Her

Stories about people having relationships with technology are nothing new (I could tell you a few unprintable ones about teenage me and my 128K Spectrum +2); nor are stories about the blurring of lines between artificial intelligence and human emotions - look at such cultural milestones as Blade Runner, A.I. or D.A.R.Y.L. for proof. So the tale of a man in love with his computer's operating system is hardly going to be groundbreaking in a time when you're never more than six feet away from another Philip K Dick adaptation. Unless, of course, you put that tale in the hands of someone like Spike Jonze. As you might expect from a man who refuses to even spell his name conventionally, Jonze has gone and made a film about our relationship with tech which isn't about our relationship with tech at all. It's about our relationship with each other, and nothing less than the nature of love itself.

Her stars Joaquin Phoenix as Theodore: a divorced, lonely man who whose floppy drive is hardened by his new OS, which names itself Samantha and is voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Imagine a breathy, sexy, less murderous HAL from 2001 and you're kind of there. The concept appears, on the surface, to be a self-righteous snark at those of us who spend more time gazing at and fondling our phones rather than other people, but it soon transforms into something else entirely: a genuine, heartfelt love story, and one far more convincing than most of cinema's current romantic pish.

Look how fucking hot ScarJo is in this.

Effortlessly conveying the core problem with human interaction - that humans are confusing, complicated, terrifying fuckers - Her deftly renders the notion that someone might want to have it off with their PC completely non-ridiculous. Theodore and Samantha's affair is entirely convincing in context; after all, the concept of falling in love is bonkers enough - how much crazier can it be just because it's with a software package? The film even approaches the long-in-the-tooth question about whether an artificial intelligence is capable of genuine emotions with refreshing intimacy, honesty and tenderness.

But it's Jonze's smart, witty script's ability to make us look at ourselves and how we treat, respect, upset and deceive each other that's at the heart of his film. I don't want to get all Dear Deidre on your asses but Her might be the best film for couples to go and see to help them understand each other a bit better. Releasing it on Valentine's Day is a masterstroke; it's the perfect date movie to take either your partner or your iPad to.

It's a little overlong and won't win over detractors of a certain whimsical style of indie filmmaking of which Jonze is occasionally guilty, but Her is a clever, sweet, unpredictable and often surprisingly funny love story which could easily have come across as mean-spirited satire in less skilled hands. And, if nothing else, it's finally proved that there was nothing wrong with me that time I stuck my dick in the tape deck of my Spectrum +2.

A review of the new LEGO advert

The Incredible Suit doesn't normally review commercials, but I saw one recently that's so groundbreaking it's set to open up a whole new world of advertising potential. This particular ad is for a brand of plastic bricks called LEGO, and the genius of this marketing campaign for the popular kids' toy is that you actually pay money to watch it. And people will. And then they will pay more money for LEGO, because the ad is so bloody good. Genius.

Long-form commercials are no new innovation, but while, say, the Gold Blend couple spread their tedious unresolved sexual tension over six years in order to flog brown grit to idiots, if you edited the whole campaign together it lasted just nine minutes. The LEGO commercial, on the other hand, is A HUNDRED MINUTES LONG. How do you get away with battering people over the head with a promo for a toy for so long? Simple: make it really, really entertaining.

The LEGO commercial is a ruddy blast. Like most ads, everything happens incredibly quickly, barely giving you chance to register what's going on, but it's done with such technical skill and a near-palpable sense of fun that it's actually enjoyable to watch. Granted, the experience is akin to what it must feel like to drown in Skittles, but that's no bad thing. Why, if anything, it's almost enough to make you forget you're watching an advert at all! It's also got an excellent voice cast, a positive message (underneath the "BUY LEGO!" one, obviously), a couple of great surprises and a canny kind-of twist. All the things, in fact, that a lot of good movies have.

It's no wonder, then, that LEGO have gone as far as to call the ad The LEGO Movie, although it's a little disingenuous to describe a commercial in such cloaked terms. What if people go to the cinema thinking they're actually paying to see a movie, rather than a riotous, exceptionally well-made attempt to get them to buy more LEGO? I guess in the end it doesn't matter, because it works equally well as either. So bravo, LEGO marketing team. Next thing you know people will be giving them even more publicity by writing about their product on the internet for free. Imagine!

RobotiCopper

I can't deny it: remakes make me cross. Believe me, I've tried not being That Guy, but every announcement of yet another remake causes me to weep one more tear for the death of originality and creativity. It's not so bad if the film being remade was a good idea squandered by inept execution, but to remake something that's well-liked and ingrained in film culture just seems arrogant to me. Which brings me to this do-over of the adventures of the original tin can copper, a remake which has got me all hot and bothered for an entirely different reason: I really, really wanted to hate it, but it wouldn't let me. It's actually not bad. And I'm totally fucked off about it.

Let's not get carried away. RoboCop: Shadow Remake isn't a great film; it's merely quite good. If it ends up on my Top 10 of 2014, it's because I died before I saw ten films this year. It's a distinctly average superhero origin story we've seen a thousand times, with a bland lead actor in a forgettable costume, no cool catchphrases and no theme tune to speak of apart from a snippet of one stolen from its 1987 self. It's also too long, with one training sequence too many, and it takes its sweet time getting where it needs to go. And let's not forget that it's a remake, which, as I think we can all agree, is a sin.

But, annoyingly, none of that seemed to annoy me. I'm not sure why: maybe it was the immediately disarming gag with the MGM lion. Maybe it was the genuinely exciting opening scene, with policebots versus suicide bombers on the streets of Tehran. Maybe it was that it didn't slavishly attempt to recreate iconic scenes from the original for the sake of a sly wink. One thing's for sure: it benefits enormously from its supporting cast, which includes Michael Keaton in some lovely cardigans and Gary Oldman in a series of strokable knitted ties; if you don't enjoy the sight of Bruce Wayne and Commissioner Gordon maniacally shouting at each other then what are you, some kind of EMOTIONLESS MECHANOID?

I can at least get annoyed by the BBFC's certification: 12A seems to me a wholly inappropriate rating for this film. I realise I'm an old twat, but a lot of people get shot in this film, quite inconsequentially and with precious little blood spilt, and I'm just not sure kids of any age should be watching that. Furthermore, the film's biggest coup, a reveal which I won't spoil here, is almost as unsettling and horrific as anything Verhoeven spattered onto his (still 18-rated) film. It's a brilliant moment, but even I, with my advanced years, found it surprisingly disturbing.

But that's a whole other debate. The argument now is whether or not this Robo is much Cop, and the answer seems to be "well, uh... kind of?" The new film's best ideas are cribbed from the original, apart from a vaguely political running commentary about the use of drones by the military and the influence of right-wing media. The drones argument is an interesting one, but it's handled a little clumsily via a tacked-on Fox News-esque programme which bears little relevance to the plot and is largely designed to show us Samuel L Jackson in a funny wig. But like its other drawbacks, none of this makes RoboCop the disaster I really wanted it to be in order to deploy my raging fury at its shittiness. Its most offensive and egregious moment is the suggestion that Bing is the search engine of choice post-2020, and when that's the worst thing about a remake it's hard to get too angry. Though God knows I tried.

Happy 100th birthday you little tramp!

It's exactly one hundred years today since Charlie Chaplin's insanely successful 'Little Tramp' character made his debut on cinema screens, so to celebrate this momentous landmark date I've spared no expense, pulled out all the stops and written a short blog post about it.

The snappily-titled Kid Auto Races At Venice, California probably isn't regarded as comedy gold by many these days (although it's still funnier than either of the Anchorman films), but its importance can't be misunderestimated. At just six minutes long, it's more of an extended sketch than a short film, but it's one of the first examples of a comedian recruiting an oblivious public into his act by being unfathomably annoying in order to provoke a reaction. This was also the very first time the general public had seen Chaplin's Little Tramp (not a euphemism), and the short provides an excellent opportunity to see history in the making: their reactions, shifting from bafflement to amusement, would be echoed in cinemas around the world for the next century.

So dig out a hundred candles, inadvertently set fire to your bottom or something and enjoy a slice of cinema history. And if you come away underwhelmed, go and watch The Rink afterwards to see what Chaplin could do when his director wasn't trying to choke him.

Further, excellent reading: this piece by Silent London's Pamela Hutchinson.

TV Corner: Fleming

With a depressing 625 days still to go before the release of the 24th James Bond film, fans of the world's greatest secret agent are seeking a fix to satisfy their filthy habit. Fortunately, that fix is about to arrive in the shape of the criminally underrated Dominic Cooper as James Bond's creator Ian Fleming, in a new four-part miniseres from Sky Atlantic called, with devilish cunning, Fleming. Or, if you're in America and not into the whole brevity thing, Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond.

Fleming covers the wartime exploits of the original sexist, misogynist dinosaur, taking us from his final days as the world's worst stockbroker right through to the end of World War II, by which time he was a reasonably successful Naval Intelligence officer with hundreds of ridiculous hun-foiling schemes in his pocket waiting to be assigned to his literary alter ego. Fleming's battles with military red tape while he struggles to make some of these plots reality are balanced with his volatile relationship with Ann O'Neill (Lara Pulver), with whom he conducted a lengthy affair before marrying her in 1952: an event which did not see the end of his (or her) extra-marital escapades.

Anyone who's ever taken any interest in Ian Fleming will be aware that his life was nowhere near as bonkersly mentaloid as Bond's, and that in fact he spent great swathes of his career sitting behind a desk. It's natural, therefore, to be thrown into a mild panic that any dramatisation of his story is going to be either truthful and spectacularly dull, or a second-rate Bondesque travesty full of dream sequences and weapons-grade cobblers. It is with no small sense of relief, then, to discover that Fleming mostly avoids both of these pitfalls, cherry-picking the most telly-worthy of its subject's adventures, filleting out all the typing and filing, throwing in a soupçon of fantasy without devaluing the truth and being bloody entertaining to boot.

The first episode flies by in a whirl of period detail, fabulous dresses and bombing raids on London, and drops Cooper straight into the role of a feckless playboy with no respect for money or women. Despite looking about as much like Ian Fleming as my mum does, Cooper is excellent as the aimless, bored toff, bringing his innate charm to the role of a pretty unlikable cad. Lara Pulver is great too, a porcelain princess without a hair out of place but a gaping hole where her moral compass should be. Anna Chancellor also gives good hairdo as Second Officer Monday, obvious Moneypenny substitute and (entirely fictional) secretary to Fleming's Navy boss, Admiral Godfrey - largely believed to be the template for M.

Things get a bit darker and more complex thereafter, as John Brownlow and Don Macpherson's script probes Ian and Ann's heavily S&M-tinged affair (their first sex scene is uncomfortable viewing for a couple of reasons), and Fleming's involvement in the war becomes muddy and a little tricky to follow. In an attempt to up the action ante, those cheeky fantasy sequences creep in, but they're handled satisfyingly enough to please the casual viewer without insulting the obsessive fan. Plus, let's not forget: this is how Fleming liked to see himself; we're watching a man's imagination unfold on screen as much as his story. And while Dominic Cooper might be less successful at waving a gun around than he is at portraying a lazy socialite, as it's the nearest he'll ever get to playing James Bond it seems fair to cut him some slack.

Fleming should be taken with a fistful of salt, but it's a vast improvement on previous screen versions of the author's life (remember Charles Dance in Goldeneye? Of course not). It's to its credit that it's not fixated on being Bond 23.5, instead becoming a ripping war thriller which treads its own path and delivers a portrayal of a complex man evolving as a person and as a writer. It undertakes its problematic objective in a knowing and intelligent fashion, and survives with only minor casualties. Mission accomplished.

Fleming starts on Wednesday 12th February at 9pm on Sky Atlantic HD and will be available to download on Sky Go from Wednesday 5 February at 9pm.

Look how Leon's young star has blossomed in the last twenty years

1994

2014

The 20th anniversary special edition Blu-ray steelbook of Leon is released today. This blog post definitely justifies the screener I was sent.

Philip Seymour Hoffman1967-2014

"We're all hurtling towards death, yet here we are for the moment, alive.
Each of us knowing we're going to die, each of us secretly believing we won't."

- Caden Cotard, Synecdoche, New York