Week 7: Time Lapse

Today I will discuss two films that were released nearly 80 years apart:

• It Happened One Night (Won 1934)
• Her (Nominated 2013)

One of the most interesting things about It Happened One Night is its age. Movies from the 1990's are "dated," and yet they are a full generation newer than movies from the 1970's (which are "old"), and yet those are a whole generation newer than movies from the 1950's (which are "really old"), which in turn are a generation newer than movies from the mid-1930's. When this movie was released, Clark Gable was a spritely 33, while Gregory Peck was still a teenager, Marlon Brando, Jack Lemmon and Paul Newman were all about 10 years old, and Debbie Reynolds was an infant.

And yet the movie holds up ridiculously well. All modern, romantic comedies are basically modified versions of this film, which swept all of the major awards at the 1934 Oscars (Picture, Director, Writing, Actor, Actress -- there were no awards for supporting roles until 1936). The writing is air-tight and funny. I found myself rooting for Gable's and Claudette Colbert's characters to end up together, which they do.

Here's a scene from It Happened One Night where Gable and Colbert must pretend to be a quarreling married couple to avoid revealing that Colbert's character is actually a famous, missing heiress:

I have yet to see any other movie nominated in 1934. There were 12 nominees, only one of which (The Thin Man) I had even heard of before beginning this project. It Happened One Night is the only romantic comedy I'm aware of to have ever won the Big One, and for being an emblematic and entertaining film, I give it a 7.5.

Let's fast forward a better part of a century to Her, nominated in 2013 and directed by Spike Jonze. It stars Joaquin Phoenix, who appears in this movie to be wearing the same, high-waisted pants as his character Freddy Quell in The Master, and Scarlett Johansson as the voice of the computer Samantha, with whom Phoenix falls in love. Samantha The Computer eventually, however, realizes that humans are stupid and abandons Phoenix to exist among other computers, and I can only assume that they eventually take over the world, a-la Skynet or The Matrix. 

Similar to Jonze's underrated Being John Malkovich, this movie is an exploration of human nature against a vaguely science-fiction-ish backdrop. I wish, however, that the film had more of Jonze's trademark, off-kilter wit, which it does only in disparate instances, such as this hilarious scene where Phoenix's character is simultaneously talking to Samantha The Computer and playing a futuristic video game:

(Note -- This game apparently runs on the same hardware that John Anderton uses to watch home movies in Minority Report. See here.)

I give Jonez and Her lots of credit for at least being interesting, and it has now become my favorite of all the quite-weak nominees from 2013. Score: 7.4.