thoughts on Her

Joaquin Phoenix stars as Theodore Twombley, a man living in L.A. in what appears to be the near future.  He wears a device in his ear that allows him to access the Internet with his voice.  He plays video games that are projected life-size into his living room.  He works for a company called beautifulhandwrittenletters.com that pays him and others to write letters for people that appear to be handwritten.  Also, high-waisted pants appear to be in style.  One day, Theodore buys a new operating system with a woman's voice; the voice calls herself Samantha (Scarlett Johansson).  Theodore and Samantha develop kind of a rapport; before long, he is openly telling people that she is his girlfriend, and being forthright about the fact that she is an operating system.  His ex-wife (Rooney Mara) is appalled, and takes this as evidence that he's not capable of being in a relationship with a real person; however, a number of his friends (including co-worker Paul and neighbor Amy, played by Chris Pratt and Amy Adams, respectively) are accepting of this.  Amy admits that she has become friends with the operating system that her ex-husband (Matt Letscher-- oh, hey, I just remembered he played the creepy guy who murdered Quinn's boyfriend on the first season of Scandal) left behind; Paul and his real, live girlfriend (Tatiana, played by Laura Kai Chen) go on double dates with Theodore carrying Samantha around in his front pocket (the operating system is about the size of a cell phone).  Theodore and Samantha have a number of problems over the course of the movie, but the biggest becomes the fact that as an operating system, she is capable of doing and learning things that he can't understand.

It's sort of interesting.  It's basically asking, to what extent can technology stand in for real, human interaction?  In Theodore's experience, having Samantha in his life is great at first; he has someone that is there when he wants her there, not when he doesn't.  He's still getting over his ex-wife (he's procrastinating signing the divorce papers at the beginning of the film).  Then, like any real relationship, she starts wanting more.  They eventually start growing apart.

I thought it was decent.  One perhaps nitpicky thing that bothered me is that all of the technology in this movie works too well.  In the beginning, when Theodore is checking his e-mail by voice, I thought to myself, "Really? His computer can understand his voice? Voice recognition stuff never works that well for me."  Also: at least once last week I had to do a hard reboot of my work computer.  I'm moderately concerned that the laptop I'm working on right now has a virus.  Yesterday the GPS on my phone crapped out when I was taking a route I never would have chosen on my own.  The point is, unless we can expect major improvements in the future, there should have been more scenes of the operating system glitching up and Theodore flipping out about it.