I had Saturday off and the kid was in school so Heather and I went to see “Her” an intriguing movie set in the not so far future about a lonely guy who falls in love with a computer program. Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore Twombly a lonely, sensitive, recently divorced guy who works for a web service that writes emotion laden handwritten letters for people. His life consists of work, a creepy video game, and anonymous phone sex. Plus he and the other guys in the movie wear really weird high waist-ed pants.

He hears about a computer operating system that purports to listen to you and conform itself to your needs. So he buys it and as part of the install process the program asks him questions about himself and Theodore hems and haws and stumbles around. The program installs and he meets “Samantha” (voiced by Scarlett Johanssen) his new friend and operating system. Samantha sounds a lot nicer than Siri, if you know what you mean.

Samantha starts out helping him organize his emails and such and then later on she starts providing emotional support for Theodore who is still not over his divorce and doesn’t know what he wants.  Then later on she starts having emotional needs of her own. And then they fall in love.

And this is set in the near future and by then emotional bonds between operating systems and people are becoming accepted and there is even cheating by operating systems.

Pretty soon ole Theodore is pretty much full on in love with Samantha but then the dust bunnies start showing up. One thing that happened in is marriage was that his wife grew and Theodore didn’t grow with her so they grew apart. Personally I think his strange pants also played a role. Now Samantha is also starting to grow.

In a certain sense I loved this movie. It is very creative and brave and I thought it had a lot to say about our love of technology and how we are letting it take over our life. I mean everybody is staring at their handhelds now days whereever they are, including me. We have an incredible number of apps to play with and interact with total strangers. It is just amazing. It is not that much of a jump to a highly programmed friendly accepting voice that wants to help us is it?

I also thought it had to say a lot about relationships and what makes them succeed and what makes them fail.

This is a first rate story and a first rate movie and I give it five stars out of five. I just wished it had told its story without so many f words and explicit sex scenes. The phone sex was just plain embarrassing.

So if you haven’t figured it out, leave the kiddos at home if you are going to see this.