8/16/2023 0 Comments Her spike jonze trailer![]() ![]() Maybe one day, Jonze will find out and tell us where the wild things are.By next month, we’ll have seen the first images or footage from the rest of the year’s slate, and, while we’re still waiting on reveals from films such as The Monuments Men and Foxcatacher, today brings the first trailer for one of our most-anticipated projects of the year: Spike Jonze‘s Her. The most direct emotional demand comes from Rooney Mara, who tells Theo "Come and spoon me," and the cry recurs, as if technology had ushered us not into adulthood but made infants of us, trapping and swaddling us in our hi-tech cocoons. "We don't have a thing in hand!" Her seems to come from the same place – the desire, above all, to be comforted, cradled. ![]() Adaptation continued some of the fun, but Where the Wild Things Are felt far too depressed for a children's fable: a movie about childhood from an adult who seemed to regret growing up – "run for the hills!" it seemed to warn them. We are a long way from the sprightly anarchy of Being John Malkovich, which remains Jonze's most fully realised film. How did such a sharply conceived movie end on such a woozy note? It's almost as if the haze above Los Angeles descends to envelop the rest of the film. What he really seems to need is a therapist, and so it proves, as the script succumbs to the kind of well-intentioned maundering that ensnares the better kind of romcom: "It's in this endless space between the words that I'm trying to find myself right now," says Samantha. If anything she may pack too much punch for Theo, who remains a strangely chaste figure, too hung up on his ex-wife for sex, let alone a relationship. Johansson has an easier time of it, having long taken over Demi Moore's mantle as the owner of Hollywood's huskiest tonsils. That's quite a burden of simplicity to put on a figure who must carry a two-hour film you can detect the strain during some of the date scenes, where Phoenix is required to gurgle with happiness one too many times – he wears the fixed grin of a man on a visit to the dentist. Even his consummation with Samantha is discretely blacked out, to spare us the lonely, masturbatory truth. A session of phone sex leaves him the bemused victim. An early mention of Theo's anger issues is never followed up on. Ditching the trail of dysfunction and hiding his scarred lip behind a neat little moustache, spectacles and high-hitched pants, Theo is a portrait of the sad sack as saintly urban eunuch – a great listener and perfect empath whose less attractive attributes are discretely masked from view. ![]() ![]() Phoenix is as sweet and soulful as we always suspected he might be. The script wants things both ways – an obvious outrage to Mara, Phoenix's love for his computer is seen as entirely normal by others – a penchant for blur that starts with the film's wispy compositions and seems to spread from there. It's like a zinger from one of Woody Allen's comedies that has somehow drifted into one of his alienation-and-anomie numbers. She gets in the zingiest line in the film, delivered over an exchange of divorce papers – "He couldn't deal with me, tried to put me on Prozac and now he's in love with his laptop" – but it doesn't quite land. She is played by Rooney Mara, thus confirming Mara's position as the ex most men would regret breaking up with, ideally through a happier times montage involving cascades of hair and white sheets seen in chalky sunlight. "Sometimes I think I've felt everything I'm gonna feel," confides Theo to Samantha, finding in her precisely the sympathetic ear he failed to find in his wife. The closer we draw to the central romance, the straighter grows the film's face. Theo's workplace is a website called, where he sits in office composing personal notes for those who can't be bothered – "Who knew you could rhyme so many words with 'Penelope'?" says a co-worker, admiringly of his work – while a neighbour, played by a curly haired Amy Adams, designs video games in which mums pick up "Mom points" for feeding the kids or beating the other mothers to the carpool, or else face the ignominious charge "You've Failed Your Children!" The whole thing looks like the most expensive ad for urban anomie ever made – Antonioni for the artisanal-cheese set – and for the first hour the conceit is unveiled beautifully, via a brisk series of gags, most of them in the periphery of the main plot. Needless to say, the film is half in love with the loneliness it diagnoses. ![]()
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