HER by Spike Jonze – his fourth feature film in 14 years – is a completely unique movie. It’s a touching relationship drama mixed with light sci-fi and cultural satire that’s somehow brutally accurate and gently affectionate at the same time. It’s the story of this depressed writer Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) who’s in the middle of a divorce, and he meets someone who he really connects with… only it’s not a person, it’s the artificially intelligent voice in his computer (Scarlett Johansson). Yeah, he thinks it’s weird at first too, but it just happens. You can’t argue with your heart I guess.
Spending his life with his operating system has its share of challenges. He has to carry a little camera around for her to see the world. It’s awkward introducing her to people. They can’t hold hands or take a picture together and when they get it on it’s basically phone sex. They’re dealing with alot of handicaps here.
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Well, I guess waiting a month to see DESOLATION OF SMAUG shows you how excited I was for it. To be honest I still didn’t have any urgency but figured that since I did intend to see it eventually I wanted to see it while 3D was still available. It seems to me like the movie ended its brief flirtation with the public consciousness at least 2 weeks ago, but I heard a group of grey-haired gentleman in the theater questioning why it was mostly empty and there were no “young people wearing costumes.”
LETHAL WEAPON 4 is a family affair. In part 1 we just had suicidal widower Riggs becoming friends with ol’ Murtaugh and his family. We still have them, but also their friend Leo (added in part 2) and Riggs’s girlfriend Lorna (added in part 3) who now he’s thinking about marrying and they live together so now he has two trailers next to each other instead of the one. And he still has his dog from part 1 plus the dog guard he stole from the bad guys and rehabilitated in part 3. And Lorna is pregnant and Murtaugh’s daughter Rianne is also pregnant and also Chris Rock is in this one and also a Chinese family called the Hongs. There’s even four new writers on this one. The cast just keeps getting bigger, like how in a long running sitcom like The Cosby Show or Roseanne they have a bunch of new grandkids and spouses and shit added on by the end.
CAPTAIN PHILLIPS is a tense and well made thriller based on a simple real life incident: a small band of Somali pirates board an American cargo ship to try to hold the crew for ransom, the crew tries to not be held for ransom. I remember when this happened. I mean, I’m sure this sort of thing happens all the time, but this was the famous one because of how things ended up. So that’s all I really knew about the story, so I was in suspense about how things ended up how they ended up.
LETHAL WEAPON 3 is the third one in the series in my opinion so it brings with it certain baggage, but also certain strengths. On the negative side, it feels more concerned with satisfying sequel expectations than with actually telling a good story. Even more than the other two it feels more like a list of ideas strung together than a story. Oh, we gotta bring Leo back, he should be bleach blond and act all Hollywood and stuff, that would be funny. And Murtaugh should be trying to sell his house and they try to not mention to prospective buyers that a bunch of deadly battles took place there! Oh yeah, Leo could be the real estate agent. That’s it! And Murtaugh should be retiring soon so he’s all worried he’s gonna get shot, ’cause he realizes how it works in movies! But then it’s Leo that gets shot, he’s okay but he gets all high and mighty about it, saying he got shot in the line of duty. You know how Leo is. Murtaugh should bond with a son this time, not just Rianne. Something about guns in the black community. Oh, and explosions. Bigger than before. One of those “the red wire or the green wire?” scenes could be fun. Who should be Riggs’s new girl? How ’bout a girl cop? You think she’s uptight, ’cause she’s internal affairs, but then she knows how to kickbox!
David O. Russell’s latest is a fictionalized take on a true 1970s incident when the FBI worked with conmen to entrap politicians to take bribes from a fake Sheik. The movie opens in the thick of it, right before a big attempted sting, with a long, quiet, unbroken take of Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) gluing on his toupee and carefully combing his remnants of real hair over it. It’s pretty representative of the movie: silly almost to the point of Will Ferrell cartoonishness, but you have to stare at it and contemplate it long enough that it’s on the verge of becoming more sad than funny.
“I’m really too old for this shit.”
I started 2013 with a review of the broad but likable baseball movie 
