adminDirector: Ivor Reitman
Cinema: Eastgate
Running time: 105 minutes
Age restriction: Adults only
Type of film: sex comedy
Most film reviews confine themselves to what the audience sees on the screen.
This one will certainly arrive at that; but first I must report that “No Strings Attached,” for me, came with a lot of baggage.
At the outset, and very important to me, it was revealed that its star, Natalie Portman, was also one of the producers. (They are “the money people.”)
It is unlikely that I shall ever be objective or even open-minded about a film in which Natalie Portman is not only the star, but one of its “backers” and producers.
My interest in this actress dates back 19 years, when, at age 12 and living in Britain, to which her family had emigrated from their native Israel, she made a couple of little noted films in which she played the child she then was.
The rest of this review about “No Strings Attached ” should be read with the understanding that I find myself very disappointed in the route this actress has taken. Undoubtedly, it was my judgment which was at fault – but who is ever really willing to take that into account?
The film is excessively foul mouthed and moves Hollywood another inch forward in the depiction of sex for sex’s sake, while, oddly, never showing a smidgen of nudity.
In the film Natalie is Emma, an advanced-student-doctor.
Ashton Kutcher is Adam, one of the “dog’s bodies” who put together the films which make up California’s d’être.
They meet, on the rebound, and clearly, openly and in accord, decide that their relationship will contain only sex and leave out the emotion which normally attends it.
They are determined to stay “best friends,” not allowing jealousy or proprietary feelings to enter in, (any person who has lived as much as 15 years in this world could have told them they are “whistling Dixie in the dark,” to use an Americanism for “inviting disaster.”)
And so it does in this film; but along the way we are witness to another step down which Hollywood is taking to what I predict will be a stage from which the public’s revulsion will compromise the film industry’s very existence.
A couple of “novelties” along the way keep the pot boiling.
Adam’s father, played by the 68-year-old Kevin Kline, takes up with one of Adam’s cast offs.
Roger, a medical student colleague of Emma’s in the “teaching hospital,” fancies himself “the one she marries,” taking in his stride the intervening carrying on with Adam which his fiance’s Emma is openly engaging in. Parents of the respective bed-mates are shown to be supportive of the “experience” their offspring are getting.
Discussion of the relative merits of the men’s sex objects is out in the open as if it were their choice of neckties being commented upon. Am I opening myself to the accusation that I am an old fashioned fuddy-duddy?
Online Reporter