I and I: Spike Jonze's uber-hip Her

Spike Jonze's quirky and uber-hip Her is set in the (near?) future LA, with much of the movie shot in Shanghai to give LA an even more futuristic look and feel (it works - I was surprised they actually shot in China and thought the Chinese architecture was worked in later through green screens or other Hollywood illusion). It's actually quite a powerful and disturbing movie about alienation, consciousness, love, sex, and AI: from the outset, we see a world in which people, even more than today, are completely dominated by their handheld devices. The lead character (Joachin Phoenix) works for a dot.com writing love letter and other personal missives for various clients - a former reporter (we don't know how or why he lost that job) he's pretty good at this, but obviously living his life through the lives of others (you can think of many movie and book analogies of course). Spends great deal of time dictating instrux to his Siri-like personal assistant, including requesting a phone-sex hookup - that's the extent of his emotional life. A new system emerges, however, providing an avatar-like personal assistant with a human-like intelligence and ability to reason, to learn, to mature; played in voice-over by Scarlett Johansson. The inevitable happens: he falls in love with his OS, and she provides him with everything he needs - without the problems of a "real" human relationship - or is this in fact a real relationship? As "she" becomes more human, she develops needs of her own, leading to all sorts of complications. and pulling him even further away from contact with "real" humans, leading to the inevitable question: what's wrong w/ that? I won't spoil things except to say that the movie has two faults: like almost all 2-hour movies it's 30 minutes too long (less is more), and I wish Jonze had not opted for the obvious romantic ending when the whole tone of the movie is dark and mysterious. Her is kind of like the anti Lars and the Real Girl, in which L. falls for an inflatable doll - "human" in appearance only. This is the opposite. It's also like 2001 two generations later, but with a bit of the same mood and conundrum: the artificial intelligence programmed to learn and grow and to protect itself - but in this case also to learn about and anticipate the needs of its "partner" (e.g., "she" assembles some of his writing, figures out a publisher he likes, edits the material and sends it off -without his knowledge or consent) - initially by reading email etc. but eventually by "her" own intuition and intelligence.