Her

I'd been on the fence about Her for a few reasons, the main one being that when testing the plot against the one sentence summary (man falls in love with his operating system), it honestly sounded not interesting to me as a premise, and also kind of ridiculous and cheap. The concept of how we "love"/depend on our technology too much has been debated to death and I was bored of that conversation. Or, so I thought!

If you haven't seen it, I would even recommend not watching the trailer or even listening to anyone else talk about it. I managed to avoid it through a combination of being sick and homebound for awhile, and went in with medium- to low expectations. I mainly went to kill a night, and also because there are certain directors (Coen bros, Tarantino, Wes Anderson) where you kind of force yourself to go as a creative and then are pleasantly surprised. I'd been disappointed by Where the Wild Things Are, his last big film, and was prepared for a torturously slow, overly wrought film with forced poignant silences and a lot of wistful gazing off into space.

To be fair, for some people this film might have felt like it had all those things, but I was completely blown away. Especially knowing that Spike Jonze wrote the entire script. I used to have a pretty illogical dislike of Jonze (WHY does he spell his name like that? And why was he so dismissive to Sofia Coppola in Lost in Translation?? Why was Where the Wild Things Are so boring???)

But Jonze pulled a fast one on us, and made the first really deeply philosophical film I've seen in long, long time on the most universal questions of the world: What is life? What is love? When you love someone, why is it so hard to give, and when you need love, why is it so hard to get? Why are we so destructive?

Obviously I spent most of the movie crying, but it also was surprisingly funny. And it wasn't just the writing, the whole thing worked together beautifully for me. The story, which I assumed would be trite and overdone, was nuanced and compelling and fascinating for me to wonder what would happen next. The future-ish setting felt very restrained, and the art direction of the sets, the colors, the framing, I loved everything. I loved the camera work and editing, which is something that only nerdy wannabe filmmakers/critics say, but I'd felt especially moved by the camera work in Breaking Bad recently and have started paying more attention to that kind of thing. I'm bummed Joaquin didn't get an Oscar nom.

Anyway, that's a lot to say about a movie, I have even more but am restraining myself. I'm glad I forced myself to go out and see it, and even though I'm in a completely unrelated industry, that kind of attention to detail and plain old hard work that can create something which transcends "work" into something else, is something I need to be reminded of every day.