What a Wonderful World

Good morning Consumers. This is Please Consume, the film newsletter that loves you more than Ben Affleck loves being from Boston.

This is what we’ve got for today 👇️

• We chime in on the A.I conversation

• Some mighty pups take over box office control.

• All the latest news and notes from this weekend.

Let’s get rolling…

Now that The Creator is bursting onto the scene bringing with it a discussion of AI in movies we decided to take that idea and run with it. So this week we’ll be discussing movies about artificial intelligence.

Her (2013)

Written by Caleb Madden

Today we are talking about one of my favorite AI movies, Her.

This movie is a lot of things. It’s a story about love. It’s a deeply emotional look at human life. It asks big questions about human existence and what it means to be human (like most other AI movies).

But I think at its core this movie is about loneliness and human connection.

What a Wonderful World

Her takes place in a world that is somehow both warm and inviting yet extremely cold and disconnected. The film is set in a dystopian world where Apple and tweed took over and now everyone wears high waisted pants and pastel button downs. Director Spike Jonze does an excellent job of crafting this world. The colors and wardrobe are so warm and comforting with lots of red, brown, and yellow.

Yet, even with this comforting aesthetic, everyone in this world is separate. There is a real sense of loss of connection. Early in the movie we watch as Theodore (played by the wonderfully charming Joaquin Phoenix) rides the train home. Everyone has an earpiece in and no one is talking to other people. Even though they are crammed together in a subway they are still so far apart from each other.

Broken Connection

This distance is felt from the opening scene of the movie. We are introduced to Theodore by him dictating a letter to a computer. He works for a company called “Beautiful Handwritten Letters”. This world is so disconnected that there are industries built around having other people write personal letters to your loved ones.

The disconnection runs deeper than that for Theodore though. We learn that he is stricken with grief over a divorce that he went through a year ago. This event in Theodore’s life has left him gutted and completely unable to connect or communicate with anyone. He is chronically lonely and has lost most of his ability to actually communicate with other people.

Come Together

Here is where the profundity of Her really comes through. The thing that helps Theodore is a relationship he builds with this new AI named Samantha (played by Scarlett Johansson). Samantha is not a human, at least not in the literal sense, but is rapidly becoming more “human” by the minute. While Samantha explores her existence and how to connect with others, Theodore is relearning how to connect to others as well.

As this story unfolds we watch as Samantha and Theodore fall in love, argue, laugh, even go on double dates. We watch Theodore come alive again. All of this is perfectly executed by Jonze and company. I mean, most of this movie consists of Phoenix walking around talking to a non-material AI. Yet, every second of this movie feels intimate and personal in an indescribable way. Not to mention the stunning cinematography and the stellar soundtrack by Arcade Fire.

This movie is one of the most emotionally gut wrenching and stunning movies I’ve seen. It is amazing that a movie about a disembodied robot voice teaches us so much about real life human experience. It is so abstract and even silly at times, yet deeply profound in its lessons and themes. Just stunning.

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