Monday, January 13, 2014

An ode to "Her", my new favorite film (spoiler-free)

The site is too long for the caption. Source can be traced through picture.
So I went to see the movie Her by Spike Jonze a few days ago.

I don’t like to sit through movies. I used to. And I still can in a movie theater, because bright lights and loud noises can pacify me, but this movie…

Woah. I haven’t had such a strong reaction to a film since I saw The Proposition by John Hillcoat. And that strong reaction was more repulsion and fear then anything else.

At the end of Her, I was sitting dead still and silent, tears streaming, chest constricted, unable how to describe my feelings.

It took me a couple of days to recover in order to write this post. I promise there will not be any spoilers.

Blondie and I went to the film fully prepared to cry. However, I was not expecting to find the highest level of humanity I’ve ever seen in any romance film within, of all things, a post-modern romance film about a man and his AI (artificial intelligence) OS (operating system).

The progression of their relationship, the twists and falls, it seems so natural and so beautiful… yet volcanic… all at the same time.

We must keep in mind that I have zero experience with committed relationships, but I usually have a pretty good sense for feeling the truth in a story, and I think that Her nailed it on the head.

Of course, I cannot talk about the end of the film without spoilers, but I must say that the entire film is absolutely marvelous and I do very much recommend people see it.

The cinematography itself is also wonderful, and I am obsessed with close up reaction shots being someone obsessed with acting theory. There were a lot of those, and they were all beautiful.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to watch it again (at least, for a very long time), but I will definitively state Her is my all-time favorite film.


Watch it. And feel free to comment if you have watched it. Or if you find the AI-human dynamic fascinating.

1 comment:

  1. I loved it too! I was deeply moved by the romance aspect of the movie and how the emotions played out in their relationship, as well as the deep look into the respective emotional difficulties of the two plain players. My main takeaway from this is on the technological end of the spectrum (and by a hair) because all of this complex, moving beauty passed between a man and an AI entity. The fact that this movie can bring tears to the eyes of its viewers despite our stereotypical aversion to humanoid technology is a positive and astounding sign in my eyes. I think it shows our ability to accept and believe in the transcendence of emotions between beings and recognize the non- human as individual persons, too.

    ReplyDelete