12 FILM
guestlist.net
Issue 59 / 2014
IEW
V
RE
HER
24th January
Spike Jonze's latest film is quiet, heartwrenching and absolutely brilliant.
Spike Jonze's short career has yielded some visionary film making. His partnership with Charlie Kaufman produced 'Adaptation' and 'Being
John Malkovich', two of the most brilliant and
original films in modern cinema. Jonze is now
back with 'Her', a sci-fi romance drama that progresses into an absolute masterpiece.
Joaquin Phoenix is fantastically measured as
Theodore Twombly, a lonely guy who finds
solace in Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), the
artificially intelligent operating system on his
computer. This is a near future filled with pasteltinted glass and elegant skyscrapers –both alien
and familiar, much like the love story at the film's
heart. It's hard to believe a relationship between
a man and a computer can be so believable, but
Phoenix and Johansson's interactions are so
natural in practice that you swiftly forget how
strange it is in theory.
Her's greatest strength is that it never runs
out of ideas, sci-fi film's greatest pitfall is that
so often movies lean on one concept until it just
splutters out. Above all, it's an absolutely beautiful piece of cinema, emotionally, conceptually
and technically stellar, truly modern film at its
finest.
More @ guestlist.net/film
