Movie Review – “No Strings Attached” – Archive
Written by Keeley Sheehan, Jan 24, 2011, 0 Comments
Girls just want to have fun.
Keeley Sheehan
Managing Editor
Natalie Portman has been giving a lot of interviews the last few weeks as her 2010 film “Black Swan” prepares to descend upon the Oscar podium in February. In several of these interviews, she talks about her latest venture into producing. She and partner Annette Savitch have started a production company, Handsome Charlie Films, to make more fun, women-centered movies.
For the magazine’s January issue, she told Vogue, “We’re very into female comedies; there just aren’t enough. We’re trying to go for that guy-movie tone, like Judd Apatow’s movies, or ‘The Hangover’ but with women—who are generally not allowed to be beautiful and funny, and certainly not vulgar.”
Her latest foray into the world of raunchy rom-coms, “No Strings Attached,” doesn’t quite achieve these goals, but it’s a decent start.
Emma (Portman) and Adam (Ashton Kutcher, “Killers”) meet at camp when they’re 14. He awkwardly propositions her while trying not to cry, and thus the beginning credits role. They meet twice more—once at a party 10 years after camp, where she invites him to a “stupid thing” the next day (a family function for which he shows up ill-attired), and once more five years after that, at a farmer’s market in California, where, conveniently, they and all their friends and family now live. Adam is a low-level assistant on a teen TV show. Emma is a doctor.
But it all doesn’t really begin until six months or so after that when Adam discovers that his dear old (emphasis on “old”) divorced dad (Kevin Kline, “The Conspirator”) is shacking up with Adam’s ex-girlfriend (Ophelia Lovibond, “London Boulevard”). After getting mad and drunk, he finds himself naked in Emma’s apartment, spilling his guts to her and her roommates.
He’s sad, hung-over and already just a little bit in love with her. She’s working 80 hours a week and looking to get laid on a regular basis without the horror of all those relationship shenanigans. They enter into a friends-with-benefits agreement and establish ground rules, each declaring that they definitely, absolutely won’t fall in love with the other. A nice montage of them having sex on every available surface accompanies the laying of these ground rules, and from there the plot pretty much rolls out exactly as you’d expect.
“No Strings Attached” doesn’t explore any new rom-com frontiers. Where Jason Segel gifted us with full-frontal male in 2008’s “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” Kutcher awkwardly clutches a towel in front of himself while Emma’s roommates snicker at him into their coffee mugs, and applaud him for having such a well-chiseled behind.
But the movie does have enough little moments of the “blink and you’ll miss them” variety to keep the whole thing from going stale. Emma’s younger sister, Katie (Olivia Thirlby, “What Goes Up”) is getting married, but is nowhere to be seen at her own rehearsal dinner. Emma sees Katie off by herself on the patio. In another movie, this would be the point at which Katie confesses with tears in her eyes that she just can’t imagine walking down the aisle without her dearly departed father. Emma would put aside all her hang-ups about monogamy and give Katie an impromptu speech about the virtues of love.
But Katie is not sad. She’s just got the munchies. She tells Emma that one of the bridesmaids had pot and she’s starving, as she indelicately shovels a bowl of strawberries and cut melon into her mouth. Nothing goes together like pot and party dresses.
The real treat of the movie is sitting through it, wondering where you’ve seen the middle-aged doctor around whom Emma makes a fool of herself, then going home to IMDB, and finding out that it’s Cary Elwes—Westley from “The Princess Bride,” who rolled down a hill screaming “as you wish!” and fought off abnormally large rodents.
“No Strings Attached” isn’t going to win any awards for groundbreaking plot or character development, but there are certainly worse things to do on a Saturday night than spend it in bed with Kutcher and Portman.
