No Strings Attached (Friday, January 21, 2011) (2)

No Strings Attached should be a terrible, terrible movie, but is actually pretty decent and not all that bad. In this Ivan Reitman picture, Natalie Portman plays Emma, a super hot, super smart med student. She meets up with a kid she knew in camp (and later in college), Adam (Ashton Kutcher), who works on a TV show. They both think the other is hot, so they fuck. Afterwards they decide it would be awesome if they could just be fuck-buddies and not actually date.

They start fucking all over the place, in cars, bathrooms, parts of the hospital. At some point Adam asks Emma if she would be more than just a fuck-buddy and actually be his girlfriend. She tells him no and then runs away. This ruins their relationship and their deal.

For such a silly idea, the script (by Elizabeth Meriweather) is actually pretty clever. There is some very funny, sharp dialogue and the flow of the narrative moves very well. I find most romcoms fall off a cliff in the third act as they try to figure out how to boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl in a new way. This one works pretty well, actually - partly, I think, because neither character is particularly a caricature of real people; they are both pretty down to earth people and you can see the situation from both points of view.

Somehow the casting of this seems to have come out of my subconscious. NatPort has long been a boyish crush of mine. She's totally cute and clearly very Jewish (she plays a Jew here, which is nice... or something). Her best friend is played by Greta Gerwig, a newish actress I adore. (I actually love Greta more than Nat.) Coming out of mumblecore, Greta is one of the best and most honest actors working today. She's funny and sweet and her girl-nextdoorness is out of control. She's wonderful here in the scene when all the women in the apartment are on the rag at the same time. ("There's red-velvet in here, right?")

Then there's Lake Bell, a girl I went to high school with who would barely give me the time of day then and certainly wouldn't speak to me now. She plays, bizarrely, the dorky, bookish co-worker of Ashton at the TV studio who is madly in love with him. She wears glasses and is mostly seen with a clipboard and mousy hair. It's a bit of a stretch that in Hollywood a sharp-tongued hottie like Lake would somehow be a meek assistant, but this is a dumb movie, so I won't argue too much about it. This character is actually not really necessary to the film and seems to only be in for one joke in the end credits. If the part is left in, I think Lake should have been Nat's best friend and Greta should have been the nerdy assistant (both roles are pretty small).

I don't know if it's because I have such fantasies about the actresses in the film or that it was actually pretty good, but I really think this movie is very watchable. It's pretty sharply written (with some really terrible lines peppered in, including the kicker line of the film before the credits, which is gawdawful) and very modern. It doesn't get bogged down in super-duper now-ness the way a movie like He's Just Not that Into You did (mentioning Myspace, so that by the time the film came out, the line was already a silly old relic of a bygone era), but feels contemporary nonetheless. I like it. Sue me!

Stars: 2.5 of 4