Her (**3/4)

The premise of Her — man falls in love with operating system — is both intriguing and goofy. Written and directed by Spike Jonze (Where the Wild Things Are), it uses a nominally sci-fi premise to explore the meaning of love. In its vision of the near future, not unlike the present day, everyone walks around talking into electronic devices. Also, men get divorced and are lonely, like cubicle jockey Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), who composes, and dictates to a computer, apparently heartfelt letters that others pass off as their own. (One imagines the reactions of widows realizing that their monosyllabic husband’s exquisite love letters were the words of another.)

Twombly walks out of the office dictating to a cute little device that made me think of a foldable mirror that might be kept in a purse, but in this case reads emails to him. But a new operating system, simply called OS1, has been invented that will interact with you as never before. It comes with paper directions and, in what seems like whimsy in a movie that is not whimsical, asks Theodore a few random-seeming questions, then emerges with the voice of Scarlett Johansson, naming herself (itself?) Samantha, just because she (it?) likes the name. (OS1 gives you the choice of a male or female voice, but not a gender-ambiguous one.)

What this reminded me of before I saw it was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which also explored love and identity with a nominally sci-fi premise. However, where that movie was funny and kinetic, this movie is deliberate and earnest. It is occasionally funny, but not often. Once, during a sex scene, it is unintentionally funny. Virtually so, anyway. At other times, it’s the cinematic equivalent of listening to other people’s love letters, like the ones Theodore invents. The sincerity can be almost cloying at times.

It’s not that I mind a serious or even somber movie, but a lighter tone might have helped sell me on the idea that a human would not mind the absence of a body, or that an artificial intelligence that thinks fast enough to read hundreds of books in seconds would not be bored by a human. The latter point is, in fact, addressed eventually, and Jonze certainly does make you think about what it means to love, about loneliness, and about how we will interact with our computers in the future. This is mostly about the first two questions, using Twombly as the experiment. The other significant characters in the film are his soon-to-be ex-wife (Rooney Mara) and his office friend (Amy Adams), so there is only a glimpse of a vision of what true artificial intelligence might mean for society. I can see the reason for the movie’s acclaim; it has a depth to it, and a stylistic unity. But, I still liked Robot & Frank better.

IMDb link

viewed 2/6/14 6:55 pm at AMC Cherry Hill; posted 2/9/14

Jobs (***)

The late Steve Jobs was a classic rags-to-riches success story, an avatar of the tech revolution, and a peculiar, particular individual. This helped make Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography a fascinating read and a runaway bestseller, and it makes him a good film character. This biopic begins with a graying Jobs (Ashton Kutcher) introducing the product, the iPod, that assured that Apple Computer would remain an important company in the new century. However, the rest of the film is set earlier, with Jobs as the scrappy underdog. Director Joshua Michael Stern skips over his childhood and how Jobs’s father’s inspired his interest in technology (and the epiphany he had at age 12 when he realized he was smarter than his old man), or how he met Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak. Instead, it begins in 1974. The 1960s were over, but Jobs turned on, tuned in (to Dylan, especially), and dropped out of Reed College while continuing to audit courses he liked, such as one in typography that helped inspired his love of good design.

In nearly every respect, Jobs is a biopic that Jobs would find quite flattering. Even his tantrums seem in service of creating a better product, and ditto his early attempts to deny the paternity of his out-of-wedlock daughter. You can almost hear him saying How can I change the future of personal computing if I have to deal with a kid? And you’ll sort of agree. Likewise, it’s impossible to see Jobs’s foes at Apple — primarily Board Chairman Arthur Rock (J. K. Simmons) and 1980s CEO John Scully (Mathew Modine) — as anything but folks who just don’t get it. Jobs’s later success makes it difficult not to agree with that view, but Isaacson suggests that Jobs’s immaturity had some role in his eventual fallout with the board and makes it at least possible to question his choices. The financial success of Microsoft makes it clear that, as a business model, there was another path rather than the high-control, perfectionist model Jobs espoused. However, the film does bring across that financial success, while important, was not what drove him.

As a longtime Mac user, I may be biased, but despite the somewhat two-dimensional portrait of its subject, the Apple story is a good story. (Other aspects of Job’s life, like his role in starting Pixar Animation Studios, are not mentioned, or de-emphasized.) The film has the chronology about right, Kutcher is made to look uncannily like Jobs and, though I have not seen Jobs on film that much, he seemed to have his mannerisms down pat. (Josh Gad seemed well case as Wozniak.) Kutcher has a cockiness about him that works in the part. Aaron Sorkin is reportedly working on a film adaptation of Isaacson’s book, and there’s an obvious parallel between the forceful personalities of Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, subject of the Sorkin-penned The Social Network. I expect Sorkin’s version of the story to better highlight Job’s difficult side, or present his story with more complexity. I expect it to have quicker pacing and more snappy dialogue; this one’s most memorable line for me came when Jobs threatens Bill Gates on the phone after learning that Microsoft planned to release an operating system — Windows — that imitated many features of the Mac interface. Like the products Jobs created, Jobs has most of the rough edges smoothed out, but is handsome to look at.

IMDb link

viewed 8/14/13 at AMC Cherry Hill [PFS screening] and posted 8/17/13

Computer Chess (**1/2)

I like low-budget films that make a virtue of necessity, and this one does that. Setting his story almost entirely in a middle-budget hotel, Andrew Bujalski follows a group of computer programmers pitting their skills against each other in a machine-on-machine tournament. Also, it’s 1982, 15 years before IBM’s Deep Blue would defeat champion Garry Kasparov in a match, and around the same length of time before geek was used as a compliment. The lone female programmer is a novelty.

Bujalski used old video equipment to make the film in black and white and even includes what look like technical glitches. It somewhat resembles an old shot-on-video documentary, though without actual interview segments and with brief flashbacks and other things a documentary wouldn’t have. So, it’s a pretty clever film that vividly recalls the pre-Internet era of technology. Ostensibly, it’s a comedy, but it wasn’t funny enough that I heard laughter in the audience I saw it with. About the most chuckle-producing incident is a college kid’s awkward encounter with a middle-aged couple attending some kind of New Age-y spiritual retreat being held simultaneously with the tournament. When the wife says that the 64 squares on a chess board is so limiting, he points out that, actually, the number of possible plays it allows is more than 10 to the 120th power.

The college kid is perhaps the most prominent character, along with an older programmer who hasn’t reserved a room and spends his evenings trying to find somewhere to sleep. However, no character is on screen more than 25 minutes or so. (It’s doubtful you’ll recognize any of the actors either, which further helps this seem like an old film that someone found.) The movie is so faithful to its premise that in fact it seems only about as interesting as it would have been were it truly a 30-year-old documentary from an old convention. It’s of little consequence who wins the tournament and there are no other major storylines. So, while the movie was original, it left me wanting a little more.

IMDb link

viewed 7/31/13 7:15 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 7/31/13

Moon (***1/4)

What’s even lonelier than being stranded on a desert island? Being alone in space, maybe. Sam (Sam Rockwell) is coming to the end of a three-year contract in which he is the sole human element in a mining operation that supplies most of the energy used on earth. (It’s a sci-fi plot that actually emphasizes the science as much as the fiction; the helium isotope he mines actually exists on the moon and may someday be used for energy.) Unlike Tom Hanks in Cast Away, though, Sam doesn’t need to rely on a volleyball for conversation; he has a computer assistant called Gerty, who is voiced by Kevin Spacey doing his best imitation of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. And he has TV and radio. (But would he really be listening to music and watching programs that even now are decades old?)

I don’t want to give away the plot, because it’s quite clever, but let it suffice to say that the movie doesn’t dwell upon how Sam whiles away his free time, but on how he has changed in his time away, on the nature of the company and the computer that manage his communications to Earth, and on the unexpected discovery he makes about himself and his mission. In other words on both the literal and figurative dark side of the moon. Unlike the vast majority of science fiction on film, this isn’t an action movie set in space, a special-effects movie, or a movie about aliens. There are barely any humans in the movie except for Rockwell, who has quite a showcase, since he’s in every scene. This is a very smart, small film that I wouldn’t have minded going on longer.

IMDB link

viewed and reviewed 8/6/09

Untraceable (**)

Here’s another tale of a serial killer who likes to toy with the police, the novelty being a killer who uses hits on his web site to trigger the mechanism of death. Needless to say, a bullet to the head is not nearly cruel enough, and, just like the tens of millions of viewers who log on to the killer’s site, we get to watch as, among other things, a cat suffocate. Never mind what happens to the people.

Directed by Gregory Hoblit, whose last movie was the fine thriller Fracture, the movie’s by no means unwatchable, thus depriving me of a better oppotunity to use that pun in my pan. Diane Lane, as the widowed computer expert who tries to track the killer, gives a better performance than this exploitation movie requires. The parts involving the killer’s use of programming tricks to conceal his on-line identity interested me. But cheap thrills are the primary focus, and the story devolves into the usual absurdities. The killer, who’s identified halfway through, is ridiculously competent until, like Lane’s heroine, he makes a mistake at the exact moment it becomes convenient for the plot.

Cynical enough to predict that a web site allowing users to participate in torture would in weeks become America’s most popular (15,000,000 simultaneous users!), the movie pretends to deplore the media’s willingness to turn tragedy into entertainment, all the while turning torture into entertainment, and mediocre entertainment at that. At least we are not encouraged to sympathize with the killers, as in parts of the Saw movies.

IMDB link

reviewed 1/27/08