“Spike seems really earnest and sincere,” she told TIME’s Joel Stein in 2002. Orlean was ready to have her character’s name altered when she met Jonze. His first two feature films, Being John Malkovich (1999) and Adaptation. (2002), both from scripts by Charlie Kaufman, went beyond meta into the fictionalizing of Malkovich and author Susan Orlean, whom Kaufman re-imagined as a drug-dealing killer slut, more or less. He made his early rep as the skateboarding director of videos for the Beastie Boys and Fatboy Slim, and birthed the Jackass franchise in its MTV and movie incarnations. Jonze has worn the high-concept mantle ever since he changed his birth name (Adam Spiegel) to a hip-hop variant on Spike Jones, the wily-crazed bandleader of the ’40s. (READ: Richard Schickel on the Spike Jonze-directed Adaptation.) For Theodore’s girlfriend is a computer voice named Samantha (Scarlett Johansson). With his new movie her, which has its world premiere tonight as the closing attraction at the New York Film Festival, Jonze creates the splendid anachronism of a movie romance that is laugh-and-cry and warm all over, totally sweet and utterly serious. Theodore might be Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts - the cynical newspaperman consigned to the agony column - except that neither he nor writer-director Spike Jonze has anything so fashionable as satire in mind. So, with photos of a couple from youth to old age as his guide, he dictates a letter for a woman still smitten on her 50th wedding anniversary and signs it, “Love, Loretta.” That’s his job at the website and also his therapy. Still bruised from the failure of his marriage to Catherine (Rooney Mara), he needs an outlet for expressing his feelings. Follow a heart as big and soft as a Valentine-gift pillow, Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) composes love notes for strangers to send to their spouses and children.
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