Her
I went into this knowing only that it was a Spike Jonze movie. Somewhat of a science fiction/drama movie set in a not-too-distant future where people in a first world metropolis are gentle and interface dependent. Nearly every background passerby in most scenes of the film are in mid-conversation with some kind of device attached to their persons. Everyone is plugged in and toothless, the meanest attitudes we see are either in the bitter parting dialogue between ex lovers or from the foul mouth of a videogame mushroom child that coaxes players with profainity. Consider one scene where the protagonist (distraught over something) trips on the sidewalk, prompting about every nearby person on a busy city street to stop what they are doing and ask if he is all right with genuine concern. Sound far fetched?
The main character is a lonely writer who scribes personal cards for people who have no tongue for intimacy. The irony is not only that it fills him with fleeting fulfillment but that he pines through the personal life histories of happy people who cannot express themselves to their soul mates. He finds the words they cannot and goes home wanting, unable to discover their secret. We watch him fumble through dates that don't end well and endure through awkward bedside cyber sexing. He eventually updates his OS with a new state-of-the-art AI, picks a female personality for it, and before long he carries her around in his pocket wherever he goes. They develop a relationship. At first our guy is shy about telling his friends about his new girlfriend, but when prodded for particulars the reactions most people have for his situation is that it is strangely normal. Apparently other people have done it too and we get the impression that this sort of thing is beyond the scope of taboo or even ridicule. The only character that seems to find it strange is his ex-wife, for reasons we would expect from any ex-wife.
There is a very high level of respect and care for the obvious target audience and for those people who have endured years of romantic exile without a physical partner, perhaps celibate aside what interaction there is to be granted to them by a keystroke. It could have very easily been the other kind of brainless Hollywood "concept" film where the story pries into something off the beaten path of mainstream but doesn't seem to comprehend it behind having a plot device. If this movie gets anything, it's that. What it doesn't comprehend, however, is what people are like when relationships work. And that becomes the movie, of course. What it is teased about a science fiction dissection of the contemporary culture of tomorrow becomes window dressing.
The meat of the film is dedicated to "the relationship" between a man and a voice. What doesn't work for me, unfortunately, is the critical mistake of the director putting his focus on his own warped perceptions of femininity and his slant on the whole man/woman thing. All you have to do is watch all of Spike Jonze's other movies to get an idea of what I'm talking about and what to expect. Infidelity, failed marriage, attraction doomed to fail, and introverted pairings. It was okay in Being John Malkovich because it was a quirky movie about other things. It was okay in Adaptation for mostly the same reasons, and Where The Wild Things Are was about a child born from parents who fell out of love and the result of those effects on his imagination (kids can't fix grown-up problems).
Here, it distracts from the big picture. Or perhaps it is more correct to say that by the end, the big picture is the introverted love affair that betrays its running time by not saying anything new on the subject of love from this storyteller. Watching it I just felt that this is the one that needed a grown-up driving the car. It's really too bad the film is hijacked by the very clear and obvious lack of understanding for anything close to what a stable relationship looks and smells like, and we don't believe it when the movie tries to prove otherwise by showing superficial flashbacks and poor examples of happy people in the subplot. The lie here is that this is smarter than the romantic comedy when it is merely an alternate viewpoint representing a subculture films are generally ignorant of, and that is Her's true strength. The ending leaves you with nothing because lonely people don't know how to not be lonely. What is there to impart are things you should already know; that technology won't necessarily make you happier. It will make life easier, no doubt. But it is very easy to get lost in loneliness the safer you are to dwell on it. Our guy will repeat the same mistakes. And that's a shame because in the end it's just a couple of really interesting ideas about what might be from someone who watched a lot of Star Trek growing up and maybe hoped nobody else did.
Pacific Rim
Big mech suits battle giant monsters. There's lots of punching of faces through buildings and things asplode a lot. I liked it.
