By Drew Grant 9/07/12 1:07pm

Casting

Video

'American Beauty' live read in Toronto (Getty Images)

Jason Reitman Assembles Dream Team For American Beauty Reading: Bryan Cranston, Adam Driver, Christina Hendricks Perform (Video)

Last night, Jason Reitman took it upon himself to prove Natasha Vargas-Cooper wrong about the timeliness of Alan Ball’s 1999 script, American Beauty. Apparently it doesn’t have to feel like a rehashed bowl of nostalgic bullshit–as the Up in the Air director proved at the Toronto Film Festival when he got a new and improved cast to breathe life into stale material during a live read. Read More

By Rex Reed 12/07/11 2:29pm

movies

Theron.

A Young Adult's Spinster Cycle

Another triumphant performance by Charlize Theron informs and enhances the otherwise uneven Young Adult, an edgy and sometimes disappointing drama about contemporary neuroses with comic undertones from director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody, the team responsible for the surprise 2007 hit Juno. It’s not in the same league as Mr. Reitman’s hugely superior Up in the Air, but Ms. Theron, a true beauty and one of the screen’s most exquisite actors, keeps the film airborne even when it seems dangerously earthbound. She’s a one-woman emergency rescue squad. Read More

By Elise Knutsen 8/04/11 11:45am

Manhattan Transfers

44 West 20th Street (Photo from Street Easy)

Jason Reitman Directs Chelsea Co-op for $2.15 M.

Director Jason Reitman ordered a new mise-en-scene this week, buying an apartment in Chelsea with wife Michele. The couple paid $2.15 million for the co-op at 434 West 20th Street. They purchased the home from a Thomas Schieble, who lists Bloomsburg, Penn., as his current residence

The Observer talked with Corcoran broker Richard Hicks, who represented the owner on the deal, and he explained what attracted the director and his wife to the apartment. “The block, for one,” Mr. Hicks began,was a main draw. The apartment overlooks the New York Seminary’s sprawling front garden. Read More

By Meredith Bryan 3/16/10 11:07pm

The Floppy-Haired Fellows

The most striking thing about this year’s Oscars, other than that a female director finally won? The guys’ hair. There was George Clooney, whose longish (for him) do had a distinctly feathered quality in the front. Then there was James Cameron, whose soft, elongated bowl cut channeled ABBA, and was possibly blow-dried. But Mark Boal, Read More

By Rex Reed 12/01/09 9:32pm

I’m Changing My Tune on Clooney!

Up in the Air
Written by Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner
Directed by Jason Reitman
Starring George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, Jason Bateman

George Clooney’s performances are always variations on the same themes: tongue-in-cheek frat-house humor; a rampant ego that makes love to the camera when no girl is around; and the suave wit Read More

By Joseph Alexiou 11/11/09 12:29am

The Reitman for the Job? Director Jason Flies For Pie

At the premiere of Jason Reitman’s new film Up in the Air— based on the 2001 novel by Walter Kirn—at the Paris theater on Thursday, Nov. 5, Mr. Reitman’s father, Canadian producer-director Ivan Reitman, said his son was a “good kid,” who “never took drugs or drank.”

Perhaps that’s because it’s pizza that’s his Read More

By Sara Vilkomerson 2/26/08 5:51pm

Olivia Thirlby: Juno’s Bestie on the Brink

“My brain hasn’t really processed it. I actually can’t believe it,” said Olivia Thirlby, via phone, early in the morning of Oscar Sunday. The 21-year-old actress, in Los Angeles, was eating breakfast (“I’m sorry for the crunching”) and about to embark upon the daylong process of readying herself for the red carpet to end all Read More