Spike Jonze
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Connections, in both directions
This is hardly a new concept for film, going back at least as far as the sexually suggestive and oddly alluring female robot of Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent classic.
In science fiction, we’ve seen similar themes in movies like “Metropolis” (1927) and “Electric Dreams” (1984).
There have been movies before about emotional relationships between humans and artificial beings, from Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" to Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner."
Watching Her I thought a little of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Andrew Stanton’s Wall-E and the idea of love and machines.
Swiss Army Man (2016)
Directed by Daniel Kwan
influenced by Where the Wild Things Are (2009), Her (2013), Being John Malkovich (1999)
Visuals Themes Music
This directionless fantasy, essentially a two-hander for an overtaxed Dano and Radcliffe, marks the feature debut of music video directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (DJ Snake and Lil Jon's chaotic "Turn Down for What"), who cite as their inspirations such music-video-to-legit-cinema crossovers as Spike Jonze (Her, Adaptation) and Michel Gondry (The Science of Sleep, Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?).
It’s really not since Spike Jonze’s Her that I’ve seen a film that so profoundly gets loneliness, longing and love.
The main difference is, Swiss Army Man is much warmer to the touch, which (along with its wild natural setting and its air of childlike wonder) makes it more like a dirtier, more grown-up version of Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are .
The wilderness where they find themselves is like the world of Where The Wild Things Are , packed with ornate decorated shelters handmade from sticks and rubbish transformed by the light and the make-believe games of the men into a beautiful idyll.
Like Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums , Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep , and Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are , Swiss Army Man is almost hermetically geared toward wayward souls who long to transcend their shared loneliness, even employing those directors' penchants for handmade built environments in order to communicate Hank's familiar but seemingly individuated ennui.
The music hilariously knocks that point home, with the Daniels practically spoofing the schoolyard jangle of Karen O’s Where The Wild Things Are score, while collaging in half-remembered lyrics from “Cotton Eye Joe” and snippets of the score from Jurassic Park.
Sorry to Bother You (2018)
Directed by Boots Riley
influenced by Being John Malkovich (1999)
Themes Visuals
STBY taps into a glorious cinematic history, joining the ranks of films like Dr. Strangelove, Network, Fight Club, and Being John Malkovich as satirical touchstones that define an era of American history.
After the delirious highs of Get Out , we get the uproarious Sorry to Bother You , which plays like the demented offspring of Office Space and Being John Malkovich.
Instead, it’s a gleeful kitchen sink throwback to the satiric, absurdist, wildly inventive indies of the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s like “Repo Man”, “Being John Malkovich”, “Bamboozled”, and “Fight Club” combined with a dash of Mike Judge’s 2006 comic (yet eerily prescient) dystopic fantasia, “Idiocracy”.
The references to Michel Gondry (Mood Indigo) and Spike Jonze's (Being John Malkovich) palette and framing are explicit, and deftly acknowledged.
Though they would be apt comparisons, likening Riley’s film to a Michel Gondry movie or Being John Malkovich won’t get you anywhere near its vicinity, especially once a massive half-man/half-horse penis shows up on the screen (I swear, I am not making this up).
Channeling the existential refractions of Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich) as well as the barbed surrealism of Terry Gilliam, Riley sends his movie right off the rails, creating a kaleidoscopic descent into the unreal (and yet hyper-real) nightmare of modern capitalism, American style.
It only recalls a similar scene in Spike Jonze’s Her , which covered this movie’s themes more powerfully.
It’s the movie’s most potentially poignant idea—the robot and the hologram, acting out a facsimile of domestic bliss—and it leads to scenes, like a strange act of consummation, that seem as indebted to Spike Jonze’s aching sci-fi daydream Her as to its own iconic inspiration.
K’s girlfriend Joi (Ana de Armas) recalls Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her, in which a human falls in love with his computer’s new operating system.
K himself has a holographic girlfriend (think Her ) named Joi (Ana de Armas) who feels and emotes, and is easily the most human of any character in the film.
Here, Ford plays the character as an even more cynical, embittered individual.
There are no new ideas here, poignancy achieved by rehashing moments of the original film with dollops applied from Spielberg's "A.I." and Spike Jonze's "Her."
Indeed, in Jonze’s radical retelling of the “Pinocchio” story (by way of 1984’s techno-romance “Electric Dreams,”), Samantha’s great existential crisis isn’t that she yearns to be a real, flesh-and-blood human.
In science fiction, we’ve seen similar themes in movies like “Metropolis” (1927) and “Electric Dreams” (1984).
If you immediately think of that obscure 1984 movie called Electric Dreams (or get visions of Philip J. Fry smooching a virtual Lucy Liu), then you’re the sort of sci-fi geek I respect — but let’s get all ideas of novelty and “gimmickry” out of the way right now.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022)
Directed by Tom Gormican
influenced by Being John Malkovich (1999)
Themes
Not since Spike Jonze’s send-up of John Malkovich’s pomposity in Being John Malkovich (1999) has such a strangely tender homage sought to self-reflexively commend celebrity as in Tom Gormican’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent curious reputation, unspooling reality tinged meta analysis on the film industry enrobed in what amounts to a zany spy spoof.
There’s a reason we get used to it so quickly: Movies with a meta dimension have been with us for years — movies like “The Player,” where Robert Altman cast a galaxy of Hollywood stars as their real-life selves, or “Being John Malkovich,” where John Malkovich played John Malkovich, or “Adaptation,” where Cage played Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter of the film we happened to be watching.
The result is a perfect little capsule of a movie, like Charlie Kaufman films "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation" without the darkness.
He has no interest in breaking his no-laziness streak, especially in his own little “Being John Malkovich.”
Early on, there’s hope this film will achieve something along the lines of Spike Jonez’s mind-bending “Being John Malkovich,” but it plays things relatively safe most of the time.
The conceit – to wed a Being John Malkovich-style experiment to a plot that eventually must also function as a watchable Nicolas Cage action movie – is bold.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
influenced Her (2013)
Themes Visuals Characters
It brings to full bloom what was only hinted at in the polite exchanges between the astronaut and HAL, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and, toward the end, as Samantha joins forces with like minds in cyberspace, it offers a seductive, nonviolent answer to Skynet, the system in the “Terminator” films that attacked its mortal masters.
Johansson’s face is never seen, Samantha being represented only by a girlish signature and a camera eye that recalls HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Her can, thus, be viewed as a benign variation on 2001: A Space Odyssey .
Like 2001: A Space Odyssey ’s first menacing, then pitiable HAL 9000, Samantha also emerges over the course of the film as a complex character, thanks in large part to Scarlett Johansson’s scratchy, velvety, irreducibly human-sounding voice.
Hollywood’s exploration of man’s relationship with computers, from HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Terminator , has mostly revolved around their destruction of us.
Possessing all the finest qualities of HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Kelly LeBrock in Weird Science , “Samantha,” an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson in Spike Jonze’s Her , is a fully customizable virtual mate—with the privacy settings defaulting to “off.”
Maria Schrader (director of Netflix’s Unorthodox ) has drawn a touching romance from this science-fiction scenario, dotted with disarmingly dreamy moments and a line of philosophical inquiry that recalls Spike Jonze’s Her .
The concept of human-robot love has provided fertile ground for sci-fi storytelling, from Data in “Star Trek” to the disembodied voice of “Her” all the way through “Ex Machina” and “Wandavision,” because it presents an obvious paradox: No amount of engineering genius, it seems, can design the perfect mate.
Whether that’s Deckard falling for replicant Rachel in Ridley Scott’s iconic dystopian Blade Runner , John Connor’s endearing relationship with the Terminator or Theodore’s unconventional relationship with Samantha in Spike Jonze’s Her .
From recent indie hits like Spike Jonze’s Her and Alex Garland’s Ex_Machina , to a history of more fantastical narratives like John Hughes’ Weird Science , films about AI always seem to posit a relationship between user and machine – the machine almost always designed to have female characteristics, to be viewed as a quite literal romantic object.
It’s nearly impossible to not think of Spike Jonze’s romantic drama Her while watching Unorthodox creator Maria Schrader’s third feature I’m Your Man .
“Her” was cute and all, but the combined torpor of last year’s “Jexi” and Melissa McCarthy’s equally grim new “Superintelligence” is enough to retcon Spike Jonze’s bittersweet cyber-romance into the Manhattan Project of Hollywood’s worst new sub-genre.
It’s obvious the filmmaker’s probably watched Spike Jonze’s “Her” followed by “Jexi” and thought it was possible to land somewhere in the middle.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Besides the previous McCarthy-Falcone blandster comedies, Superintelligence brings to mind Her with a barely remedial IQ.
Unlike the soothing, alluring Scarlett Johansson voice of “Her,” Jexi speaks — in the voice of Rose Byrne — in that neutrally prerecorded, emphasis-on-the-wrong-syllable vintage robot Siri monotone.
Spike Jonze’s Her or Michael Almereyda’s Marjorie Prime are great examples of this.
It’s a B-comedy riff on Spike Jonze ’s “ Her ,” the movie in which Joaquin Phoenix ’s painfully shy character falls in love with an operating system.
“Jexi,” a comedy written and directed by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, does not explicitly position itself as a parody of “Her,” the poignant 2013 love story of a man and a very empathetic piece of software.
As Jexi appears to develop feelings for Phil, viewers will certainly be reminded of Her, in which Joaquin Phoenix’s character becomes infatuated with his own phone’s AI.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Directed by Michel Gondry
influenced Her (2013), Being John Malkovich (1999)
Themes
Charlie Kaufman will always have the honor of penning my favorite love story of all-time “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” but Spike Jonze and “Her” are giving it a true run for the money at the moment.
I suppose if he’d wanted, Jonze could’ve come up with a film about technology that replaces that sadness or extracts it, some kind of 22nd-century version of what Kaufman and Michel Gondry dreamed up for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind —of which Her is a clear descendant—Jonze’s film uses the tools of lightly scienced fiction to pose questions of genuine emotional and philosophical weight.
Her shares a lot of themes with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, another story about the difficulty of moving on from relationships that once seemed destined to last forever, and Phoenix, in a restrained performance radically different from his volcanic turn in The Master, conveys Theodore’s inner loneliness and yearning with a remarkable subtlety.
In terms of ethereal tone, offbeat romanticism and evanescent stylistic flourishes, the film that bears some comparison to Her is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which dealt with the search for love, its memory or its prospect, in a similarly fleeting, lightly heartbreaking manner.
It was written by Charlie Kaufman, who also created the trippy screenplays for “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation.”
Phoenix also gets the rare-for-him chance to play comedy; his Theodore is a hardworking, lonely, but doggedly optimistic schlemiel who sometimes recalls Jack Lemmon’s C.C. Baxter in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment .
Jack Lemmon in The Apartment is the modern prototype: A functionary in an insurance company, he loses himself each night in old movies on television, while eating a TV dinner.
Where Fellini's film was an inwardly directed meditation on his own obsessions that revealed much about the maestro, Jonze's film is mired in the same kind of "inside Hollywood" pseudo-savviness that -- for me anyway -- made the much-praised Robert Altman film The Player an unpleasant, shallow, self-congratulatory affair.
…gazing in the tradition of The Player, Full Frontal or even Last Action Hero, Adaptation points to something more profound.
The visual sheen owes much to cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema ("Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy"), who lights scenes with a bright, polished look that echoes the utopian ideals of so many computer advertisements without overstating their cheap bids at lyricism.
Still, Her pushes some interesting notions and sports some lovely dialogue (I especially liked Theodore's speech about how all future feelings will just be smaller versions of ones he already experienced), and there are some stellar shots that further illuminate the versatility of cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (whose work here scarcely brings to mind his d.p. duties on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or Let the Right One In).
This is all laid out with superb craft (the cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema takes the understated tones he applied to 2011's " Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy " and adds a dreamy creamy quality to them, so that even the smog layering the Shanghai skyline that sometimes stands in for Los Angeles here has a vaguely enchanted quality) and imagination.
This slightly futuristic enterprise is set in a slightly futuristic Los Angeles, evocatively photographed by Hoyte Van Hoytema ("Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy") and smartly constructed out of bits of the real Los Angeles and glimpses of Shanghai's new purpose-built Pudong district by the directors' longtime production designer K.K. Barrett.
Must you ask? Technically, everything is but a dream, including cinematography by Hoyte Van Hoytema (“Let The Right One In,” “Interstellar,” “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”), production design by K.K. Barrett (“Being John Malkovich,” “I Heart Huckabees,” “Marie Antoinette”), costume design by Casey Storm (most of Jonze’s work) and music (different melancholy) by Arcade Fire and Owen Pallett.
Affectionately snuggling up to Phoenix as he whispers the sweetness of words to “Samantha” or the sweetness of a new letter at work, Hoytema has quickly become one of my favorite DP’s, especially following “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” and “Let the Right One In.” Arcade Fire and Karen O. are simply magic in their music that accompanies our story about love.
A worthy companion piece to “Under the Skin” and “Her” in its examination of what constitutes human and feminine identity — and whether those two concepts need always overlap — Garland’s long-anticipated directorial debut synthesizes a dizzy range of the writer’s philosophical preoccupations into a sleek, spare chamber piece: Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” redreamed as a 21st-century battle of the sexes.
Taking cues from obvious predecessors like 2001: A Space Odyssey and AI—some will even compare it to Her—Ex Machina stands solidly on its own as a highly stylized and mesmerizing film, never overly dependent on CGI, and instead built upon the ample talents of a small cast.
It's entertaining and cool as hell to look at but it doesn't hold a candle to Spike Jonze's "Her" for insights into man's relationship with artificial intelligence.
Nor is Garland communicating original ideas – Steven Spielberg's "A.I." and Spike Jonze's "Her" covered similar territory, albeit from different angles.
Stories about artificial intelligence are a frequent science fiction topic, from Czech writer Karel Capek's 1920 play "R.U.R." (which coined the term "robot") to Spike Jonze's invisible "Her."
As with Spike Jonze’s “Her” (2013), this movie pokes around in the schlumpy emotional needs we humans ask our technology to fulfill.
Also read: ‘Prometheus 2’ Moving Forward With ‘Transcendence’ Writer Jack Paglen Up to this point, “Transcendence” is a little “Her” and a little HAL 9000 — which is fine — but once we get clued into what cyber-Will’s ultimate plans are, the film gets a lot dumber, throwing in contrivances that keep the audience from wrestling with complex questions and raising plot points that make less and less sense the more you think about them.
Moderately entertaining, periodically draggy, “Transcendence” is not as wacky-visionary as “The Matrix,” or nearly as lyrical as “Her,” which was about a man’s romantic infatuation with a computer.
Depp doesn’t inhabit a computer as well as Scarlett Johansson did in Her.
CAST: Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany LENGTH: 1:59 Last year, Spike Jonze's "Her" envisioned a time when men and computers might fall in love.
Last year Spike Jonze upgraded the genre in his wonderfully poetic "Her," with Scarlett Johansson's voice as a superSiri.
A love story between a human and a computer: we got one for Christmas, and it was called Her.
Kaufman is best known for his work with director Spike Jonze on films like “Adaptation” and “Being John Malkovich,” as well as his collaboration with Michel Gondry on the amazing “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”
As recounted by the “Being John Malkovich” writer in a post-screening Q&A at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, he and co-director Duke Johnson went against decades of voice acting tradition, staying true to the picture’s roots as a sound play.
“Anomalisa” is another fantasia from the perfervid imagination of Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter of “Being John Malkovich," “Adaptation," and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”
That’s exactly the kind of morose, surreal premise you’d expect in a film written by Charlie Kaufman, whose credits include “Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation” and the relatively upbeat “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”
Kaufman, who has a tendency to ramble off in too many directions at once (as in “Being John Malkovich,” for instance), has never before managed so elegantly to contain and structure the products of his fertile imagination.
Before delving into Anomalisa (a created word used by the main character), realize that Kaufman has written only a smattering of theatrical motion pictures: Being John Malkovich; Synecdoche, New York; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; Confessions of a Dangerous Mind; Human Nature; and this new one.
(If Ryan Gosling could fall in love with a blow-up sex doll in “Lars and the Real Girl” and make us misty, you’ll believe Phoenix could fall in love with a computer voice.)
The story evinces such empathy for its characters and respect for their emotions that the film never threatens to become a gawking sideshow that makes a spectacle of redeeming its hero (I’m looking at you, “Lars and the Real Girl”), and the movie’s premise seldom overwhelms its plot.
Its defenders play down the science fiction element and focus on the human need for connection, forgetting that “Lars And The Real Girl” (2007) did just that and didn’t even need an actress to voice the dummy its protagonist fixated on.
But I don’t know… this kind of reminds me of Ryan Gosling in, you know, Lars and the Real Girl ?
But as we have seen in “Lars and the Real Girl,” “Ruby Sparks,” George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion” (which became the musical “My Fair Lady’), there’s no happily ever after in a relationship with a creation.
Much like Lars and the Real Girl, Jonze avoids the queasier aspects of the relationship’s sexuality with some deft comedy and a few edits; this is a solo Jonze script, and many see similarities to it and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , penned by frequent Jonze-colaborator Charlie Kaufman.
…eschews the whole “pillars of light from the sky” routine in favor of ripping off “Being John Malkovich.”
…the film has the heroes navigate a winding maze of Yelena and Bob’s darkest memories in a cerebral jailbreak straight out of Being John Malkovich…
The character’s constant vulnerability sometimes forces Phoenix towards an affected delivery that recalls Sean Penn’s oft-lampooned performance in “I Am Sam”, but Phoenix’s ability to ground Theodore in an almost pathological openheartedness ensures that he’s never more pathetic than he is relatable.