No Strings Attached
This entry was posted on 6/25/2011 10:24 AM and is filed under Movies.
When this movie, starring Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman first appeared in trailers, I thought it looked like the most offensive piece of crap imaginable and immediately put it out of my mind.
The premise is the title; lets' have sex without any emotional attachments. Like cats!
Then my brother, who's opinion on movies I've respected in the past (Andy, you've got some 'splainin' to do) went and saw it and he loved it.
He raved about it.
He called it the When Harry Met Sally for the new generation.
He said it's an exploration of the same old story; that men and women can't be friends, sex always gets in the way and when you set yourself up like that, it's going to fail and when it fails IT HURTS LIKE A BITCH.
All that is true, but there are a few differences between No Strings Attached and When Harry Met Sally;
one is funny and the other isn't.
One is charming and the other isn't.
One is a grotesquerie in which the leads behave like disgusting, skanky libertines to whom sex has no more romance or meaning attached to it than a good bowel movement and the other isn't.
As my sister Katie wrote; it should been titled "No Charm Attached", "No Wit Attached", "No Script Attached", "No Comedy Attached" or "No Romance in the Same Hemisphere, Much Less Attached". And those are the kind things she wrote.
If No Strings Attached is the When Harry Met Sally for the younger generation, I weep for the younger generation.
Natalie Portman just won an Oscar for Black Swan, in which she sucked. She also sucked in this. In fact, she's now vying with Catherine Heigl for the top of my "Worst Actress Alive Today" list, which is funny because Ms. Heigle was Ashton K's co-star in the last rom-com I saw him in, Killers, which also suffered from the fact that he didn't seem to know that being funny was an option. Someone should tell that meat head that the 'comedy' part of romantic COMEDY means 'be funny'.
As if No Strings Attached weren't bad enough, the two leads, whose only asset is apparently their good looks, didn't even look good!!
Ms. Portman and Mr. Kutcher's hair and makeup and lighting crews should be fired and banned from Holly wood forever. In fact, they should be deported to some dark little country where they can never inflict their professional depravity on the rest of us again.
It's bad enough that the idea was offensive, the script lame and the acting hackish enough to sink a good script; but if you can make Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher look greasy and homely, YOUR LACK OF TALENT HAS RISEN TO THE LEVEL OF PURE EVIL.
I'm going to have to watch a Princess Bride/Roxanne double header just to get the slime of this one out of my head.
Andy.
