(Spike Jonze, 2013)
Her feels, well...almost perfect.
Beautifully judged and finely emotionally calibrated, it manages to work as a simple, surprisingly conventional love story (following the arc of a love affair, from meet cute to emotional parting) while also indulging in an accessible, interesting investigation into modern communication, and how it has affected our relationships.
Set in a very-near future (with exteriors shot in Shanghai, making great use of that City's now Epic skyline), Her follows Theodore Twombley (Joaquin Phoenix), who works at a firm writing personal, emotional letters for clients. Recently separated from his wife (Rooney Mara), Theodore is isolated and lonely, but when he buys new software, he finds himself falling in love with his Operating System, named Samantha (voiced brilliantly by Scarlett Johansson). Samantha is evolving and intuitive, and their relationship has many difficulties, all of them compounded when she begins to grow beyond Theodore's understanding...
The future world of Her is only a few short steps from our own. Here is a world where everyone is in semi-constant communion with the device they carry around, where people appear to talk to themselves in public, and computers respond to voice commands (this is a world seemingly devoid of keyboards). The sublime production design and, more particularly, cinematography (by Hoyte van Hoytema) emphasise the flat, thin light of modern-day Los Angeles, and find personal spaces full of vibrant, earthy colours and lots of natural light. There are many witty little details - from the computer game Theodore plays to the LA transit system in which he travels and thinks - all of which help ground this story and enable Jonze and his more-than-capable cast to ensure it delivers an emotional experience.
And it feels more personal and emotional than any of his other films (which is saying something, given how oddly powerful his work can be). Much of this is down to Phoenix, now firmly ensconced as his generation's greatest leading man, here making Theodore vulnerable, interesting, poetic and also self-destructive. He is very much a "Character", but it is the film's greatest triumph that the audience can feel the universal emotions of his relationship with Samantha. The warmth and excitement of the early stages giving way to difficulty and complex growth, then the final, desperately sad stages. This film could be about any relationship.
But it is more interesting, funnier, more moving, because Jonze chose this setting, chose - in the era of Apple and Siri - to tell this particular story. Not many films can be quite so entertaining and beautiful yet just this thought-provoking. Her manages it effortlessly.
Showing posts with label Olivia Wilde. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Olivia Wilde. Show all posts
Sunday, 19 January 2014
Monday, 7 October 2013
RUSH
(Ron Howard, 2013)
Peter Morgan's screenplay for Rush is painfully, unbelievably obvious. It starts with a dual voiceover from lead characters Nicki Lauda (Daniel Brühl) and Peter Hunt (Chris Hemsworth), both of them attempting to define what makes a Formula One driver tick in the way only somebody announcing a bad movie voiceover ever would. Then, tired of having his leads actually tell us who they are, he puts them in dramatic scenes and has them basically tell everyone else what they are thinking. But that's alright, because everyone else is telling them what they're thinking back; this is how coversations work in Peter Morgan-world. When all this gets a little too subtle for the audience, he wheels the voiceovers back in to explain it all over again.
Hunt and Lauda were rivals and opposites in late '70s F1. Hunt the beautiful, reckless playboy, Lauda the driven perfectionist - in real life they were close friends (they even shared a flat) but Rush reduces them to co-dependent enemies, defining themselves against one another.
Leads Brühl and Hemsworth almost salvage Rush. They are basically playing two different types of asshole, but they make these men sympathetic and human, despite the on-the-nose script (which reaches a nadir during their first extended conversation, where they basically lay out their conflicting philosophies for each other) and Howard's direction, which tries far too hard and adopts far too many modern approaches in order to make the numbingly repetitive races more visually interesting.
Anthony Dod Mantle, a cinematographer of exceptional talent, falls prey to the cheap trick of using filters to portray period (the '70s are a bit yellow, a bit flat in their lighting) while Howard loves montages to portray Hunt's endless shagatons and Lauda's obsessive need to get everything right.
It's never quite boring, no. There are a few fine sequences, and some gripping race action.
But it never quite feels like it has much of a point, either.
Peter Morgan's screenplay for Rush is painfully, unbelievably obvious. It starts with a dual voiceover from lead characters Nicki Lauda (Daniel Brühl) and Peter Hunt (Chris Hemsworth), both of them attempting to define what makes a Formula One driver tick in the way only somebody announcing a bad movie voiceover ever would. Then, tired of having his leads actually tell us who they are, he puts them in dramatic scenes and has them basically tell everyone else what they are thinking. But that's alright, because everyone else is telling them what they're thinking back; this is how coversations work in Peter Morgan-world. When all this gets a little too subtle for the audience, he wheels the voiceovers back in to explain it all over again.
Hunt and Lauda were rivals and opposites in late '70s F1. Hunt the beautiful, reckless playboy, Lauda the driven perfectionist - in real life they were close friends (they even shared a flat) but Rush reduces them to co-dependent enemies, defining themselves against one another.
Leads Brühl and Hemsworth almost salvage Rush. They are basically playing two different types of asshole, but they make these men sympathetic and human, despite the on-the-nose script (which reaches a nadir during their first extended conversation, where they basically lay out their conflicting philosophies for each other) and Howard's direction, which tries far too hard and adopts far too many modern approaches in order to make the numbingly repetitive races more visually interesting.
Anthony Dod Mantle, a cinematographer of exceptional talent, falls prey to the cheap trick of using filters to portray period (the '70s are a bit yellow, a bit flat in their lighting) while Howard loves montages to portray Hunt's endless shagatons and Lauda's obsessive need to get everything right.
It's never quite boring, no. There are a few fine sequences, and some gripping race action.
But it never quite feels like it has much of a point, either.
Monday, 5 September 2011
COWBOYS & ALIENS
(Jon Favreau, 2011)
This would be a far better experience if you went in blind, unaware of the premise or even of the title, which does sum up the content in three words in a blunt manner which made some audiences who saw the trailer laugh out loud. For it begins as a Western, and the first fifteen to twenty minutes are like a handsome, well-cast, classically shot, slightly overfamiliar modern take on that great old genre, laying out a cast of genre archetypes and their relationships with moderate style and some soildly old-fashioned storytelling.
Then, some spaceships show up and this is suddenly a mash-up of Western and sci-fi.
The sci-fi content is minimal and rudimentary; there is a big spaceship full of aliens, they fly little spaceships and kidnap humans, they look like frogs with muscular, hulking bodies, and they have blasters which render the six-shooters and rifles the men carry largely ineffective.
The narrative takes the form of a pursuit - a group of men seeking to rescue their abducted loved ones - and that allows for a quick tour of some other Western cliches as they encounter a group of bandits and a tribe of Indians on their journey, together with one nicely Herzogian surreal image, that of a massive Mississippi wheel barge lying upside down on the desert floor.
It's all a little overlong, but the pacing and style feels appropriately leisurely for the Western side of this story, and if the final battle is slightly over egged and predictable in its every dramatic beat, Favreau gratifyingly maintains the classical approach throughout, never descending to the manic cutting and chaotic continuity of so much modern blockbuster cinema.
His cast are never really stretched by the material. Daniel Craig does his blunt instrument tough guy thing - and does it well - while Harrison Ford gives yet another rendition of the grumpy old man persona he has fallen into over the last decade or so. The others, a grizzled ensemble including Sam Rockwell, Keith Carradine and Clancy Brown, are good value in the smaller parts.
There is a slightly pedestrian quality to Cowboys & Aliens which means it doesn linger long in the mind. But it is handsome, occasionally thrilling and always watchable, which is more than could have been expected from any film with such a title.
This would be a far better experience if you went in blind, unaware of the premise or even of the title, which does sum up the content in three words in a blunt manner which made some audiences who saw the trailer laugh out loud. For it begins as a Western, and the first fifteen to twenty minutes are like a handsome, well-cast, classically shot, slightly overfamiliar modern take on that great old genre, laying out a cast of genre archetypes and their relationships with moderate style and some soildly old-fashioned storytelling.
Then, some spaceships show up and this is suddenly a mash-up of Western and sci-fi.
The sci-fi content is minimal and rudimentary; there is a big spaceship full of aliens, they fly little spaceships and kidnap humans, they look like frogs with muscular, hulking bodies, and they have blasters which render the six-shooters and rifles the men carry largely ineffective.
The narrative takes the form of a pursuit - a group of men seeking to rescue their abducted loved ones - and that allows for a quick tour of some other Western cliches as they encounter a group of bandits and a tribe of Indians on their journey, together with one nicely Herzogian surreal image, that of a massive Mississippi wheel barge lying upside down on the desert floor.
It's all a little overlong, but the pacing and style feels appropriately leisurely for the Western side of this story, and if the final battle is slightly over egged and predictable in its every dramatic beat, Favreau gratifyingly maintains the classical approach throughout, never descending to the manic cutting and chaotic continuity of so much modern blockbuster cinema.
His cast are never really stretched by the material. Daniel Craig does his blunt instrument tough guy thing - and does it well - while Harrison Ford gives yet another rendition of the grumpy old man persona he has fallen into over the last decade or so. The others, a grizzled ensemble including Sam Rockwell, Keith Carradine and Clancy Brown, are good value in the smaller parts.
There is a slightly pedestrian quality to Cowboys & Aliens which means it doesn linger long in the mind. But it is handsome, occasionally thrilling and always watchable, which is more than could have been expected from any film with such a title.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)