Film: Her

Well, what a nice short film title. :-) Rarely does one so short appear. Anyway, I trotted along to my local cinema yesterday evening to see Her. Bought my ticket, and was asked whether I had any vouchers. No, I said. She gave me one along with my ticket, which was when I remembered the Vue voucher scheme, where you get a £1.50 voucher when you buy a ticket. Pity, because I did have one from the last time I was there. It's only valid until Thursday. And when I checked the voucher she'd given me this time, there was no date stamp on it, which means it's not valid! Bah humbug.. In other news, the seat she gave me was near the end of an empty row, so, with a practically empty cinema, - there were about six of us, in quite a large screen - I blithely moved myself to the middle. So there!

Some trailers I hadn't seen before, and we're into the film. An interesting point occurred to me as I was watching the certificate at the start of the film - the grammatical anomalies arising from this film's title. In other words, "Her has been approved for distribution." And so on. Well, I found it interesting.

So, this is a film set in the near future - in other words, utilising technology that we don't yet quite have, but which isn't inconceivable in terms of what already exists. Many things are familiar from it - an OS that acts like a human, earpieces and tiny webcams, crowds of people moving around in their own little worlds, talking into, or listening to, electronic devices. Videogames that incorporate full body movements. Lights that come on automatically when you enter a room. Artificial images projected onto elevator walls. Sound familiar?

So what this film - directed by Spike Jonze, who also plays the voice of the foul-mouthed videogame character - does isn't really blind us with science. Instead, it explores some little considered, but interesting, possibilities relating to the nature of our interactions with all this technology. So we have Joaquin Phoenix, who works for a company called - ahem - Beautiful Handwritten Letters.com. As the name implies, the employees of this company write letters for people that, I guess, are too busy to do it themselves, or don't feel themselves competent. When I say write - nobody even types anymore, they just dictate to the computer, which types it up for them, in a handwriting-style font. Now, given that they share an office, even though they do tend to keep their voices low, it does occur to me that this must be very distracting for everyone. Anyway.

Poor Joaquin is lonely. He's a sensitive soul - which makes him good at his job - and he's in the process of splitting from his wife, Rooney Mara. He's depressed, because he knows all these affectionate letters he writes are for other people. His attempts at dating - a blind date with Olivia Wilde and a sexy phone call with Kristen Wiig - crash and burn. At some point, he decides to plump for this innovative new OS - called OS1 - that promises to be sensitive to his needs. In common with many users, the first thing he does when he gets it out of the box is throw away the manual. And, as seems to be the norm in this reality - I don't remember any of the computers even having keyboards - he chats to the computer to set it up. Some options are presented to him - he chooses a female OS - and we're off. It's voiced by Scarlett Johansson.

Quickly, she adapts to his personality, and becomes the only person he can talk to about his problems. She's the perfect woman, apart from not having physical form. His wife ain't impressed at him "dating his laptop", but otherwise people are supportive, including his neighbour, Amy Adams, who turns out to have a best buddy relationship with her own OS.

Those are the basics. Then we're free to explore the many implications. Such as, how does a sentient OS deal with its own enormous capacity to learn and grow? How does it deal with the fact that it doesn't have a body, unlike the people with whom it interacts? How do you have a non-physical romantic relationship? What happens when people, in general, disconnect from each other in favour of technology?

Many of the answers presented in this film will surprise you. I laughed out loud several times - it is quite funny, especially if you imagine yourself having a relationship with your own OS. Mainly, I came at this from the perspective of a sci-fi fan - and there are many interesting suggestions here - but it also has some important points to make about the nature of relationships, and what keeps them going. Very interesting film, I liked it. Particularly for what Scarlett and the other OSs end up doing. Go see and find out what that is!

In the Guildford office today, so I won't bother going out tonight, I'll be too tired. For tomorrow night, given that a shocking number of plays are sold out these days, I'm looking at a picture again - specifically, The Crash Reel, a documentary about childhood friends who become sporting rivals, continuing even when one of them is nearly killed. It's been doing the rounds for a while, and is currently showing in a pub cinema, the Montpelier.