"Her," by Spike Jonze

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS8zOLOcPMQ#at=28

2 Lars 2 Real Girlous

I thought there was probably no way Spike Jonze would ever purposely or even accidentally make a movie worse than Where the Wild Things Are, but it's happened.

manic pixie dream computer

fuck a ukelele

If this is a film where everything and everyone in the trailer mysteriously dies and/or explodes one minute in, I'm good.

Hey it's another trailer showing hipsters running around with sparklers!

feel like Gondry/Jonez/Kaufmann all need each other to balance/cancel out/mitigate their respective worst tendencies.

It's going to be so Spike Jonezy in the theatre when all the moustache guys in love with their phones are watching the movie about a moustache guy in love with his phone. He probably goes to see a moustache phone love movie in the movie.

http://sofakingnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/14_Mae_Whitman.jpg

feel like Gondry/Jonez/Kaufmann all need each other to balance/cancel out/mitigate their respective worst tendencies.

― joe schmoladoo from 7-11 (Shakey Mo Collier)

this trailer had better be concealing the twist where the multinational that manufactures the operating system comes to scoop out his testicles and sell them (precision surgical equipment interface voiced by carey mulligan)

& shakey mo otm

anyway yall probably slept on

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/80/Ruby_Sparks_poster.jpg

but i did not; i can't sleep on planes

http://crazymoviepeople.com/blog2/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/simone1.jpg

^^^ top three worst movies i've ever, ever seen

stupid right down to the tagline's ellipsis

There are all sorts of connections in that trailer. ScarJo's voice co-stars; of course, she was the co-star of "Lost in Translation," made by Jonze's ex. There's that Yeah Yeah Yeah's song in the trailer ... a song made by Spike Jonze's ex. Amy Adams is in this, co-starring with Joaquin Phoenix, and of course the two just co-starred in "The Master." I'm sure there are more.

Arcade Fire does the score, I think.

^^^ top three worst movies i've ever, ever seen

it really is absolutely unbelievable. I've tried (unsuccessfully) to get my wife to watch it and verify it's unbelievableness.

Joaquin Phoenix was in The Master with Amy Adams
Adams was in Man of Steel with Laurence Fishburne
Fishburne was in Mystic River with Kevin Bacon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek08KvgqFGM

Long live the new flesh.

Does S1MØNE have a ukulele scene? I'm going to go ahead and assume that Her will be worse.

lilting, "lyrical" ukulele music has ruined several movies for me, including a few good ones (like "nobody knows" by hirozaku kore-eda)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25q3hxlgvw4

I remember being on holiday in France when S1mone came out. The glossy film magazines all had it on the cover. I was surprised they had like 30 film mags back then, in every French kiosk, didn't know which one to pick. Bought one because I am a big Pacino fan, and it was treating Simone as if it was Citizen Kane or something. Was deeply disappointed when I finally got to see the film some weeks later.

At least half of those film mags don't exist any more now though, natch.

I'm going to go ahead and assume that Her will be worse.

when you assume...

I'll go see Her if Bill Paxton does the voice for a bubbling shit blob that provides comic relief.

I'm pretty sure I'd see anything with Bill Paxton in it.

Was going to say that "S1mone" killed Andrew Niccol's career, but he's been sort of successfully hit or miss since. "The Host" may have done more damage.

Huh:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f9/Edge_of_Tomorrow_Poster.jpg/220px-Edge_of_Tomorrow_Poster.jpg

Edge of Tomorrow is an upcoming British/American science fiction film directed by Doug Liman from a screenplay adapted by Dante Harper. The film is based on the Japanese light novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka. It stars Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, and Bill Paxton.

xpost

hit or miss? all of his films have flopped!

http://img.weburbanist.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Making-Mr.gif

did "nobody knows" really have lilting uke? all I remember was it being one of the most-heartbreaking things I've ever seen

yeah there was a lyrical interlude with all of the kids taking a journey through the city that was scored to lilting uke

at least as i remember, i haven't seen it since it came out

I don't know if a lilting uke interlude is more or less forgiveable if the movie goes on to rip your heart out

Oh god this looks pandering.

xpost Niccol is creatively hit or miss. He wrote "The Truman Show" and made "Lord of War," both of which I liked. He produced and wrote part of "The Terminal." I recall liking "Gattaca." But yeah, commercially, pretty much all DOA, esp. his directorial stuff.

'kati nescher breaks up with this guy so he starts dating his computer' 'sold!'

Ruby Sparks was slight but smart -- it's basically a critique of the MPDG.

If y'all think this is bad (it is), then you're gonna LOVE this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGWO2w0H2V8

Like I would actually prefer if Ben Stiller had just dug up James Thurber and fucked his corpse. It would be less offensive.

Man, the big New Yorker profile on Stiller and his battles to get this POS made ...

yeah I remember reading that and thinking 'this is going to suck'. having Mitty be single totally missing the point of the story.

everything about this seems to suggest that stiller has no idea what walter mitty is about.

the "designer" aspect of the trailer, from the sun-dappled, severely arranged imagery to the arcade fire music just screams car-commercial aesthetic.

actually absolutely EVERYTHING about this trailer feels like a car commercial

i feel like MAYBE jacques tati could have made an interesting movie of walter mitty but probably no one else.

LIFE

i feel like spike is gonna do some shit like "phoenix is the REAL machine and scarlett is the person" or else just erase her late in the picture but yeah as ned said, what if this was fifteen minutes of the film as a massive fakeout and then the actual movie is far more subversive it would be very very fun

Not just LIFE, but LIFE ... LITERALLY PASSING BY!

What if the Phoenix character is a construct of the sentient computer, who lives in a lonely, human-free future and creates this entire convoluted fantasy as a distraction from the relentless drip of infinity?

What if it was all a dream, and he used to read Word Up magazine?

what if it's actually a psychotic break and he doesn't have a computer or even a moustache?

Place your bets now, winner receives bragging rights on this thread and nowhere else ever

What if it's not fake and this is the actual documentary Phoenix made about his real life !?!?!?

what are you talking about, eazy? this looks like a great movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB-8x_fcV_c

Wondering if Her would've been better had it starred Kevin Kline and the voice of Kathleen Turner

http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMjA1Nzk0OTM2OF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNjU2NjEwMDE@._V1_.jpg

^^ what a sad sack

Ruby Sparks really was surprisingly good; totally rips apart the manic pixie dream girl screenwriters in so obvious a way that you'd have to be dumb to miss it; but I think the studios basically just decided that wouldn't make good box office so most of the trailers/posters I saw for it seemed to just pitch it as another 500 days of summer hellfest for the wes anderson fans

Why does everyone hate this sad mustache man movie so much? I saw the trailer yesterday and thought it looked above average for a movie about the pitfalls of modern love. Low bar, obvs, but it didn't look nearly as bad as y'all are making it out to be.

guys just hatin the ukelele

I hate the ukulele too fwiw.

the pitfalls of modern love

They should've made it where dude became infatuated with an x-box version of that classic Activision game.

only acceptable ukulele player imho
http://www.timeoutbahrain.com/images/content/israel_kamakawiwoole_album_review/innerbig/isra11011_1_innerbig.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_RjBL9m23A

tiny tim yall

nothing wrong with a uke, just don't like mawkish twee love story of a man and his disembodied voice

it doesn't seem that twee -- the trailer as i saw it made him seem kinda broken and pathetic.

hence his attachment to disembodied voice johanssen

kinda associate that introverted self-flagellation with twee in a way

hope jonze repeats this on a movie scale:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsQXQGaasUg

yeah i mean it totally looks like an ikea ad/stylish stupid condescending love movie, but then he keeps talking to the computer and saying "but you're the only one i want" and shit like that and to me it starts to read gross/creepy, which i like/find more interesting than "sad mustache man loves a computer". i dunno, i was less disappointed than i expected to be. not even sure why i watched it tbh. totally not my kind of movie! i just wondered why everyone hated it so much if i could find it in my dead old heart to think it looked moderately interesting.

yeah I thought it looked interesting why bcz sad

also joaquin #garyforever

i was just about to say!!
now i can pretend that joaquin phoenix is always the guy he played in the master and it makes all of his movies seem better than they probably are.

agreed

also otm

I hope there's a scene where the phone makes him walk from the wall to the window for hours

I hope there's a scene where he sculpts a giant phone in the sand on the beach and then fucks it

i hope there's a scene where she indulges his need to tell detailed stories about his experience as a high school science whiz who participated in a moon simulation project.

to be clear, i have only seen the trailer of this movie and for all i know the whole thing could be a huge chet-shaped piece of shit as predicted. it just seemed like most people itt weren't watching the same trailer as i was and that was weird.

also lol @ giant phone in the sand

yeah, that is amazing. is it too late? can Spike CGI up a giant sand-phone fuck scene to save this movie?

can someone just photoshop sad mustache phoenix on a clip from the original scene?

i'm sure the spike movie has a Dark Twist and is not just manic pixie dream phone but it still looks a lil #sadwhites, yknow. shame joaquin doesn't have a gf to brighten up that giant apartment. anyway it's that walter mitty trailer that's really some decline-of-the-west shit.

actually i've been watching it obsessively.

it would almost just be regular terrible but then wtf is up w sprinting past the boomer milestone life magazine covers like forrest

I hope there's a scene where panicking and in tears he races through an airport looking for an unused outlet to recharge his phone.

panic scene in the bubble bath

what if this movie has a twist that isn't being marketed and it all has to do with some pod doors at the end.

what. if.

I might have more to say about this, but for now

- Phoenix is still probably the best actor in American movies right now, and he goes a long way in making much of this work
- Jonze is a significantly better director than a screenwriter
- I like the science fiction elements more than the romance
- The last third takes the most chances and also goes 'off the rails' the most
- Nice score

I've been trying to collect my thoughts about it for days now, but for now suffice it to say it felt as "conscious" as any movie I've seen in a long time. (Also, think I'm sort of underrating Computer Chess a little bit by watching it in Her's wake.)

Very much love that this movie is in no way pessimistic about our increasing interaction with devices. If anything, Jonze seems to be saying that it's working a long way toward refining our communications. (Which, yeah, sci-fi indeed.)

also, maaaybe people who are closer to the upper end of being t-t-totally wired, all day every day, will like this more. (eg, the 4-star review I just read that talked about a "motherboard," whatever that is)

Labuza called it "Computer Chess for dummies," but I don't feel quite that harshly; haven't listened to his NYFF podcasts yet. I did think the oblique romance in CC had appeal that, uh, spoke to me more directly.

I am intensely pessimistic about our increasing interaction with devices. What did you think of the boom-lowering scene near the end that includes a shot of zombies commuters coming up the stairs, looking at their shit? Struck me as a diagnostic one.

This film makes greater use of the LA subway than any I've seen in awhile.

(full disclosure: I curse motherfuckers getting in my way looking at their goddamn toys every working day of my life, usually but not always silently)

I would buy this movie meaning a significant amount less to people born prior to 1975-ish. Saw that shot as neither zombies or commuters but as throngs of engaged people.

But age isn't the mitigating factor here so much as constitutional adaptability/resistance.

Honestly really excited that you guys seems to like it, more or less. I like Jonze a lot, but didn't really like "Wild Things," so if he's only going to make a movie every once in a while, I'd prefer it to be good.

Does he fuck a giant sandphone y/n

I like Wild Things lots more.

well, where Eric saw engaged ppl, I saw disconnected cyborgs. Long live the new flesh, I guess.

What has the old flesh done for me lately?

C'mon, surely you of all people have to recognize the therapeutic value in trading a few "fuck you"s with an A.I. marshmallow boy.

reminded me of a former work supervisor

- Phoenix is still probably the best actor in American movies right now, and he goes a long way in making much of this work

RIP gandolfini

Letterboxd says that, somehow, Gandolfini was my most-watched actor this year -- Enough Said, Not Fade Away, Zero Dark Thirty, Burt Wonderstone (!)

probably same for me except killing them softly instead of burt wonderstone

That would've been 5 had I not seen it last November.

kinda associate that introverted self-flagellation with twee in a way

― blinded by aggro (forksclovetofu), Tuesday, August 13, 2013 1:05 PM (3 months ago)

i.e., belle & sebastian

sad bird with planks for feet on the cover of mcsweeny's

etc

Measuring Her against Dick.

The initial image of the film — an extreme close-up of Theodore’s head — is indicative; he takes up all the space. It’s true that Samantha does have an arc of growth and change, but that arc is all processed through and observed from Theodore’s perspective, and so is almost entirely experienced as part of his story, his healing and his growth experience. The movie tells us that Samantha is a person, but it treats her as little more than an app for overcoming Theodore’s midlife crisis — a way to move him from his wife to, at the end of the film, another conventional relationship with a woman we hardly know because, hey, who cares, she’s a woman, right? The assertion that difference doesn’t matter becomes a means, or an excuse, to erase difference altogether. Samantha is gone; Theodore remains, homogenous and unitary, the only story that ever mattered in the first place.

In “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,” on the other hand, the anxiety about difference opens up a space in which difference can be seen as, actually, different. This is certainly true for class issues. In “Androids,” money and social status are a constant, nagging worry for everybody, while in “Her,” Theodore’s job as mid-level cubicle slogger somehow pays for a spacious apartment, unlimited techno-toys and lavish vacations — middle-class existence appears to be as much a universal default as Theodore’s own gigantic head.

http://www.salon.com/2013/12/19/americas_android_obsession_from_philip_k_dick_to_her/

I haven't seen this yet! I'm going tomorrow!

haha, enjoy

I worked to a cut that featured a subplot with Robert Patrick as a man who was making news for successfully marrying an airplane, provided a foil of preposterousness. Also it was Samantha Morton, not ScarJo. Lots has changed, I hear

read the new york mag interview with spike about that shift; sounds like morton never quite got him what he wanted so they reshot much of the film around the new voice!

that's weird, cuz elsewhere the ScarJo sub has been described as "last-minute." It seems that lots of what one reads in the entertainment press is bunkum!

i think the project came together quick at the end. also i seem to be somewhat misremembering the piece on reread.
http://www.vulture.com/2013/10/spike-jonze-on-making-her.html

It seems that lots of what one reads in the entertainment press is bunkum

enh, it's its own form of entertainment

Brody's SPOILERrific take (he saw a cautionary tale where Eric didn't):

The operating system isn’t just software; it’s also a product that Theodore has purchased. Jonze doesn’t show the transaction, doesn’t show Theodore shelling out or uploading his credit-card info or clicking “Accept,” and it matters—because the other cautionary aspect of “Her” would be: don’t fall in love with a prostitute whom one has hired...

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/12/richard-brody-review-spike-jonze-her.html

Translation: He's old. I'm not.

That or he made the mistake of putting a hooker's services on plastic.

glad you didn't take the easy way out

How else am I supposed to get rid of all these pennies?

Because this isn’t a convention weekend with your secretary, is it? Or, or some broad that you picked up after three belts of booze. This is your great winter romance, isn’t it?

you kids make this world lousy

I'm not going to give Her up easily, Max.

Seriously tho, as presumptuous as it is for me to take a cue from the behavioral patterns of millennials, I find it impossible not to take the observations of my elders on this one without a grain of salt and detached bemusement.

Sorry if the least you require is respect and allegiance.

meet you on the dance floor, boo

Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my iPod and my downloads and my Twitterverse, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.

I'm going to leave you alone. Unlike Howard Beale, I DON'T want anyone to get mad.

Unless it's in Osage County.

Morbs does have one script in which he kills himself: an adapted for television version of Short Circuit where Eric is Number Five and he's Stephanie.

where Tracy Letts' mom thanked him for toning Grandma's personality down. xp

Another couple of weeks of this, and Morbs will be bailing out!

lost me Alfred, I didn't watch bullshit in the '80s either

you watched gary carter in the 80s

pants

http://blogs.indiewire.com/criticwire/manohla-darigs-on-her-wrong-on-pants-wrong-for-america

I almost took this as a rather profound allegory about art until the last act.

also wondering if perhaps this film's "humanism" (as the critics like to say) isn't really where it goes off the rails. anyway, surprised more people haven't noted a religious allegory as well. though I guess pursuing these things through the theme of "technology" isn't unusual!

also trying to process if the insipidness (insipidity?) of the principal relationship was pointed or just lazy. maybe seeing it that way is my shortcoming though.

I find most film romances that are swooned over as "deep" to be insipid (eg, Before _____). But I kinda think Theodore was *willing* a storybook relationship came across reasonably well.

surprised more people haven't noted a religious allegory as well

Saw a piece hitting this note a day or two ago, can't find it.

you're probably right that this was probably his version of what love is. and of course who am I to tell him different?

I was anticipating a reveal that the OS was the same in each case but "evolved" in response to each owner, but they seemed to suggest a kind of Cartesian disembodied "AI" instead--a purely theoretical quibble I guess!

I get the plaudit for production design, just for the nu-L.A. skylines, and the video game stuff. I have no further comment tho

Fear about separation has been central to the success of Jonze’s first films. It’s what gave them a layer of tenderness, vulnerability, and strangeness. But here Jonze has given up on discomfort and has settled into infantile fantasy. He turns the fact of projection—that we relate to idealized or imagined versions of our lovers, not actual other people—into an excuse for self-love: since you’ll never know anyone else, you might as well get to know yourself.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/12/spike-jonze-separation-anxieties.html

Movie of the year.

In the TIME Magazine "for good or ill" sense.

Movie of the moment.

I don't understand why it got a theatrical release. Wouldn't the kind of people this simpering horseshit appeals to rather watch it on their phones or iPads or laptops?

Movie of the Gear

xp Boobie of the here.

man this was just garbage huh
like watching eternal sunshine on mute

yeah a few weeks later it's not much is it. something rather insulting and complacent about the Alan Watts (whom I love) cameo. they should have made it like saint augustine or something.

not the biggest fan of Eternal Sunshine but did appreciate it's rueful nietzscheanism over this for sure.

(i say augustine only because it would be rather more fascinating to create a less reassuring artificial consciousness in the movie)

wrt its minor appearances, my favourite was briefly mistaking the guy, half of the couple joaquin & scarlett are comparing theories about, with the most likely suspect in fincher's zodiac, the guy with the zodiac watch. it could have been just the hint of intertextuality the film needed.

this was just like a time capsule from 2004. just awful. there is a strain of american film i like, deeply, but i feel pretty regularly disappointed by just the immaturity of so much high profile stuff now - it seems amazing that somebody with so little to say about love is making a film about it, his deficit of thought apparent in its reliance on like ... dudes staring out of windows; twinkly lights; brief flickers of painfully remembered scenes of anguished couples pacing, muted, set to piano music; dumb conversations; something resembling infidelity or mistrust as the only way to shut things down, the only thing that can go wrong with love. the whole value of telling a straightforward love story but with the thrilling variable of computer love seemed to rest on the commanding underlying thesis of us all thinking ... whoa ... computers ... man.

not to harp on this through comparison to a film we both admire, but if you wanna watch a recent movie about the "unknowabililty of other people/the universe" then To the Wonder is a much richer experience.

i'm not an enormous eternal sunshine fan either, but i think it's like ... a good thing to invoke as a thing to have been shamefully outshone by. like to be eternal sunshine without as cohesive a conceit seems just devastating. two other things that really cast this in a poor light were being stimulated more palpably by finding out that a new target has opened, opposite the cinema, & then reading hilton als on the subway home, any sentence of which made for more meaningful introspection than any of this.

I wanted to jump out a window...if my theater had windwos.

I know the movie does probe the source of his wintry male melancholy but goodness me a computer, voiced by ScarJo who's the perfect companion and he doesn't have to, like, have breakfast with. It's male menopausal fantasy twaddle.

yes!

i've been having a couple of To The Wonder conversations, recently, & one of the enormous deficits of this film - & others from the kind of Boring Tasteful White Director-wave school that err similarly (Mills' Beginners, say) - is actually something that can only be somewhat pedantically separated from Malick's. awful stylistic tropes like these sequences of couples arguing on mute with piano on top, like they're actively refusing the engagement of Cassavetes' experiments, actually happen in To The Wonder - i seem to recall a few scenes of Affleck trashing stuff, probably some pacing along the way - but they seem part of a much more measured, democratic way of trying to portray every part of a relationship (the downtime, the quite spells, the newness, the dissolution) in shorthand. these films seem to just want to occupy the shallow coupling phase, serenade you with ukelele tenderness, & then whip out violins for the aesthetesised, deeply frowning denouement. so many of Her's conversations were just unbearable to sit through. also differing with Morbs, upthread, (I think) praising Jonze's direction - the whole thing is shot in close up, it's occasional non-literal touches (camera panning to others on the street) felt meaningless, the whole emphasis seeming to be on this kinda Anderson-esque colour-coding exercise.

it's shot in closeup except for those loft scenes in which Jonze rather clumsily emphasizes how the audience is intruding on the sacred place occupied by ScarJo and Phoenix.

so glad you hated this Alfred, i am mentioning Beginners so we can revel in their deficits together

& yeah absolutely, i just don't know what the impetus to make this film was given how slight its heart was - there was so little evidence of engagement with Human Relationship Problems that its thought exercise was supposedly considering

right, i think the difference with Malick is that he seems to be trying to work out an entire grammar of gesture and body language to communicate a whole range of things--rather than lazily signifying with stock "romantic" images. imo.

i mean, show me something like the dead eyed infinite mystical stare of a buffalo in this and i'll happily change my mind.

yes! absolutely
& weirdly to me that's the very thing that 'forgives', or corrects interpretations of his, you know, ~twirly adoring gaze~-stereotyped shots; that they're shorthand for just the intense, magnetic, appreciative gaze you cast on somebody when they're new

mandatory buffalo in every film, no question

buffalo certification board reject your submission, list necessary cuts & additions, all buffalo themed

something rather insulting and complacent about the Alan Watts (whom I love) cameo

This is the first thing I've seen to make me want to see this movie. Huh?

i do think they made the right choice in not going for a straightforward satire of our relationships with technology, etc. but the flaw in their approach is that intimacy is depicted in a rather sanitized and anesthetic way--so there's no real bite with the satire NOR any real sense of what actual intimacy is like. so it's in this super lame and twee middle ground the whole time. not committing either way.

haha sorry that's a bit of spoiler. apologies.

spoiler no sex scenes

Jonze, a scenester for more than twenty years, has either participated in or been around a lot of people in therapy. His characters lack the agency to act in a manner not circumscribed by the psychobabble that Jonze puts in their mouths. A perverse decision because anytime Phoenix uses a funny accent or does a little (fully clothed) striptease for Samantha's benefit (her camera eye, that is) he's marvelous, and in exchanges written by a good screenwriter like Nicole Holofcener he and Johansson might have sparked off each other. Jonze even shoehorns an Alan Watts OS cameo, voiced by Brian Cox, that's as facile as a Klimt reference in a Woody Allen film; it doesn't hint at anything, goes nowhere, and works as a tag of erudition. Ultimately, Her plays as a fantasy for male mooncalves, reminding me of a routine from Allen's Husbands and Wives in which a fictional character longs to meet an attractive woman "with the following personality: a sense of humour equal to his, a love of music equal to his and a love of Bach and balmy climates. In short, himself as a pretty woman."

Still haven't seen this but did see friends from different circles posting on social media about how ppl were freaking out emotionally in the theater after seeing the movie.

This is phenomenon y/n? Is this movie making people flip out? (Honest q)

people clapped at my manhattan showing.

The couple behind me were yawning loudly.

i saw it in some big anonymous cinema on a really big screen that cost $3 extra
i was so far away from any other patron, though i think i heard some people say it was good on the way out
after it, & still, i was trying to construct some kind of snappy putdown relating to the thread encircling its thematic focus on artificial intelligence & its artificially emotional theatrical end product

alfred otm, re: empty klimt refs especially (though regrettably, as much as i otherwise loved it, sophomoric discussion of klimt is now the domain of kerchiche, i think), & also 'mooncalf' has become the newest word i have learnt from the font of alfred's film writing

also how was manhattan ryan
if i'm not overreaching

mooncalf is an important word.

im assuming you mean the place and not the WA movie? ;)

it's good! I live here now--for now at least--so hopefully my lame film thread contributions can be more timely.

oh hey no kidding - is congrats a terrible thing to say, like does it privilege coastal living? congrats, anyway! i love new york & mourn my absence from its film culture, my eligibility to pursue the esoterica of taubin & brody recommendations, daily.

given the weather lately condolences may be more appropriate!

Ultimately, Her plays as a fantasy for male mooncalves, reminding me of a routine from Allen's Husbands and Wives in which a fictional character longs to meet an attractive woman "with the following personality: a sense of humour equal to his, a love of music equal to his and a love of Bach and balmy climates. In short, himself as a pretty woman."

this is nicely put. i think that my suspect obsession with christopher lasch is my own problem but at the same time i can't help but think of him when stuff like HER comes around. (now THAT would have been a good cameo). ultimately id want to map the problem of narcissism onto other ideas, but i *do* think that something like narcissism (again, too burdened a concept to be really useful) is at work with art that doesn't strain impossibly against its own boundaries, pov, etc--which is to say that HER doesn't ever risk anything truly *weird* enough for me. HER says "oh hey we're all lonely bastards seeking connection" when a better movie would hint at something *else* in, say, the gaze of a buffalo.

what's that line in Solaris? man explores the whole universe but only wants to find his own face reflected back, or something like that.

shit, Solaris (both versions maybe) another movie to club this one with for sure.

I longed for a scene in which Theodore gets cornholed in the armpit.

Last year-end film I really wanted to get out and see--all caught up. (Well, I still need to see Gravity from earlier in the year.)

Visually, I thought it was great. I take it Llewyn Davis is winning cinematography awards; liked this better. All the way through I was thinking, “That’s such a beautiful shot.”

Aside from that, there are things about it that will stay with me, but I didn’t get all the way there. I think it has the same limitation as Blue Is the Warmest Color: it’s an unconventional conventional relationship film. It could be Marsha Mason and Dudley Moore--it checks off all the boxes one by one. Intellectually, metaphysically, there may be something there, or may not be--I’ll leave it to anyone who was more moved by it than I was to dwell on that stuff. (Love being a kind of socially acceptable insanity seemed especially pat; Phoenix’s rumination on a life of lesser versions, though, I connected with that.) I thought Phoenix was much more interesting here than in The Master, where for me he was all tics and mannerisms--he had a great way of ambling down the hall here, exactly like a guy who wears sweaters would. Amy Adams’ similarity to Kristen Wiig was off-putting (didn’t even realize till the credits that Wiig was actually in the film), but I still liked her. Scarlett Johansson...I don’t know. Skilled, I guess, but I think it’d be a bad precedent if she won any awards. The best, or at least funniest, performance may have been given by--anyone who's seen it can fill in the rest of that sentence. Liked the music, especially the guitar piece that I thought was John Fahey but apparently isn’t. Strained to figure out the two doo-wop songs that sounded familiar, forgot to stick around for the music credits; checking online, it was the Chantels and Little Willie John. Ending was very nice, ditto the dedication.

havent seen this yet but im getting amped to hate it http://www.theawl.com/2014/01/her-this-movie-makes-no-sense

"The humanest thing, the thing no computer can imitate, a person playing the piano. Hesitations, pauses, hands, you can almost feel the blood circulating under the skin, all translated into sound. To pretend that this music could have been written by a computer! It is clever, so clever and false."

To even have a chance of liking Her, you have to accept the premise and just go with it. (Think I could name many great films that you can chip away at from a logical standpoint.) There are other things to criticize, and I'm sure that writer does--just happened to notice that scanning.

That Awl review was really, really badly written. I do not need to read some woman who employs phrases such as "a letter in fact written by some beautifully-dressed rando emoting in a cubicle?!" and "But Twombly just laughs and is all, okay!" who in the next breath complains " I really do not think that Spike Jonze has much respect for writers. Or writing."

wrong bustillos is a genius

I have a, ah, mixed reaction at best but the movie's embrace of technology was a relief!

"the thing no computer can imitate" - stopped reading.

But let's not shortchange her. The machine-Johansson, Samantha, also composes music. Music supervised by the Arcade Fire! What a wheeze. The humanest thing, the thing no computer an imitate, a person playing the piano. Hesitations, pauses, hands, you can almost feel the blood circulating under the skin, all translated into sound. To pretend that this music could have been written by a computer! It is clever, so clever and false.

Lol that was me and the piece was entirely computer generated both in composition and performance. The "hesitations" were generated with the "humanize" function on Logic. Ironic!

^clearly a bot

swoon

looooool

!

I pretty much wrote this off the moment I saw the posters for it, but lately I've been feeling particularly sappy/twee, in a kind of nostalgic for when I was a naive, romantic 15 year old kind of way, so I do wonder if this would be worth seeing???

eternal sunshine:

is it better, worse, same level or incomparable?

(worse and same=not going to watch)

Spike Jonze should turn his focus back to skateboarding. Not to film it or anything. He should just do a railslide into a comfortable retirement and quit emo'ing up my cultural sphere.

spoiler no sex scenes

mmm, not really.

Eternal Sunshine was infinitely better bcz it was written by a good screenwriter.

the movie's embrace of technology was a relief!

banging my fucking head vs the wall. really, turn off yr computers, ppl.

all caught up. (Well, I still need to see Gravity from earlier in the year.)

u seeing foreign films this year?

I mentioned one right in my Her comment; not only that, I saw the Assayas film, and I still play to see the Kiarostami. I mean, c'mon, that's three in a year.

really, turn off yr computers, ppl.

nah, it gets me laid.

wow, a new woild's rekkid! "Caught up" indeed. xp

I need to see this film again bcz the first time was on my computer screen, but frankly, I have no idea what it was about.

this was complete trash

I understand not everything needs to be realistic but if I wanted to suspend my disbelief that much (a dude falls in love with artificial intelligence), I personally need the film to be more impressionistic? This square and white trend of cinematography (also present in Upstream Color) is starting to really annoy me. Also, it's probably an immature reaction but why would one date an OS when you have adorable Amy living next door. How human is that? I know it's implied that they briefly dated in college, but still. It just threw me off that so many characters would take such a leap of faith with an OS without thinking, especially considering how societies have always vilified new technologies. Maybe Jonze thinks we are sheeple? I was so relieved when Catherine got mad at Theodore, but boy it wasn't enough for me to believe in this adventure. The terrible deus ex machina did not help.

this movie was so, so bad and dumb.

"Dur," by Spike Jonze

Ok, now you guys are going too far, I don't hate it. Also "a dude falls in love with artificial intelligence" is clearly meant to be an allegory of sorts.

I keep thinking about the cinematography, and Phoenix's performance--both excellent.

The movie has virtues, two of which clem mentioned, but, woof, is it wooly.

I could've predicted ILX reaction to this movie. If I cared.

Remove Bookmark from this Thread

but we're on the computer, be "engaged"!

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l2oir9npfC1qc073co1_400.gif

Major xposts --

I liked this movie but this post way up there by schlump is brilliant and incisive:

these sequences of couples arguing on mute with piano on top, like they're actively refusing the engagement of Cassavetes' experiments ... seem part of a much more measured, democratic way of trying to portray every part of a relationship (the downtime, the quite spells, the newness, the dissolution) in shorthand. these films seem to just want to occupy the shallow coupling phase, serenade you with ukelele tenderness, & then whip out violins for the aesthetesised, deeply frowning denouement.

Well, the shallow coupling phase is easiest to do in movies.

"this was complete trash" vs. "this movie was so, so bad and dumb."

mmm...i think i'll go with the first.

I enjoyed this. It was funny and sad and j. phoenix and a. adams were both great.

Adams looks better in the curly fright perm than Cameron Diaz.

the biggest problem with the film to me, lies in the fact that the visuals doesn't provide much to the movie's substance.

a common problem with Sci Fi movies (Matrix..) and bad movies in general.

also, it was kinda flat, too falttering to the audience and too long

flattering and faltering

lol Metathesis

i thought the final act really, really redeemed this

the scene where he finds out that she's talking to 4,000 other people is great, and i liked that the end was ambiguous enough that it can be read as the two of them having a platonic bond over having fell in love with an OS even if they'll never be right for each other

but otherwise i wanted to throw a tomato at the screen for a good portion of the movie

i thought it had a fundamental problem of assuming we'd be invested in the relationship by nature, but he goes from turning the OS on to falling in love with it in like 20 minutes of real time

real time meaning our time

i thought the rendering of the indeterminate but near future was really well done though, the technological interfaces were cool (though his computer was oddly thick) and the color palette is right in line w/ where big tech firms want to take us

Guys tend to be hasty about falling in love, contrary to popular opinion -- at least the dudes I know.

yeah you might be right

i dunno i really wanted to like this and i would say i liked it more than i didn't like it but it was irredeemably stupid in places

The problem for me is that the film wanted us to take the "relationship with an OS" conceit so seriously that it removed any sense of humor or levity from it all (save that video game scene, I guess). I'm like Alfred, I usually like when movies embrace technology and its centrality in our lives but I guess this was a bridge too far for me.

totally disagree: think the "relationship with an OS thing" was SUPPOSED to feel weird and keep feeling weird, and for us to be rolling our eyes at theodore - and shocked by the world's acceptance of it... and then for us to start to reconsider that gap between our own reaction and the reactions of people within that world, asking ourselves whether really it was so improbable as all that given how things are going

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8WOZXOeW9o

this is really good but i was mad that there wasn't a scene where he jerks off onto his phone. thats like the whole reason you make this movie, to do that scene

Lol

i thought of 500 days of summer (one of the worst movies ever) during this and was i guess impressed that it avoided most of that movie's failings. if i thought to compare it to malick and tarkovsky yes it probably would have come up short

was also initially impressed that jonze somehow transformed L.A. into shanghai but after a while i was like "oh wait this actually is shanghai" and then i started imagining the movie with tony leung in it instead of phoenix, he probably would be great but its hard to picture him dialing down his inherent gracefulness to play High Pants Guy

this is amazing btw: http://www.hulu.com/watch/588250

He should've done that to the phone on the beach, nod to The Master.

is it weird that i really related with samantha

thats cool when are you going to rocket to the stars to join your people

tuesday maybe, haven't decided yet

for real tho how did u relate to her

that's one for my shrink not for you

http://cdn.marketplaceimages.windowsphone.com/v8/images/bace91cb-4953-421c-92cb-98e7a6a4bbff%3FimageType%3Dws_screenshot_large%26rotation%3D0

As someone who embodies a hotel for a living and emotionally engages with guests every day (who are often traveling alone), I definitely related with Samantha.

Embodies in the digital world, that is.

huh i always thought you seemed like a hotel

yeah that's weird -- it'll mess with your head if you let it, i bet?

Yeah, it's interesting interacting with people as the place that they're staying with and falling in love with, beyond the more practical parts of the jobl

http://wac.450f.edgecastcdn.net/80450F/wjltevansville.com/files/2013/01/WHER-Rockin-Soul-Museum-Crop-300x153.jpg

god this was horrid. i can't believe that actual human people enjoy this horrid horrid nothing movie, this crushing hourage of fascist pap. this is the pomplamoose of movies, a crucial test of your basic humanity. if you like this, it means you have chosen the wrong path and can no longer be trusted. shame on you.

had no problem with AI OS & relationship with, btw. that part was cool, as was the ending's rejection of the anime-style "perfect fresh-minted & fully lovestruck space alien robot girlfriend magically materializes in ur apartment" setup. acting was fine, despite all the human characters being horrid vapid simps. much respect to JP & AA for adding a varnish of dimensionality to complete & utter nothing. god those letters were awful and bad. god the relentless brainless "i am such an incredible interior decorator"-ness of everything got oppressive quick.

still okay with SJ directing movies, but dude should never again be allowed to write anything ever.

i liked the part with the dead cat tho. and the sad bit where samantha tried to get whatshisface to fuck the surrogate. the rest can fuck right off.

Gondry and Jonze are both kinda lost without Charlie Kaufman

god this was horrid. i can't believe that actual human people enjoy this horrid horrid nothing movie, this crushing hourage of fascist pap. this is the pomplamoose of movies, a crucial test of your basic humanity. if you like this, it means you have chosen the wrong path and can no longer be trusted. shame on you.

u mad

trying to gloss "hourage" properly

this crushing hourage of fascist pap

Public Enemy's sixth album

this was alright. the most delightful moment for me was alan watts. the picnic sequence was the one moment i really bought into the idea that there was a relationship there.

trying to gloss "hourage" properly

does not rhyme w outrage (tho it surely should)

the Atlantic review notes correctly that the movie's crowning achievement is that sweet-ass phone

jesus christ this was insufferable

genuinely cldn't tell if it was purposely shot and scored to feel exactly like an inspirational mobile phone ad but if so - mission accomplished

Well it *is* a Spike Jonze. Arent all his films basically long versions of Weezers "Island in the Sun" anyway?

this ia one of those movies that made a tremendous initial impression, but then faded in my estimation in the weeks following

jesus christ this was insufferable jesus christ this was insufferable jesus christ this was insufferable jesus christ this was insufferable jesus christ this was insufferable jesus christ this was insufferable jesus christ this was insufferable jesus christ this was insufferable jesus christ this was insufferable jesus christ this was insufferable jesus christ this was insufferable jesus christ this was insufferable

did anyone unearth any Jonze quotes confirming Eric and Alfred's thesis about how the film endorses the benign wonders of technology?

the Newsnight interview, which caused a little stir here, is pretty explicit on 'not about technology' (not the same as 'benign wonders', I know) - I liked that about it - I went in fearing it would be about Our Alienated Modern Times & was glad it wasn't.

no its more LOVE WILL FIND A WAY than pro or anti technology per se

Well it *is* a Spike Jonze. Arent all his films basically long versions of Weezers "Island in the Sun" anyway?

― the Bronski Review (Trayce), Tuesday, February 18, 2014 5:09 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

I liked that about it - I went in fearing it would be about Our Alienated Modern Times & was glad it wasn't.

― woof, Tuesday, February 18, 2014 8:16 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

yeah same. i mean it was a little bit but not in a critical way really

theres some good stuff in this esp about long distance relationships, imo

i was pretty ambivalent about this but contenderizer's raving protestations have me considering if it was better than i thought

I liked the depiction of fashion in the future: different from today, but plausible.

xps

haha i was kind of into it as a bizarro spiritual thing abt love + aftermath of divinity + the merely human remnant, but yes it is totally a long-distance relationship (down to 'why is she quoting some fucking hippie guru at me over the phone?').

(no offence alan watts)

yeah the fashion was great - a bit too samey (like not enough people wearing leftover stuff from now maybe) but the collarless button-downs, odd fits, high-waist trousers. Convincing.

(down to 'why is she quoting some fucking hippie guru at me over the phone?').

― woof, Tuesday, February 18, 2014 9:38 AM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark

hjaha yes

no its more LOVE WILL FIND A WAY

A way for your GF to cheat on you with 287,000 people.

(no offence alan watts)

as I said upthread I like watts a lot but it's telling that he was at times given to the exact same sort of glibness ("life is a dance" or "consciousness is like jazz", to paraphrase) that this movie suffers from.

this was a strangely underwhelming experience. i liked how normalised everything was in this near future but it could have done with way more interrogation of its themes - it seemed to want us to just accept everything as is without ever really questioning the premise, nor questioning the ethics of anything, like it was scared to dig too deep (i kept imagining an alternate full on sci-fi movie of this where the OS turns evil, and then another version of the film where it was a lighthearted, warmly ironic futuristic rom com, a bit like idiocracy, rather than this mish mash we ended up with). the tone seemed really inconsistent - was never sure what the film was trying to be. seemed much too scant - i think jonze could have done with someone to help him write it cos it was all just a bit too flimsily dealt with. the reality check that came from rooney mara was a bit too obvious. great concept, shitty, far too winsome/lazy execution. at times i felt like i was watching a miranda july film. 'filmed like a mobile phone ad'is OTM.

Honestly I think windows 95 would have outgrown Theodore after a few weeks dating, don't see why Samantha had to transcend matter and time to get there

Maybe there was a blandness with the way it was shot but the way it used the wide open spaces -- what a great place, like the Tokyo of Lost in Translation -- to be alone with the crowd. And that's what it felt, all these people physically alone but not virtually so -- and not panicked about it, except in the scene where Theodore is running around and falls over as the OS stops communicating w/him (lol upgrade). That sense of what we want: which is a lack of the physical body that does not know us, that will not approach us directly with our problems and worries us (look at how much trouble just a voice can bring!) We have enough problems of our own.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkSenKn1Fv8

Heh

JH's phoenix impression kills me

As someone who liked Her, I love how that clip handles the line that most made me wince: "Love is form of socially acceptable insanity."

this should have been about that little guy from the video game

Mario?

i've found that in general women are less into this movie than men.

i could barely make it through this. just aggressively irritating to me.

yeah but you're 98 years old

that's p funny for something that was on SNL

Cera as a walking punchline gettin really old tho

Getting more work than the real Cera these days.

Michael Cera is a human being too, gentlemen. Cool it.

I don't know, I heard he smokes w33d in a movie. He's really embraced that bad boy image.

Bad boys are not necessarily bad people.

Just bad lovers.

next he'll be getting a chin transplant

Michael Cera is a human being too, gentlemen.

Human being? More like a HAS being! Ha ha hahahahahah!

Hahahahahahaha.

I think you should take a breather.

Phew. (wipes eyes). Done! Sorry about that. What were we talking about?

i liked this a lot! so from this thread it seems like everyone who didn't like this missed the fact that we're supposed to see theodore as an extremely damaged person?

eh, i think it's more that some people are turned off by the fact that theodore, as a damaged person, needed the total availability and compliance of an OS in order to learn how to open up and trust women again. an uncharitable look at the film's central relationship could see it as predatory due to sam's naivete at the outset. a poster upthread said that his experience talking to people about this movie was that women were less likely to like it than men and i think this is the reason.

that said, i liked this movie.

that's a better nuanced take tho ultimately sam was neither available nor compliant. i was thinking of alfred's fantasy for mooncalves line which i just think is the completely wrong reading, the movie invites negative-to-ambivalent feelings about the relationship and makes no bones about how theodore is a fucked up person.

i would say the movie doesnt kid itself when it comes to theodore, it sees him pretty clearly but is still sensitive to his feelings and perspective. it has lacerating moments but isnt contemptuous of him. its got a good balance that works imo. maybe it would've satisfied people if it emphasized his failures more than his desires, and that probably could've been a good movie too, but i dug this one.

I still say samantha was just a sophisticated data-mining operation

it seems like everyone who didn't like this missed the fact that we're supposed to see theodore as an extremely damaged person?

actually it seems like several ppl who loved it missed this

he's "engaged" after all, like all the motherfuckers in the gay bar looking at their phones.

we're supposed to see theodore as an extremely damaged person

Still haven't seen this, but I assumed as much when I saw the trailer of him with his mustache playing uke in Los Angeles. And his name. And I am looking forward to seeing it! But the best dismissal I heard was on an African-American call-in movie radio show where one host confessed he was pretty tired of movies about sad white people playing ukelele. Then he heard from the co-host that the character's name was Theodore Twombly, and you could just hear him sigh. But the other co-host countered with a pretty strong defense, so ...

feel like a movie about a damaged person who falls in love with his OS is a more cliched scenario that presenting the relationship less..."problematically" I guess. anything interesting the movie would seem to have to say would probably fall between the extremes, but it doesn't have the real bite of critique/satire (unless it went way over my head) nor any hard own insights about actual intimacy. it's just about the "feels" in a really anemic way imo. i suppose what it seems to boil down to saying for me is that even a manufactured "artificial" and idealized intimacy comes with risks and heartbreak. Theodore wants to feel but can't--and when he does feel he suffers.

I liked this a lot more than expected. Despite sometimes overwhelming indie trappings I felt it had some interesting stuff to say about why we love people. Also the the kid in the video game was lol.

I remember this movie with fondness, surprisingly. Its script is the weakest element.

trying not to post itt because i don't really remember this movie anymore & my critique of it is mainly just How Unambitious Can We Be Both As Directors And Audiences but that little computer game character guy is such a perfect synecdoche for how shitty this movie is, that it literally needs a cute '90s-disney-style wise-cracking sidekick to take the edge off its swirling terminal void of interesting thought

ryan i think i see where you're coming from--there's certainly a legitimate criticism of this movie w/r/t the fact that it doesn't really take a strong position on much of anything. that said i think what i took from it is how we try to mediate our connections with other humans and how the most aggressive way to do that is to have a full-blown relationship with a nonhuman and the flaws and limitations therein.

I started looking at my watch when the movie faffs around with Phoenix and Johanssonvoice doing couple things

Anyone else remember Spike Jonze's earlier sad robot short?

Hey, here it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OY1EXZt4ok

A montage of adults doing kid stuff. VO monologue about feelings. At least it didn't cost $100m this time though, right?

Her cost $100M to make?!

Where The Wild Things Are, iirc

And "I'm Here" was inspired by "The Giving Tree."

that said i think what i took from it is how we try to mediate our connections with other humans and how the most aggressive way to do that is to have a full-blown relationship with a nonhuman and the flaws and limitations therein.

this is a nice point. I should be wary of attacking the movie for not having the thematic ambition I want it to have. there's a gentle irony to theodore getting his heart broken by what is essentially a coping mechanism.

Randy W. Schekman, co-recipient of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Medicine, looks like Theodore Twombly in 20 years.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bjgt4dHCUAARdH2.png:large

Amazing, especially the top two. Not just in terms of appearance, but the expressions--you'd swear the guy had been shown stills from the film.

So i just saw this. First off the idea that this is a future where this guy forges handwritten letters for hundreds of people for a living, and yet cannot deal with the open nature of his relationship to his OS. The future portrayed here is pretty much entirely defined by his job, which suggests some kind of radically different reality, with presumably radically different attitudes towards personal relationships. Did anybody else feel like this was an issue?

I mean "Humans being irrational about their emotions" was a big theme, but this felt more like sloppy writing.

Guessing the letter-writing part of the movie was inspired by this, also covered in 2007 in a big NY Times feature:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-26379747

Third act annoyed me because it activated my "Neuromancer / Marathon (pre-Halo) did it better" nerd circuit

i finally saw this last night. it's not the extended pomplamoose music video that everyone in the first quarter of this thread assumed it would be, but i really, really liked it.

i loved all of the mirrored and inverted elements: samantha with no human form but high empathy as opposed to the androids with human-like bodies but zero empathy in blade runner/PKD's do androids dream of electric sheep. theodore's marriage dissolving due to growing up/apart vs. what happens with his relationship with samantha. the phone conversation at the beginning involving choking someone with a dead cat, vs. what it was like with samantha. the way the AI is striving to be more human-like even as theodore/amy adams are occasionally displaying elements of AI-like machine learning (there's one part where they both describe their experience with AI in the exact same way - I forget the exact phrasing, but when Phoenix hears Adams say it his eyes light up in recognition, like he's heard it before but can't figure out where)

anyway i thought it was a lot more subtle and thought-provoking than most people upthread, apparently, but i'm also predisposed to enjoy AI movies i guess. it's a fascinating subject, and not nearly so far-fetched and distant as people make it out to be.

also, all time lol at this upthread:

But let's not shortchange her. The machine-Johansson, Samantha, also composes music. Music supervised by the Arcade Fire! What a wheeze. The humanest thing, the thing no computer an imitate, a person playing the piano. Hesitations, pauses, hands, you can almost feel the blood circulating under the skin, all translated into sound. To pretend that this music could have been written by a computer! It is clever, so clever and false.

Lol that was me and the piece was entirely computer generated both in composition and performance. The "hesitations" were generated with the "humanize" function on Logic. Ironic!

― pretty krulls make glaives (flamboyant goon tie included), Saturday, January 11, 2014 11:20 PM (1 year ago)

i recommend the recent AI perv-thriller Ex Machina mostly for a very funny Oscar Isaac performance.

I think we lack a good Ex Machina thread. I felt like that one had a lot of critical takes on the plot that were very different from what I got from it. It's a decent juxtaposition: Her features a disembodied artificial intelligence and focuses on the development of the AI paired with a human being who really needs someone capable of empathy and understanding, with the AI eventually growing beyond the human.

The consensus of articles I've read about Ex Machina view Oscar Isaac's character as a villain or at least someone who is capable of cruelty, but the question he's posing is whether an AI can convince a human to perceive the AI as human. To an extent, human emotions, empathy, and motivations are projected on the AI -- and if the audience sees the AI as completely human, he seems like a cruel manipulator, a slave master, a rapist. But unlike the situation in Her, with a man attempting to find companionship to better live out the human experience, Isaac's character has eschewed human interaction for his project. His interactions with humans are limited and he's playing out basic human needs with what he -- a person who started at the beginning of the project, where it was obvious he's interacting with software and hardware -- perceives as a construct. It seems cruel that he has a lobotomized (again, seeing this in human terms for a machine) servant, that he's caging them, that he's exploiting.

At the time of the movie, he's less capable of seeming like a being worth empathy than the robot, which is where the viewer and protagonist drops in. Of course he's fucked up, he's been living in exile in the middle of nowhere so his creations don't escape before they can be vetted.

Guys tend to be hasty about falling in love, contrary to popular opinion -- at least the dudes I know.

― Bryan Fairy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, January 25, 2014 11:01 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Posted about Her, but really, this applies to Gleeson's character in Ex Machina just as easily.

Oscar Isaac is really the only reason to watch Ex Machina

Oscar Isaac is really the only reason to watch me watching movies.

why would I watch you watching Oscar Isaac

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38pDr-Xt2do

I can only assume that childlike look of joy, wonder, and lust (for life, lol) is on Eric's face. Inspirational.

Yes, face.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ka-PLgW8iQE

oscar is the reason

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOimTfNR110

this movie should be called "I WAS CUCKED BY A TEENAGE ROBOT!!!"

also it should have a laugh track and it should show computers fucking in a post credits scene

I proposed that they make a SNL-style spoof trailer for a sequel called "Him" where a woman's phone preys on her emotional vulnerabilities, gaslights her and tries to fuck her friends