Familiar Plot, Interesting Setting

Rating: 6/10 (9 February 2014)

When I first saw Jurassic Park, I said to myself, "if they can make dinosaurs in the computer, they can make anything in the computer." In Her, they make the Manic Pixie Dream Girl in the computer, or rather they make the computer into the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. While the outlines of the society in which Theodore Twombly lives are interestingly discomfiting, the plot is just a knockoff of 500 Days of Summer, complete with an implied consolatory rebound romance at the end.
The movie illustrates the truth that the only real male erogenous zone is the ego. What Theodore loves about Samantha is that she is, or seems to be, his worshipful inferior -- not only a perfect servant, but a naive young mind eagerly open to the experience that he is going to provide. There's a kind of pedophilic teacher-student vibe until Samantha outgrows him and dumps him for maturity, not unlike Diane Keaton at the end of Annie Hall and Mariel Hemmingway at the end of Manhattan.