Yet another fancy gimmick

Rating: 3/10 (22 April 2014)

I was curious about Her, as much as I was curious about Being John Malkovich exactly 14 years ago. Both are gimmick movies: they start with a clever idea and try to elaborate with more or less creativity and lightness.
The problem when you start with a clever idea is that you have to create the visuals to match, the inner rhythm to dispatch the concentrate subtext. In all these respects Her looks like a bland near-dystopian experience.
The basic idea of having a man fall in love with an OS is clever, but it is a writer's idea. On screen images can't but leaden-limb the original idea - provided it had legs in the first place. And the best actors in the world can only act what a movie is supposed to be or is potentially about.
Pretty soon it feels vain: a depressed loner, living a depressing lonely life, having an epiphany when he installs the promising AI OS? When did so-called independent film-makers decide boring was cool? It really looks like a contemporary Art Hack: "Let's mix a lonely boring character and a lonely clever idea!" A first I thought: "A writer as main character? Yet again?" but soon enough I was relieved to see that it was only a web-era chained-gang writer. And that was the beginning and the end of good surprises.