AKA The Adventures of Going to Second Base with Siri
According to some of my friends, (Muso-cough cough), this one stays with you for days on end, completely wrapped in the after effect of its touch. Yeeeeah, it won't. I'm not going to pretend like I've seen a ton of Spike Jonze's stuff. He mainly does short films, and I still need to watch Adaptation with Nicholas Cage, but this man...this was just super weird.
I get what he was trying to go for...a timeless love story in a fish out of water theme. I get it...it just didn't work. A loner separated from the wife of his youth finds comfort in the most unlikely of places, his newly purchased A.I. with whom he soon starts a romantic relationship.
They failed to convey the idea that this was okay and normal without me feeling like....wtf am I watching? This film is riddled with awkward moments, which to some extent was the point, but when you consider the fact that it's a guy doing it with an A.I. in a smartphone or whatever, albeit Scarlett Johansen, in essence, you're still just left watching some guy jack off. And then there's that weird sex scene with Samantha's surrogate body, Catherine...I mean the whole thing was just a mess as far as consummating the relationship went...which I get, it's a human and a freaken disembodied A.I., but the chemistry between the Black Widow...wait, wrong sci-fi movie...err, Samantha and Theodore really felt forced...it was worse than Clark and Lois' kiss at the end of Man of Steel...
They were giving each other compliments that exposed lack of ease and familiarity all throughout the relationship. "You're really smart," Theo would say..."Awww...thank you," Samantha would reply. That's friendzone talk! That's the type of reply I got from the crush I got friendzoned by.
Take, Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence for example. It was pretty much the same story, albeit the other way round, a robot trying to find love in a human...this time a maternal love. Despite all of that film's other faults, however, you were invested in that narrative. You felt for young David's painful desire to become a real boy. Even till "the end of the world." When Samantha got up to join all the other A.I. to go to...God knows where....the Matrix upload program????...when they left, I just shrugged like, Oh well, guess she's gone.
All in all, it was a decent film...certainly not one I'd watch again in a while, but better than Nebraska so...I guess...that's...not saying a lot. All that said however, I thought Joaquin Phoenix did a great job in his role, and to some extent, you felt for him having to divorce the wife he loved, but Spike should have spent more time exploring that rather than giving us something out of tamed Japanese pervert's mind...
One way to look at it is that it is showing where society is heading in our dependency on the digital, but you know what, it's still supposed to be a love story.
A plus for the movie was the great female casting. Scarlett Johansen, Amy Adams, Olivia Wilde, Rooney Mara...??? Yes please.
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