Rob Verger

George Clooney stars as Ryan Bingham in “Up in the Air." Photo by Dale Robinette, courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

I saw the film “Up in the Air” at a press screening in Boston back in early November, and the movie has stayed with me since. Read “Beyond Airworld,” my review and personal reaction to the film, on the Travel Channel’s website WorldHum.com.

UPDATE: Read an item from The New York Times’s “In Transit” blog about World Hum’s coverage of this movie, and my essay.

Here are the first two paragraphs of the piece:

As a devoted occupant of the window seat, I loved the opening sequence of “Up in the Air”: postcard-like images of the landscape from above, the squares and circles of agriculture, the sense of interconnectedness—land, cities, ocean. All that is set to a soulful version of This Land is Your Land, by Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings.

I loved the rest of the scenery, too. It’s not all set in Airworld—the realm Walter Kirn described in the 2001 novel the movie is based on—but plenty is, and much of the imagery is striking: metallic American Airlines jets, a white 747 towering in a window, a single plane moving down a runway in snowy Detroit.

Continue reading.