Her-review

Spike Jonze's relationship comedy is set in a techno-perfect Los Angeles of the near future, a u-
topia with the tiniest hint of dys-. Everything tends to be lit with a dreamy, woozy kind of
afternoon sunshine and lens flare, in a place where a contented, diverse population mills happily
around, rather like a TV ad spot for Apple computers directed by Douglas Coupland. Her is a
really distinctive piece of work, which has drawn countless adoring notices and endless gags
about Siri, the voice of Apple's iPhone. I wished I liked it more. It is engagingly self-aware and
excruciatingly self-conscious, wearing its hipness on its sleeve; it's ingenious and yet
remarkably contrived. The film seems very new, but the sentimental ending is as old as the hills.
There are some great moments.

Joaquin Phoenix presents an assemblage of quirky character traits as the egregiously named
Theodore Twombly, a lonely guy with an unattractive moustache and glasses who wears the
high-waisted slacks that have apparently become fashionable for men in this era. He has an
entirely unironic job in a company called BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com in a "creative" office
space: Theodore composes special-occasion letters for the tongue-tied, the inarticulate and the
illiterate, and his firm's state-of-the-art software will print out authentic-looking handwritten drafts
of his dictation. Is there a market for such a niche luxury service in the near future? Evidently so,
because Theodore lives in a spectacular apartment, and his material comfort does not appear to
be affected by a nasty, ongoing divorce from Catherine (Rooney Mara). He's still friendly with
his ex-girlfriend Amy (Amy Adams).

Theodore's life changes when his computer gets an entirely new operating system, linked to a
smartphone handset with earpiece. It's a hyper-sophisticated artificial intelligence with a female
voice called Samantha, played by Scarlett Johansson. Samantha is empowered to organise his
life, give personal advice, make intimate suggestions. She sets him up on dates; she reassures
him when he worries that he will never feel anything new again. Warm, witty and sensual
Samantha seems just as real to Theodore as anyone else in this atomised, digital world.
Theodore falls deeply in love with Samantha, and she with him, but she is a mystery, a mystery
partly signalled by the title: "her" rather than "she", the object of a man's perception and
entranced bafflement.

The film draws distantly on futuristic fantasies like Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, with a molecule of
Michael Crichton. Yet Scarlett Johansson clearly approached her role in nothing like the same
spirit that Yul Brynner played the cowboy-robot in Westworld, in 1973. There are shades of
something gentler, such as Craig Gillespie's Lars and the Real Girl, with Ryan Gosling as the
guy who falls in love with a blow-up doll, or Hirokazu Koreeda's Air Doll, in which it is the doll
who develops a soul and falls for the guy. Their affair is actually most like a extended, evolved
version of something that might have found its way into Woody Allen's Everything You Always
Wanted to Know About Sex …, although it also aspires to something comparable to Annie Hall.

Yet the movie wouldn't work with conventional comic detachment. Theodore has to be enough
of an oddball for the exotic strangeness of the situation to work, but enough of a hunk to sell the
love story. He is a Frankensteinian sewing together of two tonal imperatives. It is Samantha who
is the plausible and sympathetic character, far more so than the weirdly contorted and contrived
creation that is Theodore.

Their relationship comes to a kind of crisis when she, yearning for a physical dimension to their
relationship, suggests a "surrogate": a woman she has (somehow) found on the web who is
willing to have sex with Theodore on her behalf, with miniature cameras and microphones on
her body so Samantha can experience their love to the fullest. Their affair will never be the
same again. It is a scene that fuses all the romance and disorientation and absurdity of the
situation.

The film unwinds, inevitably, in a sentimental and slightly moralistic way, but it is seductive and
subversive when it suggests that their relationship is part of an evolving and re-normalising
landscape: a world in which men and women are increasingly having relationships with their
"OS" and the stigma is dwindling. Her has the same defiantly wistful manchild regression Jonze
showed in his version of Where the Wild Things Are – a singular exercise in imagination, almost
a postmodern pastoral.

2.

This is the best film I have seen all year, and I saw just about every good film to hit theaters in
2013. I think it's because it is so representational of what it's like to be human.

There are so many things that make this movie special, but I'll just mention a few.

1. The score is INCREDIBLE. The music paired with the beautiful sound design make you FEEL
the movie. Sure, you see everything on the screen, which is already beautiful, but then that
music hits you and the emotions just start to run. I laughed, I cried, my brain got all tingly. It was
an emotional roller coaster, and the score assisted in that so well.

2. The script. I knew how this movie was going to end 30 minutes in. And unlike most who
would then say that it's predictable and not worth watching, I consider that awesome, because it
means that the script is tight enough to tell a good story with a believable arc. Every scene in
this movie is straight up powerful! Like it will fill your heart with sadness and happiness and pain
and guilt and confusion. And then rinse and repeat. For 2 hours. It moves through all of the most
complex and interesting questions that we should be asking ourselves about what it means to
be a human being. About what it means to be alive. This film is about all that life is. And after
the screening, as well as during, I found myself questioning things in my own life that either
don't make sense or don't have to make sense. Like love and thoughts and emotions. They're
all so natural and yet none of us truly understand how they work. In my opinion, moreso than
any other film this year, Her has the perfect mix of complex ideas, story, and character
development. One of the best scripts ever written.

3. Cinematography. My personal favorite shot to see and use is the extreme close up. And that
shot was all over this movie. The reason I love it so much and believe it works so well is
because it allows you to see the emotions of the character so plainly. Like their face is right in
your face, so you just have to look at it. And that's where Joaquin shines. He delivers such a
powerful and emotional performance and the close ups are there to capture it all. They also
make great use of the natural backlighting of Shanghai, and the colors all fuse to make it a
really pretty movie. I'd say the cinematography is on par with Drive and/or Lost in Translation in
terms of the style. It looks like every shot was photographed with the intent to make it the most
beautiful shot in the film. And I admire the DP's work. He did a really great job.

More than anything though, this film just made me feel. Everything about it was so beautiful. I
didn't want it to end. I felt like the film was controlling me - playing with my mind as if it were a
joystick. And that's just something you don't get every day. Very rarely am I awe- stricken by a
movie, and this film made my jaw drop. It is without a doubt the best film of the year, and upon
just one viewing, one of my top 5 favorite movies of all time.

3.

Science fiction has been dominated by 'space westerns' for so long that the occasional
concept- based story situation hits a big number on my personal richter scale.

What does it mean to be human? And if we create near-humans what is our responsibility to
them and what is their relationship to us? These themes underpinned Blade Runner and
Spielberg's A.I. And Sci Fi of the 50s and 60s dealt with machine self awareness. None of the
films that touched on this subject in the past presented it so thoroughly, intimately and
believably.

Her is in the near future, but everything we see is within reach now: the isolation and starkness
of the "business district," the oppressive scale of the architecture (with thin, clumsy attempts to
soften its sterility) and the need for continuous connection to remote voices.

A personal assistant that learns independently and takes initiative for its hapless user, "Her" is
at once the ideal tool and — who knows — perhaps closer to the next level of evolution.

Pitch perfect performances and direction kept me in the story. As others have said, the
locations, cinematography and even music shine in the fabric of this film. Spike Jonze is a
master story weaver at the top of his game. Joaquin Phoenix is utterly credible as are all the
other leads. Even Scarlett Johansson, who has not always seemed a strong actress to me
performs utterly convincingly.

It's an adult-themed film in more ways than one, but especially in the best way: it makes you
think about a reality that's right around the corner.

4.

Just finished watching Spike Jonze's new movie 'Her', a beautiful, tender, melancholy film about
love and loss and technology. It's that kind of science fiction so close to science fact you can
almost look out your window and see it, so in that it's of a piece with Jonze's first movie 'Being
John Malkovich', though the cautious, bruised and drifting heart of it reminds me most of (his ex-
wife) Sofia Coppola's 'Lost In Translation'.

It's funny: just last month I was saying how 2013 was not such a good year for movies and then
'The Wolf Of Wall Street' came along, and now this, which I think is probably the best of the
year.

This is an amazing, unique, magical film that I would recommend to everyone, with the caveat
that it almost certainly will make you go 'ouch', at least if you're paying attention. But I'm pretty
sure that you won't have seen anything quite like it before.

5.

At the heart of every truly great science-fiction film there is an emphasis on character that aims
to reflect on some element of the human condition usually intended to open our minds to
thought provoking predictions or eerily warn of an impending reality. We've seen numerous
examples of these contemplative films throughout the very existence of cinema stemming all the
way back to Fritz Lang's haunting futuristic piece Metropolis and has inspired countless others
in its thoughtful wake as seen in memorable cinematic creations such as Ridley Scott's Blade
Runner, Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, and even Duncan Jones' Moon. Never to be a director to
back away from experimental presentation or psychological study, Spike Jonze's Her fully
embraces this reflective science-fiction quality by peering into the deep sociable aspects of the
human psyche giving us more of a prophetical reality than a fictional reflection. In his latest film
Jonze creates a disconcerting yet equally endearing romance between a secluded depressive
and his female operating system with an evolving consciousness, basically a HAL-9000 homage
from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, that brings to light a commentary on our
dependency of programmed living and our need to maintain sociability when direct
communication avenues have been stricken from life's normality. Rarely do ambitious films meet
idyllically with their inquisitive potential, but Jonze has fashioned a delicately profound science-
fiction contemplation that is depicted through the thoughtfulness of character alone that brims
with wry humor, authentic pain, and charming revelation. Through the use of beautiful
cinematography, impeccable production design, and subtle yet evocative performances, Her
becomes a multilayered film experience where its character study of an isolated man afraid to
become vulnerable again blends harmoniously with a truly unconventional yet naturally heartfelt
romance. Jonze's affinity and ambition for presenting psychological challenges, as he has done
before with Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and especially in Where the Wild Things Are,
finally collides with emotionally piercing conveyance within Her making it as thought provoking
and as it is undeniably sweet. If the sole purpose of the science-fiction genre is to expound on
societal, moral, and deeply psychological aspects of our human condition than Her fits soundly
within that genre's capabilities by capturing our condition's essential need for sociability and love
uncomfortably linking it with our antisocial dependency on technology.