Movie # 3 - Her

What a unique movie this is. A film about love, how we love and why we love.  I've never really seen anything like it. It's offbeat, a little uncomfortable at times, but strangely magnetic.

A brilliant central performance is given by Joaquin Phoenix as Theodore Twombly, a very sad man who is getting over the breakup of his marriage while trying to maintain an emotional even keel at work where his job is to create beautiful handwritten letters for other people to send to friends, family or lovers.  Theodore's melancholy existence is interrupted when he purchases a new Operating System (OS) for his computer, one with the ability to learn and evolve.  Voiced evocatively by Scarlett Johanssen, "Samantha" proves to be far more than artificial intelligence from the very first moment of set up, displaying the sense of humour and conversational style of a real woman.

I don't want to say too much about the plot as it's definitely better to experience it live.  Suffice to say that from here, the film goes on to explore the behaviour of people falling in love and being in love.  It's done in an extremely talky style, essentially being a lot of conversations between Theodore and Samantha, Theodore and his dictated work letters, Theodore and his friend Amy, Theodore and his ex Catherine.  These conversations are dense but fascinating and well-written by that crazy genius Spike Jonze ("Where the Wild Things Are", "Being John Malkovich").  Given one half of the relationship is an unseen computer drive spoken to through an earpiece, the camera lingers on the face of Joaquin as he goes through the full range of emotions.  It's a brave, excellent portrayal although distractingly at the beginning there are lots of similarities to Johnny Galecki's Leonard on Big Bang Theory as he gets his geek on.

It sits in the 'sci-fi' genre because a unique  world is created in minute detail that completely immerses you into the setting in such a way that it doesn't seem bizarre that a man dating his OS is not seen as needing to go to a mental institution.  The setting is definitely Earth and definitely not quite now but not a dystopian future either, it's just not the world we live in right now (in this way it reminds me strongly of similar sci-fi "Never Let me Go" and "Oxv: the Manual).  This is portrayed most strongly through the technology being futuristic but the clothing being retro 50s in many ways.  

There are laughs in this movie but it's mainly a drama tracing the odd emotional reawakening of a man who has unwittingly hidden himself from life.  The relationship between a man and his OS doesn't seem that unrealistic most of the time due to the setting, but then there are moments where I was thinking "this is so weird".   The scariest thing of all is how you leave the cinema thinking "this could really happen the way we are going".  Look around you and see how many people are sitting on your bus or train, immersed in their phone and ipad. or with an earpiece in and having a one-sided conversation in public while avoiding eye contact with any other human being.  Let's hope this doesn't really happen in future.  But the overwhelming outcome of the movie is that it will leave you thinking about love and all its wonderful feelings and lack of reason, and wanting to express your feelings to your loved one in a deeper way.  Well I did anyway. 

Up for Oscars for Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Production Design and two noms for Best Music.  It's got some pretty stiff competition in most of those categories but regardless if it wins, it's gotta go down as going to be one of the most unique films of the year and probably the warmest.  I give it four hearts out of five.

Movie #2 - Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues

Back at the beginning of 2013 when I published my post on 2012 Year in Review, I included a number of predictions for 2013.  One of those was that Anchorman 2 would "withstand being the most anticipated sequel of the year and deliver".  I am pleased to say that this is one prediction that came true, although some of the others were off the mark (World War Z definitely beat Warm Bodies as the zombie movie of the year, Seth McFarlane unfortunately didn't nail the Oscars hosting gig). Debateable though if this or Catching Fire was the most anticipated given the box office records the Hunger Games sequel has been smashing around the world.

Anchorman 2 picks up a little after the end of the first movie.  Ron and Veronica are now married with a son and co-anchoring the San Diego local news.  The rest of the team is scattered for reasons unknown.  Ron and Veronica are summoned to the office of the big boss (the first of a series of excellent cameos) where they think they are going to be promoted to the primetime news hosts.  However only Veronica gets the gig and oh boy is Ron not happy about that.  Cut to a few months later and Ron is alone and in a sorry state when he is approached by Freddie Schapp to move to New York and work for GNN (Global News Network) on their new concept of 24 hour news.  Which Ron promptly calls "stupid" when he hears it but hey, what choice does he have? So he gets the team back together, moves to New York and takes a shot at this stupid new concept, having a series of bizarre adventures and trying to win Veronica back along the way.

From the get-go Anchorman 2 is very funny although some of the gags are recycled from the first movie (Ron's pre-news warmups are more of the same stupidity) and they start to become a little more sparse as the film progresses and life lessons have to be fit in.  The humour continues to be on the stupid/bizarre/offensive side of things and if anything, takes the weirdness even further than the first one.  So if you didn't like that, you won't like this at all.  The introduction of Kristen Wiig's character Chani as a love interest for Brick creates some very uncomfortable humour as these two are almost like mentally deficient children and if they were real people would actually be unable to survive in the world let alone have jobs.  But it is pretty funny if you're not too sensitive.  It is overstuffed with big star cameos, particularly in another news team smackdown.

While frequently gut-bustingly, tears in the eyes funny in the first half, the second half is less so because of the relationship drama that needs to be resolved but also because the film actually has some very good points to make about what has happened to "news" over time.  Smartly ignoring the 1970s setting, the film skewers our obsession with light news using current popular issues such as "cute animals", "car chases" and "patriotic stories".  When you have so much time to fill, is it inevitable that you are going to end up giving people stories they want to hear about rather than telling them what they need to know?  It's left me reflecting on these issues even a week after seeing the movie, as well as quoting all the funny lines. 

It doesn't have the surprise factor of the first movie, but it certainly has a lot of positive points with most of the original cast returning to provide great support to the wonderful creation that is Ron Burgundy.  Will Ferrell finds some new shades to Ron in this one with the introduction of what could be yet another Wes Mantooth style inferior rival in Jack Lime (James Marsden hamming it up) but instead Ron is in awe of him - "he's magnificent" he breathes upon first seeing him.

This is a very funny movie for the first hour and then a smart, kinda funny movie in the second portion. So I'm giving this 3.5 stars out of 5.