Her
Whenever Pip and I don’t know what film to watch, we end up with some film that got a bunch of Oscar nominations. This year, he has already seen “American Hustle”, we all have seen “Gravity” in a 3D movie theater and nobody truly wants to see “12 Years a Slave”. So we ended up with “Her” this time. I remember that Gorp really liked it, so I was quite optimistic.
In the end, I thought it was a fun little movie and so so so self-reflective. Unlike in “Where the wild things are”, Spike Jonze managed to keep the self-obsessiveness to a healthy level, resulting in a film that was pleasantly self-indulgent in the way only Woody Allen is sometimes. I thought it was refreshing to see a movie in which people essentially spend the entire two hours talking about their feelings where somehow, these feelings actually made sense. Pip said he liked it and I was like: “But you never talk about your feelings!” Seriously, though, these characters do nothing but live in their own world of feelings and interpersonal relationships, as if their jobs, anything like other hobbies and other things that make any person’s life livable don’t matter. Even though that is not the case for me (and, thinking about it, it has never been), I can strongly relate to the purity of these relationships, how they exist in this little vacuum of interpersonal tenderness completely untouched by societal pressure (hey this is the relationship between a human and an AI after all!) or even something like family. I really enjoyed it, it made me feel like I was young again when I too cared little about those environmental aspects.
There was also something very fascinating in how the main character and Samantha made love just by speaking to each other, and it also totally reminded me of my youth hehehe. That particular scene could carry the whole movie single-handedly and made it almost as memorable to me as the make-believe dialogue in “In the Mood for Love” and the end of “Before Midnight”.
Also thank God we only had to see a little bit of Amy Adams. I can’t wait till in 10-15 years we won’t have to deal with any of these current Hollywood favorites like Carey Mulligan, Natalie Portman and, my least favorite of them all, Amy Adams.
I’m not a huge Spike Jonze fan (and I am a little suspicious of his following), but “Her” definitely redeemed him for me.