop-culture--one of my favourite moments has the kids sending a talking Cartman plushie down the well. Dante's still using the Spielbergian camera for evil and there are vintage flashes of his humour in the film, such as a glove factory named Orlac. Alas, it's not enough to keep the (unfortunate) novelty of seeing a theatrical feature directed by Joe Dante--in 3-D, no less--from wearing off, at which point the film loses its flavour faster than chewing gum.

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