Day 2 at TIFF 2009 brought on the two films at this festival that could be thought of as Juno followups: the Jason Reitman-directed Up in the Air, starring George Clooney as a traveling merchant of vocational death and Vera Farmiga as the woman who induces his midlife attack of consciousness; and Jennifer’s Body, starring Megan Fox as high school evil incarnate, directed by Karyn Kusama from a script by Diablo Cody. The former has emerged as near-unanimous favorite both here and at Telluride; the later has been largely derided as a disappointment. Whatever Juno seemed to be at the time of its release, two years later I imagine it would be hard for either its biggest fans to get it up enough to defend its Oscar-worthiness, or for its hardest haters to declaim it as a travesty. If anything, Up in the Air and Jennifer’s Body reveal the extent to which Juno could have only worked as a cultural phenomenon by committee: Cody’s instinct as an auteur is to drop a breadcrumb trail of code, while Reitman’s obsessive yen for polished explication is Academy all the way. Each needs their talent balanced by the opposite.

In Up in the Air, Clooney’s Ryan Bingham is a proud bachelor who gleefully crisscrosses the continent 300 days a year, leaving a trail of unemployment in his wake. Ryan works for an Omaha-based company to which other companies outsource the task of downsizing to minimize their own personal and legal risk. “Christmas has come early this year,” quips Ryan’s boss (Jason Bateman), and Ryan is no more sensitive to the increasingly dire economic realities that keep him in business traveler’s nirvana. Passing out pink slips is what Ryan does, but the dance between airports, airplanes, hotel bars and complementary terry cloth robes is who he is. “To know me is to fly with me,” he chirps via voiceover — mostly because if there’s any directorial flourish Jason Reitman gets off on more than narrative montages set to jangly guitar ballads, it’s pointedly glib voiceover. Ryan’s worked hard to ennoble the business that subsidizes his lifestyle. “We are here to make limbo tolerable,” he tells a co-worker. Of course, it’s not until two very special ladies fly into his life that Ryan realizes that he is –– wait for it — in something of an intolerable limbo himself.

With increasingly tough times calling for desperate measures to streamline the employee elimination industry, Ryan is given a traveling companion/reality check/surrogate daughter in the form of Natalie (Anna Kendrick), a perfectionist Ivy Leaguer who has developed a videoconference system for issuing redundancies. Around the same time, on a typical night in a typically nondescript hotel bar, Ryan picks up Alex (Vera Farmiga), who seems to be his female counterpart: they both have a passion for business travel as sport, and both have conspicuously little to say about their respective lives off-road. Alex is an elusive presence (this is a role engineered to the second for a Best Supporting Actress nomination), and after years of flying solo (like virtually everything else in this film, literally), Ryan soon finds himself longing––apparently for the first time EVAR––for a more substantial relationship. Jumping straight to the Clooney + drunken flirting = Total Audience Wish Fulfillment equation in the first act is a risky move, but the chemistry between he and Farmiga is such a knockout that it works. For her part, the actress turns an intentionally two-dimensional character into an enigmatic marvel, even as Reitman has her blatantly telegraph her character’s Big Secret an hour before Ryan (literally!) flies into it.

Whether you think Jason Retiman is the new Billy Wilder or the hackiest hack in Hacksville, it’s inarguable that he is an extraordinarily transparent filmmaker. Up in the Air, which he directed  and scripted (from a novel by Walter Kirn), has no double or hidden meanings, and precious little is left unsaid through dialog or via voiceover. Like Juno and Thank You For Smoking, it doesn’t require the viewer to do work or ask questions, and barring a single scene in which Alex and Natalie have a loaded conversation about romantic ideals as Ryan silently listens on, nothing is left open for interpretation –– what you see is what you get.  In other words, Jason Reitman does what Hollywood filmmakers are supposed to do. They are supposed to tell stories in the most straightforward manner possible; they are supposed to make their choices seem invisible to the casual viewer so that the stars pop and the Big Emotional Moments sing. That Reitman is perceived after this trifecta as being anything like an auteur in the contemporary sense of the word is remarkable.

Spotted with snippets of mock exit interviews with real recently laid-off Americans, Up in the Air tries hard to embody this moment of national melancholy, but Reitman reveals his hand by setting the opening credits to a light blues cover of “This Land is Your Land.” The song, and the film, are pure American schmaltz jazzed up, its inherent brightness tinted blue but never significantly darkened. Up in the Air is the kind of feel-good film about bad news that has been winning Oscars for decades. Like its opening song, we’ve heard Up in the Air’s tune so many times that it no longer means anything.

Reitman and Cody seem to have a common interest in tweaking genre conventions just enough to get critics excited that they went there, but both refuse to subvert audience expectations to the point of inviting frustration. That Jennifer’s Body has been widely described as not meeting expectations is odd, because what exactly was expected from a teen horror sex comedy starring Megan Fox and scripted by Diablo Cody? Self-aware, sexually voracious teenage girls? Check. Narration in blog voice and illogical internet jokes? Check. A subplot involving an indie band desperate for the kind of wealth and fame that comes from getting a song on a cool soundtrack — thus pointing back to Juno and reifying the Diabloverse? Check! All this and a prolonged girl-on-girl make out session? What’s not to like?

A lot. Dramatically inert and neither funny for scary nor sexy, Jennifer’s Body is the kind of failed film that can only come from deep, collaborative miscalculation. The shock of the script is not the badness of the ironic, momentum-tripping throwaway gags (such as when someone who can’t forget something horrible is told to “Move on, dot org”), but the flatness of everything in between. Cody’s deconstruction of key 80s teen genres (slasher horror, John Hughes, Heathers) starts with aping their earnest pretension. Needy (Amanda Seyfried) narrates; she’s the nerdy enabler of Jennifer (Fox), the hottie in heat who goes homocidal after an unfortunate post-traumatic run-in with a suspicious pub band. Cody’s twist on the Final Girl mythology wouldn’t have a chance of succeeding if embodied by a character as reflexively snarky as her last film’s namesake, but too much of Jennifer’s expository language goes too far in the other direction, such as when Needy explains that she and Jennifer “were our yearbook pictures—nothing more, nothing less.” How one could hypothetically achieve a state of being that’s “less than” a yearbook photo, and what that would actually entail, is anyone’s guess.

The total lack of chemistry between actors is probably partially their own fault, but it’s important to note that Karyn Kusama, best known for directing the Sundance hit Girlfight and most recently known for her disastrous Aeon Flux adaption, has zero sense of timing. Her horror setpieces are suspense free (a far cry from the Italian gore that’s said to have been a Cody inspiration), and the ostensibly comic dialog is done no favors by the director’s haphazard cutting. Filling screen time and space with innumerable shots of Megan Fox walking, running, swimming towards the camera to an Evanescent-esque hard guitar score (the titular Hole song is never heard in the film, though a different one plays over the closing credits), Kusama’s visual signature seems to extend no further than deciding which of these shots to run in slow motion.

Critics seem to be shocked that Jennifer’s Body isn’t better than it is, but the film will probably please a certain audience (to reiterate: two pretty actresses kiss each other in it for, like, awhile). Up in the Air will almost definitely be nominated for multiple Academy awards, win a couple and then quickly thereafter evaporate from the zeitgeist. I’m less bothered by the films themselves than the extreme reactions they’ve engendered. Neither is worth getting excited about. Both are thoroughly mediocre.