Thursday Movie Picks: Love in the Tech Age

A weekly series hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves

Had the Titanic disaster happened a century later, in 2012 instead of 1912, Jack and Rose would never have been a thing. They would have been way too focused on their smartphones to notice each other. They would have probably found each other on Twitter, while live-tweeting the disaster, and at that point it would have been too late for their ill-fated love. Or maybe they would have found each other earlier on Instagram, while searching the Titanic hashtag. Which would have made this week's Thursday Movie Picks theme, love in the tech age, a lot easier cause boy did I struggle to find three films.

Her (2013)

Plot: Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), a man who writes romantic letters on behalf of other people on the internet for a living, is dumped by his wife (Rooney Mara) and soon falls in love with Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), a new, surprisingly human generation of OS.

I truly struggled to watch the whole film as I found it beyond tedious and unappealing and Phoenix is always so unlikeable for me — I've been meaning to give this another change though — but it's the first that popped int my mind and it fits well. 

Love, Simon (2018) - Review

Plot: Simon (Nick Robinson) is a secretly gay teenage boy who starts exchanging anonymous emails with a boy who goes by Blue from his school. Unfortunately, an unpopular kid, Martin (Logan Miller), stumbles across Simon's emails and uses them to blackmail him. While dealing with the blackmail, Simon also tries to discover Blue's identity and his own. 

The story is a bit clichéd and all that — it's a teen rom-com, after all — but it has so much heart, it delivers a beautiful and powerful message of love and acceptance, and Nick Robinson's performance is great. 

Sierra Burgess Is a Loser (2018) - Review

Plot: Sierra Burgess (Shannon Purser) is as smart and witty as she is ugly and unpopular. When the most popular girl in school, Veronica (Kristine Froseth), gives to a sweet football player, Jamey (Noah Centineo), Sierra's number instead of her own, Sierra and Jamey begin to text and when she realises he believes her to be Veronica, she asks for her help to get the boy. 

This one did not work for me. At all. Not only the plot is terrible and the message wrong — it pretty much says that lying and manipulating others is okay and you're getting your way in the end anyway — but it also has an incredibly unlikeable lead.