Her

We don’t require relationships to spawn or raise our offspring. Plenty of pregnancies occur as accidents outside of relationships. A village can raise its children collectively. What use, therefore, have we of relationships?

To study this question, the movie Her removals sex (all physical contact, in fact) from such a partnership. It digs at what truly affects our emotions and fuels our needs for intimacy beyond the bedroom.

If we required only physical intimacy, our lives would prove simpler, and our vocabularies would rarely include the word “lonely.” Sex would, without emotional baggage and wagers, prove a common, effortless occurrence.

The movie Her features Theodore, who, for a living, writes beautiful love letters. He takes the lives of other people, and he writes for one exactly what the other feels. Yet, he cannot honestly express his own feelings.

Theodore spent the last year finalizing his divorce from Catherine, with whom he seemed to enjoy plenty of physical contact, but very little intellectual or emotional synchrony.

Catherine, in a flashback scene, asks her then-husband Theodore to spoon her. He happily gratifies her request. They seem, in terms of physical affection, compatible and content.

Theodore eventually purchases a computer operating system for his computer-phone-and-so-forth that possesses artificial intelligence (Her takes place in the near future, where everyone wears the same stupid pair of pants).

His operating system can speak to him through an earpiece and see him through his smartphone’s camera. She names herself Samantha.

Theodore and Samantha’s relationship starts out professional before it graduates into friendship. They afterwards connect on and intellectual and eventually emotional level . . . and fall in love.

Theodore can (perhaps because Samantha is a computer program, and he therefore doesn’t have to look her in the eye) speak frankly with her. He discovers much about himself in the process.

The movie’s experiment begins. How would a relationship with someone you cannot see or touch differ from a physical version?

Would a polyandrous relationship bother Theodore, despite the fact that Samantha couldn’t actually touch (let alone enjoy sex with) her other boyfriends?

Would the routine, relationship hurtles surface, even those that seem directly related to the sex Theodore and Samantha couldn’t experience? They do (as if sex actually has little in common with these issues).

Her presents evidence that we want someone to see us naked of our daily disguises, which we shed once no one can see us. Notice me. See me. Infuse me with significance. I’ll hide from you, though, the instant I notice your attention.

The dialogue in Her feels so well crafted that this movie could’ve worked just as well as a radio drama.

That’s not to say that Her failed to offer impressive visuals. Its director, Spike Jonze, uses everyday objects—from boiling teakettles, to a manhole cover venting steam, to dust drifting helplessly through the air—to convey the movie’s mood.

I recall a splendid scene in which Theodore sits in front of a large, television screen that displays an owl while it swoops down for a kill, and I felt refreshed to witness visuals creatively geared towards telling a story, rather than loud, high-end, “mind-blowing” computer graphics without a message.

Her moves a little slow at times. Jonze might’ve benefited, had he sliced away or shortened thirty minutes from the final cut. Still, I’m far from complaining.

Guy falls in love with his cellphone. Who would’ve thought?

I love it when Hollywood takes chances. I love it when those chances pay off wonderfully and unexpectedly.

(You can catch my short fiction at martinwolt.blogspot.com, and you can find my novels, such as Daughters of Darkwana, on Kindle. Thanks for reading. See you next time.)

Afflicted

Have you ever played one of those sandbox video games in the Elder Scrolls series, such as Morrowind, Oblivion, or Skyrim? In all three of these open-world, first-person (you experience the game through the eyes of you avatar) games, you might face the option to become a vampire.

Welcome that option, and you’ll soon race through multiple settings at superhuman speed, dodge law enforcement while the sun vaporizes your skin.

The movie Afflicted offers a similar experience.

A terrible diagnosis spurs two Canadian friends, Derek and Clif (no, I didn’t spell that wrong) to travel the world.

A medical condition transforms Derek’s brain into a time bomb. In months, maybe hours, he will die.

Clif, a film student, decides to document their trip. Clif’s special vest allows him to carry his camera arms-free.

Derek and Clif arrive in France, where Derek takes a young woman to his hotel room. The young woman, a vampire it turns out, transforms Derek into a creature of the night so as to “save” him from his fatal illness.

She does not explain what she has done to him.

Derek and Clif try afterwards to deduce why Derek can’t stomach food. Why sunlight burns him. Why he demonstrates super speed and strength.

I thought for certain, at this point, that I wouldn’t enjoy the movie. I’m sick of vampires—Hollywood’s lazy, go-to device for the last thirty-seven billions and six years.

However, once the police started to chase Derek, and I experienced his flight—first-person, via his mounted camera—I loved the ride, which reminded me of the aforementioned video games, where I, as my avatar, experienced the same sort of ceaseless escape.

Derek discovers that he cannot cure his vampirism. He’ll lose his mind and blindly attack anyone in reach if he does not feed frequently on human blood. He can’t die, either.

Derek’s stress feels remarkably real. The actor sold his situation.

Many vampire movies offer me some crybaby who’s depressed because he exercises superpowers and immortality. Boo-hoo. Afflicted managed to sell the situation as truly horrifying, as endless damnation and misery.

Afflicted serves as a careful-for-what-you-wish tale. Derek, fearful of his inevitable and probably upcoming death, travels to Europa to feel alive. He takes a woman to his hotel room to feel human.

As an ironic set of consequences, eternal life curses him and human experiences stand forever from his reach.

While the first-person, chase scenes, flavored by Derek’s superhuman speed and leaps across Europa’s tallest buildings, felt wonderful, my excitement deflated whenever I watched those same events from another person’s perspective. The special effects looked terrible from their points of view, melted from thrilling to laughable.

Afflicted felt a little slow at its start (par for the course of nearly all found footage movies), but the rising action proved worth the wait.

(You can read my own short stories free at martinwolt.blogspot.com, and find my novels on Kindle)

Bad Words

If you could go back in time and hang out with yourself as a child, what would you two do? While that’s not exactly the plot of Bad Words, it comes close at times.

The movie Bad Words introduces its audience to Guy, who has an amazing talent for spelling.

Guy’s father, Philip, abandoned Guy’s mother after he knocked her up, and he never once made an effort to contact Guy.

Guy grows up fatherless and friendless. He becomes something of an ass.

Philip goes on to run the prestigious Golden Quill Spelling Bee, for which he proves immensely proud.

Guy (now 40 years old) finds a loophole that allows him to enter the aforementioned spelling bee—intended for ten-year-olds.

Guy plans to make a mockery of the event with his bad behavior, embarrass Philip to the point that he will never forget Guy, which Guy sadly says “is the least a son could expect from his father.”

Keep in mind that Philip has no clue that Guy’s his son.

The community hates Guy for his unwanted attendance at the spelling bee. It seems the whole world wants him disqualified via any means.

Guy reluctantly befriends, during his unwelcomed participation at the spelling bee, Chaitanya, a likeable, idiosyncratic kid who plans to win the spelling contest.

Chaitanya’s father hasn’t abandoned him, but he mentors the kid from afar (to help him build character and independence).

Guy grew up without discipline. He knows how to amuse himself and live in the moment, but he lacks the most basic of social skills and moral restraints. He has accomplished little to nothing with his life.

While Chaitanya’s father stays far from arm’s reach of his son, he still holds high expectations for his son. An anti-Guy results. Chaitanya knows how to study and work hard, but he doesn’t know how to enjoy himself.

Chaitanya, desperate for companionship, names his study binder Todd. He considers the binder his best friend (which seems as sad as those single servings of birthday cake I’ve noticed at the bakery).

It turns out that Guy used to, as a child, carry around a small, toy, police car, a symbol of the authority figure he lacked. Chaitanya carries around a similar car. However, Chaitanya’s toy car hasn’t the flashing light that makes it as police car.

With a dab of ketchup, Guy adds a police light to the roof of Chaitanya’s car, marking it as a symbol of authority, right as Guy takes the kid under his wing and teaches him how to behave . . . horribly.

Chaitanya gives Guy the toy car as a gift, as Guy now serves as his new authority figure.

Later, Guy and Chaitanya share a heartbreaking falling out, and Guy smashes the car.

Guy purchases, after he and Chaitanya rectify their friendship, a retired police car, in which he and Chaitanya chase bullies, symbols of the gatekeepers who wouldn’t allow them social acceptance.

Bad Words is about what might’ve been, about making peace with unpleasant childhoods and the scars they produce. It proves hilarious and touching. It’s wonderfully paced.

I loved its characters for their flaws, and that feels perfect.

(You can read my own short stories free at martinwolt.blogspot.com, and find my novels on Kindle)

Divergent

Every good story is ultimately about a person (or persons) answering the question, “Who am I?”

However, the movie Divergent explores this questions in such an extremely on-the-nose fashion, that the writers seem terrified their audience might not “get” the premise (much as the writers did with the movie Green Lantern).

Divergent takes place in world where everyone must “fit in” with one of five factions (high school pandering, anyone?).

Teenagers must take a test that determines which characteristic they possess (if they have more than one, there’s trouble. More on that later). The one trait that a teen possesses determines which faction she or he should join.

People who possess selflessness run the government (how optimistic does that seem?).

People who possess a sense of peace become farmers for some reason.

People who prove honest become lawyers (even more optimistic) or something like lawyers (I wasn’t 100% on this part).

Brave people join the police force.

Intelligent people become scientists.

Who builds and maintains cars and other mechanical equipment? Are the no artists of any kind? Teachers? Who designs the buildings? It seems that more than five jobs ought to exist (perhaps the novel by Veronica Roth better explains this).

The “trait test” proves moot. Teens may, after they complete it, choose whichever faction they want to join. The test therefore serves only as a plot device to tell our main character, Tris that she doesn’t fit into any single faction!

She’s an individual. No one can tell her what group to join, what clothes to wear, and what to do with her life. She even afterwards changes her name and gets a tattoo (perhaps the lawyers serve as the tattoo artists?).

But wait! Individualism remains illegal for vague reasons. Oh-no!

Once Tris decides to keep her individualism a secret, she joins the police force, and the movie thankfully switches gears to becomes pretty enjoyable.

Tris must pass a series of challenges before she may remain in her chosen faction. If she fails, she faces a lifelong expulsion.

I love that sort of story. I use it all the time in my own writing. It gives me basic-training nostalgia.

The pass/fail system remains foggy, so the audience never really knows how much danger Tris faces of said expulsion.

A lot of scenes dangle at this point. In one scene, three of Tris’s fellow classmates try to throw her off a cliff. They get caught, and . . . nothing really happens to any of them as a consequence.

The cliff scene serves only as an excuse for Tris’s love interest to rescue her, because beating up bad guys makes people sexy in Hollywood’s strange formulas.

If a four-foot, morbidly obese guy with lazy eyes, acne, and crooked teeth saved a woman from would-be robbers, she probably wouldn’t find him attractive as a result. Sorry to say it, but you know I’m right.

Of course, the guy’s attractive. Tris looks good, too, because even a protagonist who struggles for acceptance in the face of permanent exclusion must own a pretty face. Why else would we care about her?

Once Tris passes all her physical challenges, she faces a series of interesting mental challenges, in which she’s force-fed terrifying hallucinations. She must overcome these hallucinations to pass this second portion of her exams. These scenes worked really well.

Then the movie crumbles. Tris’s behavior threatens to expose her secret individualism. Her love story turns corny and formulaic.

Our villain decides that she must use mind control to restore peace (there’s no war whatsoever) She mind-controls the police force, sets one faction against the other for no good reason.

Mind control doesn’t work on individuals (what a surprise) and Tris and Shirtless Individual Guy must now save the world with the power of their individuality (good grief).

The movie goes backsies on its own rules. It turns out that mind control does work on Shirtless Individual Guy, but only when it’s structurally convenient.

Tris’s journey to join the police force feels like a wonderful movie trapped within an otherwise terrible film designed to pats teens on the head and tells them, “You are special. The fact that you don’t fit into a clique proves it. Have a cookie.”

I don’t take issue with the movie’s message. The message is, and always has been, great. My issue’s with how the movie presents this message. It’s too damn on-the-nose, beating itself over the audience’s heads.

This story would’ve worked better if its director, Neil Burger, had played the individuality angle subtler while he focused more on Tris’s trials to join the police force.

A more concrete pass/fail system for those trials would’ve improved things, as well.

I’m not the target audience for this movie. However, “It’s for kids (or teens)” is not an acceptable excuse to express a moral premise via the first idea that pops into your mind. Give kids credit. They can “get” a message without having it forced down their throats.

(You can find Martin Wolt, Jr.'s novels on Kindle and his short fiction at martinwolt.blogspot.com)

Oculus

I have to admit that I hadn’t held the highest expectations for the movie Oculus. I mean, a killer mirror? Seriously?

However, I stand pleased to report that the movie surprised me. It’s rare to find good horror, when filmmakers rely so often upon special effects and shadows that jump up and scream “Boo” rather than decent storytelling.

Oculus tells the story of a brother and sister who, as children, watched their father shoot their mother to death—before the brother (supposedly) killed the father in self-defense.

Fast-forward to eleven years later, while the state releases the brother (now 21 years old) from the mental hospital in which he has remained a prisoner ever since the double homicide.

Prior to the brother’s arrest, both he and his sister insisted that a haunted mirror murdered their parents. No one believes them, naturally.

While the brother grows up in a mental ward, his doctors convince him that he imagined everything he remembers about the supposedly haunted mirror.

The sister (now 23 years old) hunts down the mirror, more-or-less steals it from the auction house at which she and her fiancé work, moves the mirror to her childhood home (still in her ownership), and awaits her brother’s release.

The sister surrounds the mirror with cameras and computers that try a little too hard to advertise Apple. She intends, with her brother’s help, to prove once and for all that the evil entity inside the mirror killed her parents.

Her brother argues that both of them invented the mirror’s paranormal resident. He argues from the side of logic. She argues from the side of intuition (gender roles, anyone?).

The movie’s writers make it clear from the get-go that the mirror is, indeed, haunted. However, it might’ve proven more interesting to actually call into question which of the siblings properly recalled the events that led to their parents’ demises.

Did the brother convince himself that nothing supernatural happened as a defense mechanism, or did the sister convince herself of the supernatural entity for the same reason? Even when the creepy, paranormal stuff started, the writers could’ve elected to play it as, “Hey, did that really happen, or did the sister only think it did because she’s losing her mind?”

But, as I said, the movie made it clear fewer than five minutes into the movie which of the two siblings remembered events correctly.

Director Mike Flanagan tells the story’s past and present almost simultaneously. He switches back and forth, sometimes so rapidly that one scene (taking place in the present) bleeds right into a similar scene (from the past) only to flash cut back into the present.

The cinematography looks great. The camera sweeps through entire series of micro events while it weaves through the house that serves as the movie’s center stage. Said cinematography manages to look beautiful and skilled without calling attention to itself.

Heck, even most of the acting proves pretty impressive. How rare is that for horror?

The setting makes the fantasy movie, and the villain makes the horror. Oculus proves no different. Its audience will feel its villain right in its guts. Oculus’s villain is misunderstanding, confusion, delusion, the unknown, the second-guessing at the crucial moments, and that nagging feeling that we don’t truly understand the crisis that faces us.

These all serve as instinctual fears. When we can’t trust our senses, we experience a stomach-borne terror. We understand on some level that everything we perceive remains vulnerable to our biases (and the mental manipulations of those who whisper in our ears, who cannot help but repackage information so as to accomplish their own ends).

Oculus takes our build-in fears of manipulation, misleading information, and biases and (like Planeteers pointing together their rings) combines them to create an ultimate, terrifying demon.

This movie works very well. Again, I wish the writers had held their cards a little closer to their chests and left the audience wondering which of the two siblings maintained the correct memory of the events that led to their parents’ deaths, but I’m far removed from complaining with the results.

This movie is worth your time. Check it out.

(You can find Martin Wolt, Jr.'s novels on Kindle and his short fiction at martinwolt.blogspot.com)