Tag: science fiction

Movie Post: Mickey 17, My Weird Obsession with Dark Comedy, and Other Tangents

On Monday this week, I decided to go see Mickey 17. I saw the trailer for the movie when I went to the movie theater to see another movie called A Real Pain, and I absolutely loved the trailer for Mickey 17. I thought it was original and unique, and I remember seeing Bong Joon-Ho’s other movie, Parasite, a few years ago and it was really intriguing. I also really love Robert Pattinson, so I was pretty excited to see the film. I know that he has done so much more in his acting career since his days as Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and as Edward Cullen in the Twilight franchise, and for the past few years I have seen him in more intense, independent films. A few years ago, I saw a movie directed by Benny and Josh Safdie called Good Time, and it’s a crime thriller movie. It was pretty dark, but I watched it because I enjoy movies distributed by this movie company called A24. They have a lot of interesting cool films, and even though I won’t get to see all of them, like X and other horror movies that A24 has distributed (I don’t like scary movies), I have enjoyed many of their films since I saw Moonlight. In Good Time, Robert Pattinson plays Connie, a young man living in New York City who tries to rob a bank and also looks out for his brother, Nick, who has a developmental disability. It was a total contrast from the Robert Pattinson I saw in Twilight and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and I think that Good Time catered to a different audience. When he was in these two movies, a lot of the audience members were teen girls, like me, who really loved the Twilight book series by Stephenie Meyer and a lot of people in my peer group loved Cedric Diggory. I’m sure there are still young women who love his current movies, and I am glad he got to star in those movies, but I’m also glad that he gets to find other projects that he wants to explore and roles that different from what he has played in the past. The last movie I saw him in was The Lighthouse, which is another film from A24, and in the movie Robert Pattinson and a legendary actor named Willem Dafoe play two lighthouse keepers who are stranded on a remote island off the coast in New England. The film takes place in the 19th century, and to give it its olden ancient feel, they shot the film in black and white. Honestly, I don’t remember any specific details that stuck out to me about the movie. All I remember is that it gave me chills, and I probably should have watched it with subtitles because the dialogue is old New England dialect, and I had a hard time understanding what the characters were saying. I don’t know if I can watch it again, though. It’s pretty unsettling and left me with goosebumps.

I think what got me more interested in learning about Robert Pattinson’s acting is an interview that he did with the incredibly talented actress, musician and producer Jennifer Lopez (she will always be “Jenny on the Block” for me. I love ya, girl). The interview is so authentic and so lovely to watch. Just seeing two people talk passionately about film and praising each other’s movies was so heartwarming and so delightful. I have always seen Robert Pattinson as this dark, serious person when he was playing Edward Cullen, or being a heartthrob as Cedric Diggory, but honestly, I loved watching him just nerd out with Jennifer Lopez about the work they do as actors. Actually, the entire Actors on Actors series is very wholesome to watch. I haven’t seen all of the interviews, but I have seen a few of them. There is one with Emma Stone and Timothee Chalamet, another with Kristen Stewart and Shia LaBeouf, and another with Daniel Kaluuya and Timothee Chalamet. I want to see the rest of the series on YouTube because I don’t know much about the business of being an actor in Hollywood, so it was really cool to hear the different acting methods and processes that these famous actors go through to prepare for their roles.

But I want to segue into my experience going to the theater to see Mickey 17. I got off work at 4 pm, and there was a showing at my local movie theater at 5 pm. Perfect timing! I asked my mom if I could borrow her car, and she was fine with it. I drove up to the movie theater, excited to see another movie. I felt once again like I was that 8-year-old kid getting excited to go to the movies. I pulled up, and I got there at 5:05 because I was running late. I rushed over to the ticket counter and purchased a ticket for the 5:00 pm showing of Mickey 17. I paid my $11.10 in cash (it was a matinee showing), got my ticket and walked into the theater. I felt like I was in paradise. I went to the person at the front desk near the concessions and showed him my ticket. I needed help finding House 11 on my ticket. The person told me where House 11 was. I thanked him and fast-walked towards House 11. I was worried I was going to miss the beginning. I walked past a large ominous poster for The Monkey, a horror film directed by Oz Perkins. It freaked me out, but I kept walking.

When I reached House 11, I opened the door. It turns out that I wasn’t late after all, and they still had ten more minutes of graphic violent bloody red-band previews to go. I told myself to not turn around as I heard squelching noises from the large movie theater screen. It was the red-band trailer for Novocaine, an action film. I thought about going back outside because I am sensitive to movies with violence and gore, and the sound was pretty loud. But I didn’t know if, when I waited outside, the movie was going to start without me, so I closed my eyes during the previews. There were only a few people in the movie theater seeing Mickey 17, which was kind of nice because I am still trying to be cautious about COVID-19 since I live with my parents and don’t want to get them (or myself) sick (although I haven’t been very good at masking all the time, to be honest.) So, I had the entire row G to myself. I put in my foam earplugs because the noise from the previews was pretty loud, and I have sensitive ears. They played another trailer for The Woman in the Yard, which is a horror film. After that preview, my heart kept racing, and I thought I was going to get a panic attack. I violated a huge movie theater rule, which is to not use my phone during the movie. Because I didn’t have the common sense to just walk out during the ten minutes of violent scary previews and just stay there until it was safe to walk back in, I opened my World Tribune app and read some faith experiences about members who used Nichiren Buddhism to overcome various challenges. But I couldn’t focus because my anxiety was at such a high level, and it was screaming at me to get my butt out of my recliner chair and go into the bathroom to recollect myself instead of thinking I just had to sit and close my eyes through the trailers and that would be enough. Even though I had my earplugs in, just hearing the screaming and the jump scares from these trailers set me on edge and almost made me cry and freak out right there in Row G. After quivering and closing my eyes through a trailer for a scary movie based on a Play Station horror video game, I opened my eyes when the trailer ended. The movie had started at last, and so I finally got out my skein of acrylic yellow yarn and size 8 needles and started knitting in the comfort of my recliner chair.

The movie opens with a young man named Mickey Barnes (played by Robert Pattison) lying down in an icy cavern. His friend, Timo (Steven Yeun), finds him down there and asks him what it’s like to die, and after he disappears, a bunch of aliens (called “creepers”) surround Mickey’s body and try to get him out of the ice. Mickey begins to narrate how he and Timo left Earth and ended up on the planet Niflheim. The movie takes place in the distant future, and Timo and Mickey are unable to repay a loan they owe to someone and as punishment they have to watch a man get his legs amputated with a chainsaw (I don’t remember if they showed it or not because I was closing my eyes during this scene). Mickey and Timo sign up to be crew members on a spaceship that takes them to a planet called Niflheim, which they seek to colonize. Even though Mickey tells the person at the desk that he read through the paperwork before knowing what he was getting himself into by signing up as an “Expendable,” it turns out that he lied and didn’t read the paperwork before signing up. He ends up taking a job where he becomes literally disposable and dies multiple times and is cloned over and over again for research purposes, so there are multiple clones of Mickey throughout the film. Even though Mickey’s job is thankless and bleak, he falls in love with Nasha, a beautiful crew member on the ship, and they have sex frequently and become a couple. Everyone else on the ship makes fun of Mickey for being an “Expendable,” but Nasha always sticks with Mickey and provides him a source of love and companionship that is missing from his daily job. Mickey 17 and 18 are the clones who end up surviving, and they have to find a way to stop Kenneth Marshall, who is a corrupt politician, from killing Mickey. Kenneth and his wife, Ylfa, aren’t only plotting against Mickey, but they also want to kill off the original inhabitants of the planet Niflheim, the “creepers,” and Nasha and Mickey have to find a way to stop Ylfa and Kenneth from forcing Mickey to carry out the plan to annihilate the creepers with poisonous gas.

I am still processing the movie, so I can’t give an explicit synopsis, but I will say that this film is pretty brilliant, even though it is goofy and outlandish at times. I tend to gravitate towards black comedies for some reason. I don’t know why, but one of the reasons that I saw Mickey 17 is because it is a black comedy. I had to look up more about the elements of black comedy to understand it more, and according to Brittanica, black humor “juxtaposes morbid or ghastly elements with comical ones that underscore the senselessness or futility of life. Black humour often uses farce and low comedy to make clear that individuals are helpless victims of fate and character.” I think my earliest memory of reading something that had dark humor in it was when I checked out a book at the library called The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy, which is a poetry collection by Tim Burton. In the book, the young characters in the book go through horrible ordeals, such as Oyster Boy, whose dad eats him so that he can boost his sex drive, or a kid named James who gets mauled by a bear. Don’t forget the Mummy Boy who kids mistake for being a pinata and bust open. As a ten-year-old, the adult themes of these poems went completely over my head, but somehow the characters resonated with me, probably because they, like me, were outcasts. I also think I just liked the book for the illustrations because I found them to be unique and interesting. I’m pretty sure I checked out The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy several times because to this day, I still have those grim illustrations stuck in my psyche. I reflected on it as an adult, and I thought, Wait….why are these poems so depressing? Also, I read some of those poems on PDF as a 30-year-old and realized, Oh, wow….wow, that was an adult joke or wow, wait, they were talking about sex in that poem?!? How did I not realize this when checking this out from the library?!? And then I looked online for more background about the book, and it said the poems are full of black humor, and it made sense why they kept this book in the adult section of the library rather than the children’s or young adult section of the library. It’s not every day you see an eight-year-old kid reading a poetry book about a bivalve whose dad eats him to increase his sex drive. But honestly, I have no regrets because I really loved reading those poems, even if they were bleak and sad. Maybe the loneliness of the characters spoke to me somehow. I was a pretty introspective quiet kid back in the day (I still am, even though I have discovered that I can also be outgoing at times) and was often lonely and didn’t have lots of friends to play with on the playground because I was weird and picked my nose and cried a lot. Books were great friends to me during that time, and so I guess I felt some sort of empathy for the characters in The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy that made me want to read the poems over and over again. As I got older, I started to watch more movies in the dark comedy genre, such as Birdman and The Lobster. I really loved The Lobster. It was one of my favorites, but it is a really sad movie. It’s about a dystopian society where people have to find a romantic partner in 45 days or else they will be turned into an animal of their choice. The characters have to deal with these harsh restrictions, but they show little to no emotion, which I guess is why this movie is a black comedy. It’s pretty wild to think that we could live in a society where singles face such absurd discrimination and turn into non-human animals if they don’t find a companion. But the film does present a social commentary about the stigma that still surrounds being single. Even though more people are open to saying they are single or want to take care of themselves after a breakup or wait until dating again, there is still that pressure sometimes to find a romantic partner to spend your life with. I am inundated with Bumble ads, images of happy friends at their weddings and engagement parties on social media, and sure, I want to be happy for those people, but sometimes advertising has a way of making you feel that you’re missing out if you’re not doing a certain thing just because everyone else is. It’s why I had to delete my Facebook after a while, because I found myself comparing my life with my peers who were engaged, married and had kids and not being happy for them. I have thought at times about getting married one day or having kids, and obviously there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that I am still unsure at this point in my life if that is what I truly want, and even just having the chance to think about it is something I need to appreciate. I might change my mind one day and want to have kids and get married, but right now, I’m still figuring my life out and trying to take care of myself, so I appreciate that I have the space to do that. Watching The Lobster was uncomfortable at times, because the society had very little regard for the single people and expressed a cold unfeeling attitude towards them. The humor is really offbeat and deadpan, not normally the kind of humor I watch on a regular basis. But as I watched more of Yorgos Lanthimos’s movies, I came to understand he uses a very offbeat style of humor in his movies, like in The Favourite and Poor Things. I haven’t seen his recent movie Kinds of Kindness yet, but I’m pretty sure that is a pretty dark film, too.

I guess the movie Mickey 17 is a dark comedy because it grapples with the uncomfortable topic of death and dying. In real life, once someone dies, you can’t clone them. Their physical form is no longer there. But because the movie is science fiction, Mickey gets a new chance to die, not a chance to live, every time scientists on the ship clone him for research. It’s pretty bleak and messed up if you think about it. He has to die multiple times so that these researchers can do experiments on him. He can’t live a normal life. He has to live a meaningless existence where his entire purpose in life is to die and be cloned, die and be cloned and repeat. Honestly, I found it hard to watch the scene where they kill that one baby creeper. I know they are weird-looking creatures, but for some reason, I think after realizing that the creepers were trying to help Mickey, not kill him, I started to have more empathy for the creepers, especially the baby creepers. They were big and scary to watch, but I didn’t get any horrible nightmares or wake up screaming in the middle of the night after watching the movie. I did have to close my eyes during the scene where Kenneth Marshall and his wife, Ylfa, invite Mickey to dinner and serve him this unpasteurized meat, which he devours. I closed my eyes because I have an irrational fear of vomit scenes in movies, and Mickey vomits after eating the unpasteurized meat. It is a pretty long scene, and I chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo under my breath to calm myself down because vomit scenes actually make me have panic attack symptoms. Thankfully, I didn’t miss anything super huge by closing my eyes during the scene. I am glad I read Does the Dog Die before watching the movie to see if there were any vomit scenes in it.

I think my favorite scenes where when Nasha and Mickey were making love. For some reason, I found these two characters making love with each other to be incredibly hot and sexy. I haven’t seen the actress Naomi Ackie in a ton of stuff, but I saw Steven Yeun, who plays Timo, in a few movies like Sorry to Bother You, Minari and The Humans. I really love Mark Ruffalo, and he played a very convincing Kenneth Marshall. Even though Bong Joon-Ho, the director, said that Kenneth Marshall wasn’t based specifically on Trump, but on authoritarian leaders throughout history in general, Kenneth’s way of talking and mannerisms were very similar to Donald Trump’s, and at the rally on the planet Niflheim, there are pro-Kenneth Marshall supporters who wear red baseball hats similar to the MAGA hats that pro-Trump supporters were. I found it hard to watch the scene where Nasha has to save the baby creeper, which is hung on a hook and about to be killed.

Movie Review: Her and some personal reflections on technology

In my junior year of college I remember when the movie Her came out Saturday Night Live did a parody of it called “Me” with Jonah Hill and Michael Cera. Even though I had not seen the movie yet, the parody was incredibly hilarious. I think now that I watched the film and understood the plot better, I found the parody even funnier. But when I saw the actual movie of course, I was left pondering a lot of deep questions and themes. If you haven’t seen the movie it is about an introverted lonely man named Theodore Twombly (played by Joaquin Phoenix) who is getting a divorce and writes letters for other people for a living. He befriends an operating system named Samantha (played by Scarlett Johansson) and what starts off as a casual friendship becomes something much deeper. Even though Samantha is not a human, she experiences human emotions and has empathy just like humans do, even more so it seems than the people around Theodore. Theodore lets his love life with Samantha consume him, and it puts him at odds with his ex-wife (played by Rooney Mara), who accuses him of escaping his problems and not dealing with real emotions, which is the same problem he had when they were married. However, Theodore’s relationship with Samantha changes over time as well. He thought that he could hold onto her forever, but like any relationship, whether between two humans or a human and an operating system, things change and people grow and start to learn more about themselves. The only other person it seems who can truly know what he is going through with his love for Samantha is his friend, Amy (played by Amy Adams), who makes documentaries and also is not happy in her marriage to Charles. When Amy and Charles break up, Theodore and Amy both engage in relationships with their operating systems and when the operating systems don’t continue anymore, they are left to face themselves.

This movie really made me reflect on how technology has played a role in my life. I actually wanted to watch the film now because I was keeping up with news about the writer’s strike and the actor’s strike and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in Hollywood was a huge debate. Many argued that it would force many actors and screenwriters out of their jobs, and others argued for it. To be honest, I didn’t dive deep enough into these debates, but I will say, technology has had a pretty huge impact on how people function. Honestly, the idea that people walk around with these operating systems in their ears and don’t talk to each other wasn’t all that surprising as I watched the movie. I go to the supermarket all the time and see quite a few people talking into their Bluetooth headsets, and I often see a lot of people spending time on their smartphones whenever I go out, whether to my place of worship, or the supermarket, or restaurants, smartphones are pretty much everywhere. Not that having a smartphone is a bad thing, of course. I use my phone to navigate directions when I am going to someone’s house. I use my phone to watch funny videos and exercise videos, and also listen to music. I listen to podcasts on my phone. I use my phone to call and text. But like anything else, you need balance, and I think these past couple of years my phone use has increased and I often find myself scrolling the news on my phone to avoid talking to people or when situations get uncomfortable or make me nervous. I would see the people in my life spend time on their phones when they had spare time and I started to think, Okay, well this might be a social thing so maybe I should do it, too, and before I knew it I was spending lots of time on my phone. I really didn’t think I would use it that much. I got my first smartphone in 2016 to go out of the country, but I didn’t even use it much because there wasn’t much cell service where I was, so I could not call home much or even text. And I also dropped my phone while texting and walking down stairs, which in hindsight was not a great idea, because I was about to catch a flight back home and could not call my family to tell them what happened (the least I could have done was borrow someone’s phone, but I was so deep in grief and shame and self-criticism while sitting at the airport, with no phone, that I didn’t even bother.) I think watching The Social Dilemma and reading more about my addiction to technology helped me understand ways that I could better monitor my behavior because they let me know that smartphones and social media were purposely designed to be addicting. That is why smartphones have bright colors and why we have all these apps where you can like, share and comment, because it releases a neurotransmitter called dopamine in the brain, which requires you to do activities that bring you pleasure in order to get that dopamine or reward boost. I’ve realized after doing more research and becoming more aware of my phone use that I want that pleasure hit, so I need to check my phone constantly. But after a while, you realize you probably don’t need to be on the phone all the time. It’s gotten to the point where we need to even have books about phone addiction and limiting phone use and screen time. I checked out a book called How to Break Up with Your Phone by Catherine Price and listened to a podcast special where Vivek Murthy and Catherine are talking about being more mindful of phone use. I first found out about the causes of phone addiction from reading a book called Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, where he talks about why phones and social media are so addicting. It’s because companies designed these devices to be like slot machines, which also make you use them all the time because it releases that dopamine in your brain. I really didn’t think my phone use was going to get that bad. But I think watching Her made me really reflect on why I am using technology and what I want to get out of it in a super hyper connected but lonely world.

In the film Her, Theodore writes other people’s letters for them for a living. Of course, there may be valid reasons but considering Her is a science fiction movie it just made me wonder if people stopped writing letters because they now relied on artificial intelligence to do everything for them (I thought it was interesting how all the employees at this handwriting company write the letters on computers, which I think shows how even when it comes to writing letters, people still need to rely on technology to write them. Not that there is anything wrong with that of course, but it reminded me that this is a science fiction movie that takes place at a time when technology is everywhere and people need to rely on artificial intelligence for everything.) I love writing letters, and no matter how many times I text someone or how eloquent I sound over text (which I usually don’t) nothing beats writing a handwritten letter. In 2020, while in quarantine with family, I often wrote letters to my friends and writing these letters felt so personal and allowed me to convey stuff that would be really hard to type over the phone. I think writing letters also is good practice for me as a writer, too, because it helps me get my thoughts out on paper. For some reason the company Theodore works for, Beautiful Handwritten Letters.com, reminded me somewhat of the movie Young Adult, which is about a ghostwriter. Even though I saw it a while ago, there is one scene I remember from the movie where Charlize Theron’s character, Mavis, who is the ghostwriter of a series of young adult novels, goes into a bookstore and finds the books she ghost-wrote on clearance. She is appalled and starts signing the books with her name in them. When the clerk tells her she cannot sign the books, she tells him she is the actual author of the books, not Jane McMurray, who created the series but didn’t actually write the book. When she asks if he wants a signed copy, he declines and says that if she signs the books, they can’t take them back to the publisher, which they were intending on doing because while the series was once popular, no one will probably buy her books now because they are no longer popular. When he turns away, she starts grabbing all of the books and signing them, and he gets angry at her and tells her she can’t write in the books, and she leaves angrily with the copy she signed. Mavis spent much of her career writing these books under someone else’s name, and at this point in the movie when things are just not working out for her in any area of life, she is fed up and seeing the books she worked so hard to write end up in clearance because they aren’t going to sell like hot cakes anymore really hurts. Writing is such a personal journey and even as someone who is not a professional writer, I am sure Mavis put a lot of work into writing those books and they even became a part of her. I was not sure if Theodore Twombly was going to get credit for writing those beautiful handwritten letters (as I listened to him read the letters he was writing I found myself pretty moved by his beautiful writing) but Samantha decides that he deserves at least some credit for writing these letters so she has compiled some of his letters into a book and sent it to be published. It would be really interesting if the company Beautiful Handwritten Letters existed in real life and I would be interested to know what goes into the business of writing other people’s letters. I am sure there are instances in real life where people have others write their letters for them for various reasons. But to be honest, I don’t want handwritten letters to go away. I want to keep writing letters for as long as I live, as long as I have a pen and paper in hand. The existence of Beautiful Handwritten Letters in the movie is a pretty significant detail because it reminded me to not lose the art of writing a handwritten letter to someone even in this age of technology. I haven’t written long letters in a while, but I think at some point I want to go back to writing them.

Loneliness is a pretty huge theme in this movie. I have started becoming more interested in learning about the science of loneliness after grappling with my own challenges of loneliness. I remember in 2021 grappling with serious anxiety and depression and I felt I had no one to turn to. I remember reaching out to one of my friends and taking part in Zoom meetings with my SGI Buddhist community, and I think that helped a lot. Even though loneliness is painful I have been using my Buddhist practice to create value and meaning from it, and I have also come to understand that everyone feels lonely at times. Having a romantic partner doesn’t mean that you won’t ever be lonely, and even as a single person who was happy being introverted, I soon realized after spending a lot of time in isolation in 2020 that like everyone else, I am a social creature and need human interaction and connection just like everyone else. I remember reading the book Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World by Vivek Murthy, and I remember feeling a sigh of relief because I thought that I was the only one feeling lonely and disconnected from others and reading that book reminded me that loneliness is a common experience for many people, to the point where it’s even become a serious public health issue. Reading the book made me want to cherish my connections with people more.

There was a scene in the movie Her that really almost made me choke up. Maybe it is because earlier I was still crying after writing that review of the movie Lamb because it brought up a lot of my own experiences with grief these past few years and the more recent experience of grief I had after losing my mentor in faith. In this scene, Scarlett Johansson’s character, Samantha, tells Theodore that she has an idea to spice up their relationship: because she doesn’t have a human body, she will hire a surrogate partner when they are having sex. He tells her he is not comfortable with this because allowing a third person in their relationship would only leave them hurt, but Samantha insists that she really wants a surrogate, and not wanting to upset her, Theodore reluctantly agrees. Isabella arrives and attaches Samantha (in the shape of a beauty mark) to her face, and as she has sex with Theodore, she doesn’t say anything but lets Samantha’s voice do the talking. When they are about to get really heavy into the sex and Isabella is really enjoying it, Theodore suddenly stops and tells Samantha he thinks this is to weird and begs her to stop because he doesn’t know Isabella. Hurt and crushed by what Theodore said, Isabella leaves in tears and Samantha and Theodore both beg her to come back, but she says that no one really wants her to be there and that she saw how pure Samantha and Theodore’s relationship was and she really wanted to be part of something like that. Theodore misspeaks and says that isn’t true, and Samantha becomes angry with him for implying that their relationship wasn’t pure love, and Isabella leaves because she is just really heartbroken that Theodore and Samantha seem to not want anything to do with her anymore. I don’t know if I’m reading too deeply into this scene or not, but it really made my heart heavy because it showed me that even though Isabella was supposed to just do her job of being a surrogate partner, she is also a human being who wanted to feel respected and valued and she didn’t feel respected or valued by either of these people. Isabella must have also felt really lonely, too, and she wanted human connection, and she felt really sad that Theodore and Samantha didn’t want her to be in their relationship. There is one scene where Theodore reflects on what his ex-wife criticizes him about when they meet, that he is dating a computer so that he doesn’t have to deal with the problems that he faced in their marriage , and he tells his friend Amy that maybe Catherine is right, that he is dating Samantha because he is not ready for a real relationship. Amy gives him pause and asks him if he really thinks that relationship with Samantha isn’t a real relationship just because she is an operating system. She finds happiness with Charles’s operating system, Ellie, and is even happier with Ellie than she is was with Charles, who she often got into fights with.

There is also an earlier scene where Samantha sets Theodore up on a blind date and he goes on a date with this woman, played by Olivia Wilde, and at first things are going well. They are talking and laughing, and getting drunk. And then Olivia Wilde makes out with him and Theodore struggles to get intimate with her, and she asks him to assure her that he is not going to be like the other guys she went on dates with who didn’t call her back. She wants to know if he seriously loves her and wants to be in a relationship with her. When he says he isn’t sure, she is upset and says that at her age, she cannot afford to waste her time with someone who isn’t willing to commit, and calls him a creepy dude and when he offers to walk her back, she refuses and leaves. As someone who hasn’t been on many dates and has only had one romantic partner in my life so far, I didn’t really know whether I could relate, but I could definitely relate to that feeling of loneliness, that craving for human connection and love and respect, and I saw that the blind date felt that this was not the man she would feel okay being in a relationship with. And Theodore was also on the fence because he finds himself falling in love with Samantha, and he isn’t interested in having a committed relationship with the blind date because he really loves Samantha. However, as I saw later in the movie, he finds out that his relationship with Samantha is changing over time and she eventually moves on and hangs out with other operating systems and becomes an operating system for other people, so she can’t really commit to being with just Theodore anymore. It seemed like Samantha was the key to alleviating Theodore’s profound loneliness, but when their relationship changes and she moves on with her life, he is back to square one. But it gives him time to reflect and so he writes to his ex-wife apologizing to her and expressing his appreciation for her.

Honestly, this movie was very profound. I had heard so much about it but I had not seen it until now. Theodore’s experience with loneliness and love really resonated with me, and it was a very touching film. And the acting was amazing. I wanted to go to bed early, but I just couldn’t stop watching this movie. It was really good.

Her. 2hr 6 min. 2013. Directed by Spike Jonze. Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Pratt, Rooney Mara, Amy Adams and Olivia Wilde. Rated R for language, sexual content and brief graphic nudity.