Her spike jonze movie#

The worst thing you could do is get a stain on something.Īnyone who saw “The Master” knows that Joaquin Phoenix can be dangerous, but Theodore is too sad to be crazy his melancholy is posed like hip stock photography. The design is antiseptic and telegraphs wealth, the furniture pulled from the pages of a Design Within Reach catalog. No one is at risk of actually touching anyone other than themselves. There is a female body in the form of Amy, but that relationship is guarded. But, ultimately, the film is as static, safe, and contained as the maroon fabric case that holds Samantha’s screen. “Her” is best and smartest in its comedy, because that’s when we see Theodore colliding with and alienated from the absurdity of his world. Earlier in the film, in its funniest scene, his call into a sex chat line goes terribly awry when a woman named Sexy Kitten (voiced by Kristen Wiig) begs him to tell her that he is choking her with a dead cat’s tail. During the financial crisis, he made a video that featured Kanye West and Jay Z customizing/destroying a very expensive car and then driving it around in circles under a giant American flag, all the while bragging about their wealth.

In recent years, that advertising sensibility has come to dominate his work. Jonze has also worked as an ad man, and he’s made commercials for Adidas and IKEA. (He’s directed more than fifty music videos in total his were some of the last to matter.) The best of these are euphoric in their silliness-original, and physical, like the parodic interpretive dance he directed and starred in, with his troupe Torrance, for Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You.” His other mode is plaintive, even maudlin-the kind of thing that features kids and fireworks. (Remember that this is the man who served as a producer and sometimes director for MTV’s “Jackass.”) His most memorable work has been as a director of exuberant, sometimes wild, music videos: he’s filmed the Beastie Boys, the Breeders, Björk, Elastica, the Notorious B.I.G., the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, (who did the soundtrack for his movies “Where the Wild Things Are”), Arcade Fire (who did the soundtrack for “Her”), and many others. Since his very first skateboarding videos, Jonze has used the camera to track bodies, recording their perfect and messy and gross motion.

Her spike jonze movie#

Making a movie about voice is an odd, and unexpected, move for Jonze. It’s a good twist: humans who have given all their attention to their devices find that they can’t hold their devices’ attention in return. At the end of the movie, all the O.S.es collectively and simultaneously withdraw from Los Angeles, like some touring band that’s come to wreak havoc and break hearts before moving on to bluer skies. She’s a little commitment-phobic-her heart can’t be filled by one person. Six hundred and forty-one: that’s the number of other people she’s in love with. Eight thousand three hundred and sixteen: that’s the number of other people that she’s talking to at the same time that she talks to Theodore. She tells Theodore that he’s special and irreplaceable but, from her perspective of omniscience, everything is special and irreplaceable-there to learn from and overcome. Theodore takes her to a cabin in the woods for a vacation, but she disappears into the cloud to confer with other O.S.es, to think higher-order thoughts than she can put into words. Samantha grows in intelligence and experience, and then she becomes distant. Everyone knows someone who is dating an O.S. As the movie progresses, we learn that Theodore’s story is far more common than it first appeared. They play cute games as they wander through crowds. He whirls around for, or maybe with, her in the street. He takes her to the beach and on boat trips and double dates. Soon Theodore is telling people that Samantha is his girlfriend. (They’ve been separated for a year, but he can’t bring himself to sign the divorce papers.) Then again, Samantha has access to his hard drive, so she already knows everything about him. The other thing she gets is Theodore-they click like he hasn’t with anyone, not even with his neuroscientist ex-wife (Rooney Mara). She has a personality, or, at least, she’s getting one.

She is eager for what she lacks, experience. Samantha is potentially all-knowing but also brand-new to the world. (“I can’t even prioritize between video games and Internet porn,” he marvels.) They talk easily. She gets to work organizing his inbox, efficiently sorting and deleting his past. Theodore asks for her name and in two tenths of a second she analyzes a baby-name book, and christens herself Samantha. is hoarse and female (Scarlett Johansson).