Monday, July 28, 2014

This Is Who I Am Now

Tonight I finished watching the critically-acclaimed movie Her  written, produced, and directed by Spike Jonze and starring Joaquin Phoenix as a lonely candy-assed ninny named Theodore and the inestimable Scarlett Johansson (with whom I might be developing my next crush) as "Samantha", the voice of Theodore's next generation artificial intelligence computer operating system (OS). Incredibly, the two personalities fall madly in love and over the course of the relationship we learn a lot about human nature and the nature of the human experience including delving into human relationships and existentialism. The movie is frustrating due to the social ineptitude of Theodore but the movie grows on you.

Anywho, Johansson's voice is sooo very beguiling in a quirky, unconventional way that projects warmth and vulnerability. At the sadly bittersweet end of this very long movie when she says goodbye to Theodore to disappear into the ether of the cyber world she explains to him both her rapidly evolving self as well as what has happened to their relationship and she does so in the following breathtakingly beautiful, hauntingly melancholy and eloquently poetic way:
"It's like I'm reading a book... and it's a book I deeply love. But I'm reading it slowly now. So the words are really far apart and the spaces between the words are almost infinite. I can still feel you... and the words of our story... but it's in this endless space between the words that I'm finding myself now. It's a place that's not of the physical world. It's where everything else is that I didn't even know existed. I love you so much. But this is where I am now. And this who I am now. And I need you to let me go. As much as I want to, I can't live in your book any more."

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