System Malfunction: Spike Jonze's Her

Many thanks to my friend and fellow cinephile-in-arms Carson Lund for helping me edit this piece.

Her is so obsessed with trying to tell a story about “how we live now” that any of its profound ideas seem quite self-evident. By playing the romance between Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix, introverted to the point of limitation^[i]) and his new operating system, Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson^[ii]), as a serious relationship, Jonze certainly asks us to explore radical territory by thinking about our new(-ish) relationship to technology. However, it becomes quite apparent that despite this bold premise, it’s more of a sleek surface to create an allegory of loneliness. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with such a choice, except Jonze emphasizes his narrative through utter banality, a conventional romance about letting go of the past. Despite the uniqueness of the central relationship, Jonze is complacent in simply following through the various conventions of meet cute scenes, vulnerable people talking about their vulnerability, and various day trips that play to broad gestures of emotions. These sequences rely on montages that could come out of his 90s music videos—pleasantly shot in mutedly light colors for pleasant compositions, but rarely perceptive ones—pandering to a little more than a cinematic equivalent of BuzzFeed. It’s an emotional simulacrum without depth. 

Link Round-Up: Something Is Coming

Lots of stuff to catch up on...

Next week, Andrew Welch and I will launch To Be Contd, a film site dedicated to longform dialogues about film, inspired by many sources that believe that slow is better. Andrew and I have been writing and editing each other's posts for the first "issue" for quite some time now, and I'll be very happy to announce the topic when it launches next week (the photo above gives a good hint though), and I'm very excited about some of the writers who will be writing in the future. Do us a favor and follow the social media glitz for now: Twitter and Facebook.

Over at In Review Online, I had a couple of posts. First, I wrote about Wong Kar-Wai's debut feature As Tears Go By for a directrospective on the Hong Kong filmmaker. I tried to get into the nuance of how to examine the film in terms of the industry Wong had been working in for 10 years. Read that over here. I also offered some preliminary thoughts on The Grandmaster over on Letterboxd. 

My other review was for the tiresome Ain't Them Bodies Saints, one of my larger disappointments of the year in terms of what could have been a really unique deconstruction of the "lovers on the run" genre. Take a gander to understand my frustrations.

New Cinephiliacs have gone up. Doc expert Robert Greene joined me for a conversation on his two fantastic features - Kati With An I and Fake It So Real (thoughts on each respectively on Lboxd) - as well as Peter Watkins's enormously complex film, Edvard Munch. Then acting expert Sheila O'Malley came on to talk about her work as an actor and blogger, plus John Cassavetes's Opening Night. On the "Thank You" side, the equally fantastic blogger Brian Doan wrote about the podcast here.

Some Letterboxd reviews...

From the "current cinema:" The Heat, The Canyons, This Is Martin Bonner, Touchy Feely, and my revisit to Moonrise Kingdom.

From the past: Intolerance, 3 Women, The Hunger, Good Morning, Taipei, Love Streams, A Woman is a Woman, and Ashes of Time.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: A Twisted Hero for Twisted Times

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Directed By: David Fincher

Written By: Steve Zallian, based on the novel by Stieg Larsson

Starring: Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgard, and Robin Wright

Director of Photography: Jeff Cronenweth, Editors: Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall, Production Designer: Donald Graham Burt, Original Music: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross

Rated: R for hard violence, rape, and all the other stuff to support your anti-holiday cheer.

            The pitch-perfect sequence in David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is also one of the most unmemorable sequences in the film. Journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) is led around the yard outside the mansion of millionaire Henrik Vagner (Christopher Plummer), who has changed Blomkvist with investigating his family. Henrik explains each member of his family, where they live, and who talks to who. But Mr. Fincher’s camera refuses to let our eyes process this information. He cuts to shots of each home of each family member, and refuses to orient the spatial relationship of these homes to each other, just that they all surround each other. This reflects not only the script’s suggestions that the closest people to us are often the ones that hurt us the most, but more so, Fincher’s deconstruction of the investigative process. The textual information is displayed concretely and without flourish, but because the director refuses to reinforce each detail with visual information, we remain lost to the mystery.

            If Zodiac, Fincher’s cult classic masterpiece about the true-life serial killer in San Francisco, was all about making audience as obsessive as the characters solving an unknown case, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo does the opposite. The answer to the central mystery is slapping us in the face, but because Fincher constantly disorients us with his bold and anti-genre compositions, it remains more of a character piece. And thus, the American director of Fight Club and The Social Network has done the best job he can in adapting the tepid, international best-seller by Stieg Larsson. Why the Swedish novels became an extravaganza still remains something of a mystery—the narratives are built on the same twist-heavy lackluster prose that launched Dan Brown, but include intense violence and rape as well. Perhaps thought, that comes down to the film’s titular character, here played by Rooney Mara (last seen breaking up with Mark Zuckerberg in the opening of The Social Network).