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Her   14 January 2014

Deana and I went to see “Her” tonight and I can’t say enough good things about it. I whole heartedly agree with Craig Mazin:

I think this movie, honestly, aside from being my favorite movie of the year, that doesn’t even matter. Who cares? That’s a calendar demarcation. I think it’s a classic. I think this is an important movie. I think this movie is going to live on and it’s going to be talked about for a long time. I think it’s amazing.

I thought that Spike Jonze and his cast and his crew did a profoundly brilliant job with this movie. I loved it. And I want everyone to see it. http://johnaugust.com/2014/scriptnotes-ep-125-egoless-screenwriting-transcript

And I couldn’t agree more. It was beautifully and intimately shot. The acting was phenomenal. The script led you naturally through the world, about the time you’d start to think “why is that?”, the answer was revealed.

The most remarkable thing to me is it’s hard science fiction movie about AIs speeding off to the singularity and at the same time an amazing love story.

They gave the near future had the perfect mix of new and old. The costumes have a high-waisted retro 1930’s feel (I’d thought the 1940’s until reading this interview with the costume designer). The future LA still sprawls but is now covered in skyscrapers. It seems to be much more like New York. You never see Theodore get into a car, he crosses the city on LA’s amazing metro and takes high speed trails to the Sierras.

Minor spoiler: The only quibble I had was when we find out Samantha has sent a collection of his letters to a publisher. Since he was being paid by beautifulhandwrittenletters.com to write them, the letters would likely be work for hire. Meaning his employer–or perhaps the customer who commissioned the letter–would control the copyright. This would obviously cause some problems trying to publish the book.

All in all a brilliant movie. I feel bad even mentioning the legal aspect but it stuck out more because everything else was so beautifully explained.

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