Wild Bill Ketelhut provides the "blog" to this anti-blog
Wild At Heart
I rarely review films I don't get invites for but I am so amazed by "Her" by Spike Jonze that I have to get the word out. It's rare that I can leave a film that is so perfect and thought-provoking that it leaves a profound impact on me as a viewer. Like "Fargo" or "Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind", this is an incredible tour-de-force that I feel compelled to talk to anyone that will listen to me that they must see it. I am not a huge Joaquin Phoenix fan but he is wonderful as our lead character, Theodore Twombly, who is dealing with the emotions of a recent divorce and works for a company which creates personal love letters for people who have problems expressing their feelings. It is a brilliant look into a near very plausible future where one can see us getting away from handwriting with all these tweets and such. After an awkward online dating chat he makes an impulse buy for an OS that uses artificial intelligence to provide friendships for people. Despite his incredible ability to express the feelings of others, he suffers at his own inability to form relationships.
This OS gives him the perfect opportunity and Scarlett Johansson does an amazing job on bringing this OS to life as she and Joaquin really bring us on a relationship as real as any onscreen affair. Despite only seeing her as essentially an ear bud and small cell phone-like box, we really travel a wide relationship arc filled with longing, discovery, jealously, sex (yes, sex) and everything else. Jonze does a great giving us a fully realized relationship between man and machine that doesn't take any short cuts or Hollywoodized ending. This is one of the most exciting movies I have seen in the last decade so please get out and support it. We also have a great supporting cast of women in his life as portrayed by Amy Adams (his college friend), Olivia Wilde (blind date), Kristen Wiig (sexy kitten phone sex) and Rooney Mara (his ex). I give this film an easy A+.
It is a good week to see it and some of the other Oscar nominated films as it is a light concert week for me:
Wednesday (1/22) - Honeycutters @ the Ark
Friday (1/24) - Collective Soul @ Ceasars Windsor