![]() (This is either purely coincidental, or suggestive of a surrogate scheme that would be far too knotty to untangle here.) (For young American filmmakers, apparently nothing evokes alienation like an Asian megalopolis.) Further entwining the two movies is the casting of Johansson in Her as Theodore's love interest, the operating system Samantha. Lost in Translation is set in Tokyo, while Her is a vision of a future Los Angeles that both sprawls and rises like Manhattan, a feat achieved, with alternating degrees of success, by splicing footage of L.A. But instead of finding solace in the figurative arms of a computer program, she develops a deep, if platonic, relationship with Bill Murray. The latter film follows a young woman (Scarlett Johansson) who is drifting away from her husband, a weaselly, shallow, distracted character who has long been rumored to be a stand-in for Jonze himself. For all of Jonze's preoccupations about the digital age, for all the implications of spending the bulk of our time interacting with disembodied voices, the movie's heart - if that is not too quaint a metaphor - is a tale of love, loss, and renewal.Īs a result, many have speculated that Her is a response to a movie with a similar plot, aesthetic, and Pitchfork-approved soundtrack: Lost in Translation, which was directed by Jonze's ex-wife Sofia Coppola. In a gushing review at The New Yorker, Anthony Lane wrote, "Who would have guessed, after a year of headlines about the NSA and about the porousness of life online, that our worries on that score - not so much the political unease as a basic ontological fear that our inmost self is possibly up for grabs - would be best enshrined in a weird little romance by the man who made Being John Malkovich and Where the Wild Things Are?"īut beneath Her's sci-fi premise is a more conventional story about a man (Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix) recovering from the dissolution of his marriage. The movie has been praised for its timeliness and topicality, capturing the anxieties of an era in which we spend less time gazing into each other's eyes than into glowing screens of varying sizes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |