Review of Her (2013) by Cdncurmudgeon — 14 Jan 2014

Some movies make you wonder. You wonder why they made the movie in the first place. You wonder why good actors would get involved in such a lame project. You wonder why a the most bubbly actress in Hollywood would allow herself to get sucked into playing such a flat personalityless character. You wonder why 93% of Rotten Tomatoes critics liked it. You wonder how a usually boring actress actually ends up being one of the very few bright lights in an otherwise dim cast. And you wonder why, after saying that it looked like a stupid idea for a movie after seeing the trailers, you allowed the critics to seduce you into sitting in the dark and lamenting the $12.99 that you just wasted. Well dear readers by now you are probably wondering what god-awful movie I am talking about. The movie is “her”.

When I finally get around to compiling my best and worst lists “her” will likely top the list. My spouse actually left the movie before it was over and I would have accompanied her but since I had dragged her into the theatre kicking and screaming I felt that I had no choice but to stay. Here is the plot synopsis that my spouse posted on Facebook in answer to my daughter’s query about the movie: “ "Her" - a really stupid pathetic person poorly acted by Joaquin Phoenix using a really stupid voice was dumped by his wife. Several months later he gets this AI OS - the latest thing - and it becomes more human-like. The was only one 15 sec scene that was at all entertaining (an alien type thing in a video game), and even then it was only because you were so bored by then that those 15 seconds seemed good.” I have to disagree with my spouse on one point, the video game character was annoying as was its potty mouth.

This movie was so bad I don’t even know where to begin. The entire plot-line is ridiculous and the characters are even worse. The only three characters that really seem to have any grip on sanity or reality are Olivia Wilde’s “blind date” character, the partner of Amy Adams’ character and the lead character’s ex-wife-in-waiting.

I don’t usually like Olivia Wilde in movies but for some reason she was great in the small part of the loser’s blind date. I think that the “partner” is one of the two characters in the movie that actually has a brain and he bails early and joins an ashram, totally separating himself from Spike Jones’ perverted vision of our future society. And Rooney Mara’s ex-wife-in-waiting is brilliant in the scene where she denounces Joaquin Phoenix’s character as the loser that most of us watching the movie figured out about 3 minutes into this 2 hour 6 minute borefest.

You know that you are in the wrong theatre when after about ½ an hour of watching Phoenix walk zombie-like through his so called life we are treated to an aurally-graphic scene of him having telephone sex with a dead-cat-fetishist. But it gets worse, later we get to stare at a totally black screen while he has cyber-sex with his Operating System. But wait, there is still more up Spike Jones sleeve, we soon get to see Phoenix attempt to have sex with a sex-surrogate who has agreed to stand in for the Operating System. That’s when my spouse left.

Sure I get that Spike Jones is trying to warn us about the direction that our millennial society is going as it abandons real human interaction for communicating through Facebook, Twitter, blogging and internet porn, but he could have given us an entertaining movie at the same time.