*Spoilers*

George Clooney regularly plays that guy many of us secretly wish we were: suave, well-groomed, handsome, charismatic, confident – in other words, the Oceans Eleven Clooney – or for that matter, simply that general image we have of George Clooney with those aforementioned qualities, devoid of any discernible weaknesses or personality flaws. Certainly he has also played roles where he is paranoid,  troubled, even ‘kooky’, but regardless of the odd exception which has seen him gaining weight or growing a beard for certain parts, there’s that marked disconnection between the audience and him and his characters – where its particularly difficult to even picture him wearing anything other than a suit or even just with a different hairstyle. In fact I’ve often wondered whether he’s been ‘doing a Hugh Grant’ this whole time by simply playing himself in most of his parts – where the on-screen Clooney is almost inseparable from his celebrity persona.

In Up in the Air it comes as no surprise when he initially appears to fit the bill again – a sharply dressed, handsome, confident, silver-tongued devil. But as we delve deeper into this character of Ryan Bingham – a ‘corporate downsizing expert’ who has prioritised professionalism and self preservation above all else and has micromanaged to a clockwork efficiency every little last detail of his working life spent mainly at airports and within planes and hotel rooms and who is, as a result, completely detached from remorse and emotional reality – we see something we haven’t seen before; the polar opposite of what George Clooney stands for and what that overall image of George Clooney is. A vulnerable human being.

Bingham comes across as very similar to the character of Nick Naylor in Thank You For Smoking, also directed by Jason Reitman, the former a professional firer of people with zero empathy and the latter a pro-tobacco spokesperson, the both of them unscrupulous champions of capitalism who we ought to really hate but somehow, through those innate snake-like charms of theirs, manage to win us over with a surprising likeability. The main difference between them is that in Up in the Air we catch a glimpse of the life Bingham has left behind and the pain caused by the ramifications of his choices, concealed behind that all-too-familiar smiling Clooney exterior.

This is a film many of us can relate to. It deals with the pursuit of a career and the security of a salary versus the dreams that may not pay off and which we may well never achieve. It explores the trade-off between excelling in what you need to do and not doing the best you can in what you want to do, and vice-versa. We are confronted with that awful fear in the back our minds that there is an extremely high probability that our lives will probably not turn out the way we wished, and how powerless we are to truly prevent ourselves from harm. We see human fragility in the face of love and pride, where a compromise needs to be made and where something usually needs to be sacrificed.

All of these worries are present in the characters in Up in the Air: dreamers and cynics, sometimes a bit of both. Bingham’s love interest in the film, Alex, shares the almost exact same lifestyle but ends up affecting him profoundly. The young hotshot Natalie Keener believes in true love and the importance of seeking it, refusing to even imagine life without it and disagreeing with Bingham’s outlook and the emotionless prerequisites of the horrible nature of their work. These characters impart their beliefs on one another, but the one who ‘learns’ the most from it is Ryan Bingham who, as a downsizer whose life philosophy all along has been to reduce the load of his own emotional baggage while reaching his life target of 50 million frequent flyer miles, eventually comes to terms with the harsh reality that he has, consequently, made redundant his own opportunities of truly living. The scene where he is required to give a potential future brother-in-law advice on the importance of marriage – a decision he has up until then personally staunchly opposed – exposes a hypocrisy he can’t help but self-deprecatingly acknowledge and yet, through this, we feel a strange empathy for him, a character who is seemingly heartless, and see how even the most rock-hard stubbornness can still be swayed. Bingham is heartbroken in the end, but the fact that his heart was able to be broken at all really solidifies his character.

And that’s what really got me in this movie. Far from being depressing, there is a hope that’s revealed through Ryan Bingham: the moment he accepts the flaws of his own beliefs and comes to terms with the pure fact that life cannot be lived alone coincides with the audience’s discovery that, instead of constantly being that guy we wanted to be, this time round George Clooney is playing the guy who kind of reminds us of ourselves. We might not have that exact same external charm or the trademark grey hair or display such confidence in public speaking but inside, we all feel the same things, and that’s what makes Up in the Air hit home so convincingly and accessibly on a human level.

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Clint Eastwood directed films, for me, come in two categories: his best films such as Unforgiven, Gran Turino, and Letters from Iwo Jima are amazingly sentimental, whilst his worst ones suffer from, and this might be a little harsh, extreme emotional manipulation – take the ending of Million Dollar Baby, the overacting in Mystic River, and pretty much the entirety of Changeling for instance, the latter category of which I consider to feature several of the most overrated movies of recent times. So then along comes Invictus, a drama about the 1995 South African Rugby Union World Cup winning team and Nelson Mandela’s input in using the sport to unite a divided nation, which not only throws my two category theory out the window, it also convinces me that Eastwood is capable of achieving something in-between: Mediocrity.

The problem with Invictus is that, unlike many sports films that have come before it, it doesn’t focus just on the sport or the sporting-related drama. It tries to bring together Mandela’s election victory, the man himself and the inspiration he found in prison through the poem the film is named after, the state of apartheid and class in South Africa at the time, as well as the events of the rugby tournament without really concentrating enough on any of the individual elements. It is, in other words, the film equivalent of gathering too many eggs into the one basket or, if you will, a film which tries to tackle much more than it can really handle.

Invictus does have its moments. Morgan Freeman is excellent and the character of Mandela is portrayed affectionately and sensibly with hints of his humanity, humour, and his own family problems amidst the enormity of the task he faced. There is a nice scene where the Springboks spend a day with soccer-loving children in a poor community and the only black player on the team is mobbed. But sadly the story suffers mainly through the lack of any strong leading characters apart from Mandela: Matt Damon’s Francois Pienaar who, as the team captain and the main focus on the sporting aspect of the film, is at the end of the day just a rugby player after all, and whilst there are supporting characters in the form of Mandela’s bodyguards and personal assistants while New Zealand’s Jonah Lomu is represented as the closest “bad guy” character to be found in the movie, none of them are explored enough to make the event feel as significant as it ought to have been. The rest of the cast act only as a means of connecting the few major characters together – the Springboks team in particular have very little to offer apart from uttering filler-speak and nodding their heads in agreement or shaking them in disapproval - and Pienaar’s and Mandela’s families contribute only in speaking minor lines of exposition and shouting in excitement at the final whistle.

The fairytale simply works better as a moment in history documented through word and memory than as a film, which is surprising given that, even without any liberties taken with the actual facts of the tournament as demonstrated in many of the other movies in the genre where last minute goals or touchdowns or home runs or three pointers are scored, the Springbok’s did really win the World Cup as underdogs and they did actually score a last minute drop goal in extra time in the Final and yet none of this hits home as anything remotely exciting. Unfortunately Eastwood has a deliberately slow style which is simply not suited to a story of Mandela as well as a story about a sporting miracle at the same time, when clearly he does not know how to capture the excitement of sport never mind a code of football alien and peculiar to many Americans and the mainstream audience granted how scrum shots are over-elaborated on and drop goals are excruciatingly slow-mo’d. As to the bigger question of whether South Africa’s problems improved as a result of the team’s victory, the film teases you by alluding to it through a close-up of black and white hands on the trophy and spliced-together footage of a celebrating nation but does not expand on what happened next, and what we are left with is an attempt at capturing the state of a country during a single sporting moment when the moment is better felt and experienced and almost impossible to truly capture on screen.

It is by no means a terrible film. Certainly nowhere near as awful or as ridiculous as my favourite bad sports movie Victory/Escape to Victory – starring Michael Caine, Sylvester Stallone, members of the England 1966 World Cup (soccer) winning squad, where English and American prisoners of war  in WWII (plus Pele) play the Nazis and win not only the final match but also their freedom. There is however a perplexing and inappropriate scene in Invictus near the end where a South African Airlines plane flies over the stadium to insinuate an act of terror which has no place whatsoever in this movie. Ultimately though we are merely left with a Mandela film which would have been better had it just focused on Nelson Mandela and where the rugby didn’t get in the way, or otherwise a rugby story better left as perhaps a feature article or a story told in a pub or in a school PE class. Fans of the sport and those interested in the former South African president will likely be left disappointed with a final product akin to that of Ang Lee directing Hulk; a talented director better suited to emotional pieces taking on a project that aims for an ambitious goal but skews the kick wide of the mark. And regardless of what the critics say, I still think Million Dollar Baby, Mystic River and Changeling were much worse than this.

The winner will receive a Will Ooi-autographed copy of a picture of Jack Nicholson holding a picture of Heath Ledger, being asked for an autograph

I still remember it so vividly: the day my mum took me to the store to pick up the Sega Master System II, my first ever console and a moment that inevitably influenced my gaming life for good, culminating in me. The console’s box design and game covers checkered in predominant white with black stripes and adorned with Times New Roman font. We sure have come a long way since then, but in the early 90s when Hypercolour t-shirts constituted taste, it was magic.

All my friends had NES’s – all of them – but there was something about Sega that struck me. Maybe it was the futuristic logo which has never aged, even now, or maybe it was the appeal of supporting the underdog. Perhaps it was even the built-in game, Alex Kidd in Miracle World. Regardless of what it was, there was certainly something special about it and I simply couldn’t wait to rush home to unbox it along with my first ever non-built-in game that accompanied it, Enduro Racer.

Glorious it was, curvaceously compact with a shiny charcoal finish and smelling like fresh plastic. Cables were connected and old CRT TV channels were manually configured, on it went and there it was, the most unforgettable theme song in my entire life. Enduro Racer and all its isometric angle cruelties which I would come to learn of later could wait its turn for now.

Photo from RetroJunk

Alex Kidd in Miracle World had several pivotal aspects. The awfully harsh difficulty scale. The skill required to swim against the flow while underwater, avoiding that Octopus boss’ tentacles in order to get close enough to punch him. The punishment and fear it conditioned into young impressional minds by morbidly offering special question-mark item boxes which were possessed – at random – by ghosts that would fly straight through every on-screen obstacle and kill you with a touch. The number of times I died and replayed straight away, watching that same title screen and hearing that same jingle. The shame I still feel in never finishing it, always losing the last Scissors-Paper-Rock boss fight without even a hint of the luxury afforded us today via modern-day FAQs or, dammit, even the internet. I must have played that game over 200 times and it always ended up (and immediately restarted) in frustration and that friggin’ theme song.

Now when I look back, 20 years later, the game wasn’t that great, even by 8-bit standards. It was always going to be remembered as a mediocre Mario rip-off, just with oversized-fists and big ears and a relentless level of difficulty. As for the Master System II itself, the console’s controller’s sharp edges used to give me blisters and you could only pause by pressing the big round white button located on the actual machine. And ever since then I’ve witnessed, as we all have, the rise and fall of Sega, with memorable characters and games coming and going and often fading into obscurity, with Alex making way to Sonic as Sega’s mascot and being promptly adandoned, but that bloody music, my God!

Still catchy and no longer rubbing in the fact that it was game over yet again, the theme song to Alex Kidd in Miracle World takes me back to a wonderful time of my youth and for that it’ll always hold a special place in my memory, bringing a smile to my face whenever my brain decides to turn back the clock, overlooking the trauma caused not only by the lack of save function with those old game cartridges, but also the painful injustice of predetermined Scissors-Paper-Rock contests resulting in two fingers stuck up at you followed swiftly – and memorably – by death.