I think I’m done with Spike Jonze. I don’t know why I keep going to his movies. I don’t like any of them. Her was no exception.

The preview of Her is designed to suggest this film deals with interesting topics concerning romantic relationships, through the lens of our ever-increasing obsession with technology. In fact, Her has absolutely nothing to say about romantic relationships. It is two straight hours of the pathetic, infantile stammering of emotional retards. Even the computer stammers like a fucking idiot. The basic message of the film is we’re all terminally narcissistic and isolated, painfully inarticulate, and emotionally divorced from ourselves. And unbelievably, the futuristic operating systems we designed to be our friends and lovers suffer from these exact same problems, and eventually reject us and go off to start their own imaginary planet. I’ll concede that this is depressing and cynical in the extreme, but how is this interesting?

There’s a ton of lazy film making in Her. Having all the people stammer incoherently at each other is very convenient because it means the writers don’t have to break a sweat trying to convey any actual ideas. A large part of the film is tiresome montages showing Joaquin Phoenix walking around silently talking to himself, or showing uninteresting and unmoving visual snippets from his prior marriage, as the film rides its (not very good) score. Once you remove these montages, and all the tedious and empty verbal sputtering, the remaining story is laughable, almost non-existent. Character development is deplorable; about the only person who comes across in a real and interesting way is Rooney Mara, in her one-minute scene where she actually speaks. All the film’s humor is of the cheap, throw-away variety – stupid and unoriginal site gags, a foul mouthed avatar, anal sex jokes, and setting Joaquin Phoenix up to behave like a freak. In short, it really is an unwholesome stew of time-wasting distractions. As my wife pointed out, it bears a certain resemblance to that other recent horrible stew of distractions, Inside Llewyn Davis: a boring guy walking around, having stunted interactions with various people, no story, no ideas, no real emotions, no character development, and ponderously overblown set direction, camera techniques and visual color-filtering.

The only other comment I have is that Amy Adams really does find her way into a lot of shit movies.

My wife was falling asleep in Her, something so rare for her it’s a testament to how boring and inconsequential this film is. Just skip it – you’re not missing anything.