Review of Her (2013) by Baronvontang — 22 Sep 2014

Ever seen a movie that's so bad when it pops back up in your memory you get angry? I saw this movie in theaters about a year ago, and something reminded me of it today, and I, instantly, got pissed off. This may very well be the worst movie I have ever seen, like, not even exaggerating, not even a little bit.

Now, I'm not one of these people that just hates on Spike Jonze, I mean, I don't really think he's worthy of the constant attention he gets, but I thought Adaptation was a really well put together film; everything else he's done is kind of meh; but this movie, dear god, this movie.

It's so unnecessarily pretentious: it's deliberately slow paced and the characters are deliberately unappealing to draw out the "reality" of the situations; I'm not a fan of this particular approach, I'm definitely a strong advocate for clever stylization over realism, but, there are some occasions that call for the dreary shackles of reality, and some occasions where this works, like when the film is presenting some great truth or some really rich ideas, it can be advantageous to juxtapose that with the tedium of the real world...however there are no great truths here, no rich ideas, there is absolutely nothing profound in this movie to warrant how slow it is.

It's a very bland look at a, somewhat, tired subject: sentient machines and there impact on humanity. Now anyone familiar with, almost, anything to come out of the science fiction genre over the past 80 years or so is very familiar with this subject; hell even if you're not so familiar with the genre you've probably caught a passing episode of Star Trek the Next Generation, played some Megaman or seen, at least, one of the Terminator films or something, so you've, no doubt, come across this theme; it's nothing new, but, apparently, when Spike Jonze does it, it is!

You see, Spike Jonze draws in this pretentious hipster crowd, and these people dismiss science fiction as "genre" and anything that's "genre" is beneath them, because it's not up it's own ass and touting itself as a work of art, (whether it is or isn't is a discussion for another day); so these hipster Jonze fans go and see this movie and are just seeing, or just paying attention to these concepts for the first time and it's mind blowing to them, and when you tell them: "Well, it's nothing new, Phillip K Dick and Kazunori Ito did it a lot better" they just glare at you and make condescending remarks about the circles those particular talents move in.

I was seriously shocked when I left the theater after seeing this film and everyone seemed so enthralled by it, then I looked around and noticed all the skinny jeans(for men) and high waisted skinny jeans (for women), pork pie hats, thick rimmed glasses, ironic mustaches and the occasional bow tie and I was like "ooooooh".

Also, and I just found this out, Arcade Fire did the soundtrack; they're the **** worst.