By Jay A. Fernandez

“I’ve gone to plenty of bar mitzvahs here growing up, and I’ve seen my father receive awards in this room,” Jason Reitman said as he looked out over the buzzing international ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel. “It’s a nice room.”

Sure, “Up in the Air” is personal to him, but the geography of the film’s Monday night premiere and afterparty were even more so.

Premiere ticket as AA boarding pass

“Right now I’m trying as much as possible to stop and enjoy the moment,” Reitman said. “It’s kind of like a wedding. Everyone suggests, ‘Stop and take it in,’ but it’s hard to do. Look at this room: They all just watched my movie in the Mann Village [Theater], my favorite movie theater on Earth.”

Even after a dozen screenings at festivals from Telluride to Rome, Reitman seemed genuinely gobsmacked by the L.A. premiere event and the hoopla spinning around his latest awards-beckoning effort. That, and meeting “Harold and Maude” star Bud Cort milling about the party. “That’s exciting in itself,” Reitman muttered.

By Steven Zeitchik

Remember that great Sopranos episode where Tony suspects Big Pussy is selling him out, rounds up Paulie Walnuts and the other capos, then puts on a big furry suit and crowns a nine-year-old king?

If you don’t, you might start wondering if you missed a plotline after you’re done watching Tony — er, James Gandolfini — in “Where the Wild Things Are,” which has the iconic mobster voicing the slow-witted but genial giant Carol.

Celebrity voice-work is often a double-edged blade. It can bring star power to what would simply be a pedestrian set of drawings. But it can also distract from the effect a director is trying to create, as viewers, already lacking cues from real-life expressions, allow the voice to conjure up other roles. Gandolfini is getting good notices for his turn in “Wild”, but every time he opened his mouth to muse in Max Records’ magical land, we couldn’t help wondering when he would order Christopher to keep an eye on Uncle Junior.

This fall movie season sees a few A-listers running into the problem. It also afflicts George Clooney  in “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” which we saw at a screening this week. It’s not that we couldn’t believe Clooney as someone other than his standard charmer role. It’s just that it was hard for us to think of a fox that wants to steal chickens when we kept hearing the dulcet tones of Dr. Doug Ross.

By Steven Zeitchik

George Clooney is either really charming or really dorky, perhaps a little bit of both.

The actor/People magazine pinup was in his usual form Friday as he held forth at a Toronto Film Festival press conference on behalf of his military satire "The Men Who Stare at Goats" for the myriad reporters eager to hear the latest details of what he'd "do" for a woman, whether he'll ever get married and other questions of interest to people with an IQ number under the minimum Social-Security age.

"I didn't want to say it here because it seems like a strange place to announce it," he said, to that second question, as the audience sat forward, attentive. "I'm going to get married. Tonight."

That joke was kind of typical, either a clever deflection from a guy tired of all the questions or a guy who, like most actors put on the spot in the contrived setting of a press conference, simply doesn't have that much to say.

By Steven Zeitchik

There's something about Jason Reitman and odd years. 

In 2005, the son of directorial royalty took his debut, the morality satire "Thank You for Smoking," to Toronto and found the movie such a hit that two specialty divisions actually fought over it (Fox Searchlight ended up winning the battle).

In 2007 he and Searchlight brought teen-pregnancy comedy "Juno" to the fall; the movie went on to become a $225m global breakout and scoop up a batch of Oscar noms.

In 2009, Reitman and (this time) Paramount are hoping "Up in the Air," his frequent-flyer tale starring George Clooney that unspools at Toronto, can finish off the hat trick.

Reitman actually wasn't planning on debuting his pic — in which the bachelor Clooney meets the girl of his dreams just as his jetsetting life is threatened — at this time. The movie wasn't supposed to be ready for another three months, in fact, but Reitman badly wanted to keep the Toronto streak going.

"We truncated the schedule to make it work," he told Risky Biz when we caught up with him recently. As a result, it's now one of three pics that features a principal from "Juno" (the Ellen Page-toplined "Whip It" and the Diablo Cody-penned "Jennifer's Body," which Reitman produced, are the others) to debut at the fall festival.

By Steven Zeitchik

Now that all the tackling, sacking and interception puns have been exhausted (for the moment), what really happened at the box-office this weekend?

Most outlets seemed to present the results, with a showdown between a star-light movie in its second weekend and a Clooney-heavy movie in its first, as a sad indicator of the current state of Clooney stock.

Blogs and pundits heaped on he-who-made-the-Caesar-cut famous, and that was before his “box-office woes deepened,” as Reuters put it, with word that “Nim”s Island” actually finished above “Leatherheads” when all receipts were tallied.

Some examples: (We’d link but we decided to save you the clicks. Our pleasure.)

–”The Hollywood hunk’s new football comedy was beaten by Kate Bosworth’s casino thriller, ‘21.’”

–”George Clooney, a giant in his own mind and much beloved by powerful people in Hollywood, launched another bomb over the weekend.”

–”‘Leatherheads’ couldn’t beat 21 at the weekend box office, even though 21 lost almost 40% of its audience from last week and is clearly rubbish.”

–And something close to clever, from Anglo site ContactMusic.com — “George Clooney may have wanted to seek treatment in the E.R. over the weekend as he suffered a nasty beating at the box office.” (This one we’ll give you.)

But all the obituaries seemed more unnecessarily dramatic than a soapy plotline about Doug and Carol from back in the day.

First, Clooney hasn’t opened a movie in a decade. Apart from the “Ocean’s” pics — which the presence of Damon and Pitt render useless as evidence — no Clooney-anchored movie in recent memory has cracked $13 million in its first weekend of wide release. “The Good German?” “Michael Clayton?” “Intolerable Cruelty?

Talent wants to work with him, men want to be him, women want to be with him. But box office just isn’this thing. Not to mention that this film was somethng of an anomaly. (What’s that you say? A period sports-comedy with elements not seen in U.S. film in decades? And it didn’t work?! Impossible.)

Much has been made of how the movie lost to “21,” as though somehow George Clooney is now less of a draw than a few off-suit number cards. But there’s another criterion to examine here beyond actors’ bankability.

The last three major football movies — “Invincible,” “We Are Marshall” and “The Gridiron Gang”– opened to an average of $13.3 million, roughly the same as “Leatherheads” earned this week.

The last three gambling movies (”Smokin’ Aces,” “Casino Royale” and “Two for the Money”), meanwhile, averaged nearly $15 million in their second wide weekend — pretty much the same total as “21″ did in its second weekend.

So “Leatherheads” and “21″ followed exactly the same pattern other films in their respective genres have followed for years. On the shock scale, then, the “21″-”Leatherheads” ‘beatdown’ strikes us as about as remarkable as us coming back from a weekend in Vegas down a few bills.

Or our football team coughing up the ball at the goal line.

By Gregg Kilday

Director Joe Carnahan is something of a straight shooter, and so when George Clooney decided to withdraw from Carnahan’s upcoming film adaptation of James Ellroy’s period cop drama "White Jazz," Carnahan himself broke the news to his fans on his blog. But Carnahan is determined to keep the project alive, and so he wrote, "Right now, (actually it began on friday) we’re in the process of trying to plug a guy into this movie that, if it works, would be pretty f*cking amazing. No, INCREDIBLY f*cking amazing, so we’ll see what happens."

Who’s replacing Clooney? That tease was catnip to the reporters in town who are currently chasing the story. Tuesday, Carnahan posted an update, hinting that there are now not one, but two names, in the mix. But that only further provoked press inquiries as all sorts of big names have been bandied about. And so Wednesday, Carnahan reluctantly announced that until the situation was resolved, he’s invoking "radio silence." As he explained online, "Apparently, my rather liberal blogging habits have created a bit of a situation for my old friend and publicist Lynda Dorf. Lynda’s been doing me solids since the ‘Blood, Guts’ days and she’s apparently being innundated by reporters looking for casting confimations about various actors appearing in WHITE JAZZ and PABLO. So, long story short kids. I’ve been asked to curtail it in the interest of both projects and not release any information that might do damage down the line."

Aw, say it ain’t so, Joe.

George Clooney doesn’t waste any time setting the record straight. Out there in the blogosphere, KP International is currently circulating a report that claims Clooney slammed jailhouse heiress Paris Hilton. “You can only get so far without discernable talent – then you either work, or use cheap publicity tricks to keep the public’s attention. Paris has no reason to complain if she is on the end of bad publicity,” Clooney is alleged to have said. Except that Clooney says it ain’t so. Clooney’s press rep Stan Rosenfield has just released a corrective, saying, “Statements made about Paris Hilton and attributed to George Clooney by KP International and picked up by other news sources were not in fact made by Mr. Clooney. Clooney demands an immediate retraction by KP International and further demands that the source of the story be named. An immediate apology is expected.” (Gregg Kilday)

Here ’s this weekend’s Fandango Five – Weekly Ticket Sales (as of 1/04/07 4:00 pm PST):

Night at the Museum 21%

Dreamgirls 11%

Charlotte’s Web 10%

The Pursuit of Happyness 5%

Children of Men 4%

Fandango Weekly Poll: The Screen Actors Guild has announced its nominations for the Best “Ensemble Cast” of 2006. Which one deserves to win?

The Departed 46%

Little Miss Sunshine 28%

Dreamgirls 12%

Babel 8%

Bobby 6%

The Fandango Fifty: The Top Stars Moviegoers Want to See in 2007

Johnny Depp and Reese Witherspoon may enjoy a very good year at the movies. To compile the Fandango Fifty, Fandango asked filmgoers to rank the stars they are most looking forward to seeing on the big screen in 2007. The online survey was posted at Fandango.com during the last week of December 2006.