Director: Spike Jonze Run Time: 126 min. Rating: R Release Year: 2013
Starring: Amy Adams, Joaquin Phoenix, Olivia Wilde, Rooney Mara, Scarlett Johansson
Country: United States
Language: English
Summer of Love
A celebration of indie romance, July through September at the Film Center.
About the film:
World Premiere, New York Film Festival 2013.
Winner of the 2014 Academy Award for Best Writing — Original Screenplay.
Set in Los Angeles, in the near future, Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) is a complex, soulful man who makes his living writing touching, personal letters for other people. Heartbroken after the end of a long relationship, he becomes intrigued with a new, advanced operating system, which promises to be an intuitive and unique entity in its own right.
Upon initiating it, he is delighted to meet “Samantha,” a bright, female voice (Scarlett Johansson) who is insightful, sensitive and surprisingly funny. As her needs and desires grow, in tandem with his own, their friendship deepens into an eventual love for each other.
“It’s a melancholy comic fable about the here and now, thinly disguised as an outlandish vision of the there and later.”
—A.A. Dodd, AV Club
About the filmmaker:
Spike Jonze (born October 22, 1969) began his career as a teenager photographing BMX riders and skateboarders and co-founding the youth culture magazine Dirt. Moving into filmmaking, he began shooting street skateboarding films, and his distinct style soon made him an in-demand director of music videos for much of the 1990s, resulting in collaborations with Sonic Youth, R.E.M., Beastie Boys, Ween, Fatboy Slim, Daft Punk, Weezer, Björk, Kanye West and Arcade Fire.
Jonze began his feature film directing career with Being John Malkovich (1999) and Adaptation (2002), both written by Charlie Kaufman; the former earned Jonze an Academy Award nomination for Best Director. He was a co-creator and executive producer of MTV’s Jackass reality franchise. Jonze later began directing films based on his own screenplays, including Where the Wild Things Are (2009) and Her (2013); for the latter film, he won an Academy Award, Golden Globe, and WGA Award for Best Original Screenplay.
