Oscar-nominated filmmaker Spike Jonze is at it again -- with his latest film, Her, that takes an unconventional, modern yet tender love story that explores "the evolving nature-and the risks-of intimacy in the modern world."

Academy award-nominated and Golden Globe award-winning actor Joaquin Phoenix, who was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico (but is of English,German and French ancestry with Jewish roots from Russia and Hungary) takes on the complex, leading role in Her. Phoenix has also taken on other impressive roles in Gladiator, Walk the Line, and The Master, for which he received several accolades.

Known for the outside the box films such as, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, Jonze takes a closer look at what makes people connect -- whether it be virtually, physically or emotionally. As humans we all have an innate desire to connect to someone or something. With the advances in technology and the amount of time we spend on our iPhones and computers, are we jeopardizing the truly attainable relationships that are worth investing our time and/or our hearts? Jonze delves into the issue in an unexpecting way.

"Set in the Los Angeles of the slight future, 'Her' follows Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), a complex, soulful man who makes his living writing touching, personal letters for other people" as a ghost writer for an Internet company called BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com., according to the film's official website.

"Heartbroken after the end of a long relationship, he becomes intrigued with a new, advanced operating system, which promises to be an intuitive entity in its own right, individual to each user. Upon initiating it, he is delighted to meet 'Samantha,' a bright, female voice (Scarlett Johansson), who is insightful, sensitive and surprisingly funny. As her needs and desires grow, in tandem with his own, their friendship deepens into an eventual love for each other."

"I don't think the movie is about technology," Jonze, 44, told The Wall Street Journal. "Yes, it has all these big ideas but whenever the ideas dwarfed the intimacy ... we always went towards the relationship."

Jonze explained to the WSJ that there was a technical approach to the film's research at first.

"We did all the traditional research, about what Motorola MSI +0.98% is doing with devices and blah blah blah, what Corning glassware is doing with monitors, and all these different things," Jonze explained to the WSJ. "A lot of that glass and plastic, sheets of glass, nanotechnology, was conceptually interesting and it was great to see, but it is very cold. We didn't want to put it in our movie. We realized, 'Oh, we don't need to think about what the future is going to be.' It's good that we did it, so we could throw it all out. We could just create what we wanted our future to feel like for this story."

"Despite the fact that the operating system, named Samantha, isn't 'real,' the bond that forms between her and Mr. Phoenix's character is. They go for long walks on the beach. They double-date with friends. They pour their hearts out to each other, fight like any other couple and ultimately question their compatibility," WSJ adds.

In one scene in Her, Theodore meets with his soon-to-be-ex-wife (Rooney Mara). She confronts him with a question that many people nowadays jokingly ask their spouses: 'You're dating your computer?'"

In 2009, I helped to explore this topic in The Future of Dating...Robots with The Tomorrow Show's Mo Rocca.

Jonze's blog Everything About Everything takes a closer look behind the influences of the film, Her, in an effort to share "interesting, thought-provoking, and inspiring pieces we've discovered that make us happy, or make us curious, or make us feel alive."

One article highlighted Slate's Ray Kurzweil's Singularity: What it's like to pursue immortality:

"Where Spanish adventurers believed in the Fountain of Youth, [Ray] Kurzweil believes in what the mathematician John von Neumann called the 'singularity' -- a point in human progress at which our machines become as smart as we are. They won't rise against us, though, because they will by that point be very much a part of us. Already our smartphones are becoming extensions of our minds.

"Kurzweil forecasts that we'll eventually be implanting computers and nanobots in our bodies and brains to enhance their natural functions. (That's bridge two on the road to immortality, in Kurzweil's scheme.) And someday-by 2045, to be precise-we'll have machines so sophisticated that we'll essentially be able to back up our minds to the cloud. (That's bridge three.)"

Ultimately, in Her, the artificial intelligence teaches a 30-something man, down on his luck, to love, the WSJ points out.

"She's not trying to teach him anything. She's just living. But she's able to engage with him in a way that inspires him and angers him. Her emotions are real to her," Jonze explained. "And he ultimately can't know her in the same way that he can't know anyone outside his own subjective emotional view of his life. We can empathize as deeply as we can empathize. We can connect. And that is the sort of leap we have to make. For Samantha, she lives in a computer, but is her consciousness any less of a consciousness to her?"

Check out the trailer. "Her" hit theaters today.