ViewGuide

Created Jan 22, 2014 09:14PM PST • Edited Jan 31, 2019 02:47AM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Perfect 5.0

   Her is set in Los Angeles by way of Shanghai – palm trees, beaches and lots and lots of super tall towers. People barely engage with other people. They engage with cybots: robotic cyber-beings purringly delivered.

   Scarlett Johansen turns in the sexiest performance of her career as Samantha, a cybot who just thought of her name a nanosecond ago. Sweet, saucy and seductive, ScoJo’s mouth turns out to be her sexiest organ.

   Siri inspired, Spike Jonze created, Her hits several cinematic erogenous zones: important • SciFi • romance.

   • Important: Jonze uses Siri as a jumping-off point to envision profound cyber services and effects.
   • SciFi: Joaquin Phoenix plays a human cyber-companion, a guy well paid to craft handwritten personal letters for distant clients. His PDA and earphone connect him to a superior being.
   • Romance: The love affair Theodore Twombly has with his cybot starts and flows naturally, helped along by some newfangled phone sex. It’s mostly sweet, occasionally stormy and ultimately sad.

4. Acting

   Perfect 5.0

   Joaquin Phoenix & Scarlett Johansson score big in Her.

   Joaquin Phoenix now has yet another famous name associated with his. Theodore Twombly is a man from the near future, a man like any of us. Well, any of us who live in a luxe Century City high-rise apartment. A man whose job is the apotheosis of English Major career success, a well paid Lit dude. Phoenix is a natural.

   Three women surround him.

   • Rooney Mara as his wife. His soon to be ex-wife.
   • Scarlett Johansson as his dreamboat assistent Samantha. Smartest girlfriend he’s ever had. ScoJo deserves an Oscar. Seriously. Her voice does it all.
   • Amy Adams as his college friend Amy. You gotta like that Amy Adams plays an Amy. Matt Letscher plays her prissy husband.

   Another woman appears as an image in front of Theodore Twombly: May Lindstrom as the Sexy Pregnant TV Star. That’s a fetish I never understood.

   Plus, a major score…

   Olivia Wilde as the Blind Date. That’s quite a Blind Date, more like Sexiest Blind Date Ever. Theodore Twombly rejects her, of course. The guy’s mental. La Wilde One is a total hottie – gorgeous, smart, eager.

   Voices

   • Bill Hader as Chat Room Friend #2. Money.
   • Kristen Wiig as SexyKitten. Ka-Ching.
   • Artt Butler as Text Voice
   • Brian Johnson as something called OS1 Commercial Lead
   • Spike Jonze himself – aka Adam Spiegel – as the livingroom videogame Alien Child

   Letter Writers

   • Lynn Adrianna
   • Lisa Renee Pitts
   • Gabe Gomez

5. Male Stars Perfect 5.0

6. Female Stars Perfect 5.0

7. Female Costars Perfect 5.0

8. Male Costars Perfect 5.0

10. Film

    Perfect 5.0

    Alone Together gets taken to new levels in Her. Passersby stream through public spaces conversing elsewhere: talking with people and cyber companions who are elsewhere or nowhere at all, save the cloud.

    This all takes place in a placid and crime-free L.A. Odd for a futuristic Hollywood fantasy that it’s not apocalyptic and seething with class resentments. You know, like an Obama economics speech.

11. Direction Perfect 5.0

12. Play Perfect 5.0

13. Music Really Great 4.5

14. Visuals Really Great 4.5

    The Perfect Housewife game is brilliant highbrow comedy done through lowbrow animation.

15. Content

16. Edge

    Risqué 2.2

    More spicy than Salty • One tick over Titillating into Erotic • Violence of the emotional kind = Risqué

17. Sex Erotic 2.6

18. Violence Gentle 1.5

19. Rudeness Salty 2.5

21. Reality

    Glib 1.8

    Deconstructing “the first artificially intelligent operating system”, we see that Artificial Intelligence still has humanistic weight, even after all these years, technological generations and failed expectations. We also see that Operating System is a base level positioning of what the cyber companion is. When positioning, go with something base level and differentiate from there.

    Theodore Twombly’s two devices never go missing, are always readily at hand: a phone-like object that’s hinged like an old-fashioned dual photo frame and an earpiece that’s a full headphone. Yet they have no home, other than the nearest horizontal surface to him or precariously hanging out of his breast pocket. Only in the movies.

    Finally, here’s a fun exercise: Google “Her movie” and click Images. A bumper crop of gorgeous actresses appear, including a never hotter Amy Adams. Plus shots related to the movie. But it’s the adders that make it especially pleasant, albeit diverting.

22. Circumstantial Surreal 2.6

23. Biological Glib 1.9

24. Physical Natural 1.0