No Strings Attached seeks to answer the question nobody is asking: «Can sex friends be best friends?
It does at least come around to mildly admitting that it can be difficult to have noncommittal sex without a few pesky emotions getting in the way. And it speculates that adults who pursue a me-centered life will negatively impact themselves and their offspring. But it certainly doesn’t suggest that you should change your ways.
In fact, if anything, there’s a much more focused encouragement here for young and old alike to find their own paths through the �no rules/new rules� of dating and sexuality
�I think this movie does point out, though, that we have to stop acting like casual sex isn’t happening, and start to be realistic about what a modern courting relationship is like,� Kutcher told hollywoodnews.
Of course, the actor did go on to admit that his �realistic� viewpoints don’t always translate to how he runs his own home. �My youngest daughter just went on a date with a kid,� Kutcher continued. �I made him come in. He said hello . He walked her to the door at the end of the night and did all the right things. So that gives me hope.�
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I’m not about to make apologies for No Strings Attached — it’s a soulless movie with zero charm and almost no merits; a film which, if deleted from existence, wouldn’t even make the smallest ripple in the space-time continuum. However, speaking from Natalie Portman’s point of view, I can understand why she made it. After 12 months of hardcore ballet training for Black Swan, she just wanted to slum it. Acting opposite Ashton Kutcher is the equivalent of dropping down a year in school for someone like her.
» The question you need to ask yourself before you buy your ticket is, do you really want to spend two hours in the company of two rich, attractive megastars fucking each other senseless and crying about it? And anyway, what the hell is a ‘sex friend’? No one with an actual fuckbuddy would ever say the words ‘sex friend’.
This sex-com is directed by Ivan Reitman, which means precisely nothing in 2011 other than the fact it mercifully makes Ghostbusters III that little bit further in the distance. In a jaw-dropping gender reversal (*gawps*), Ashton Kutcher plays the soft and sensitive type who falls for Natalie Portman’s feisty, independent woman (*snaps fingers*) who simply doesn’t have time for relationships and has an «emotional peanut allergy» to the word love. Neither character are especially sympathetic or make for particularly good company, nor do you hope for them to end up with one another. It’s a no-score draw, romance-wise.
Still, Kutcher and Portman insist on boning each other relentlessly — though without the nudity offered by fellow A-list wank-drama Love And Other Drugs — and fool themselves that sex is enough: that feelings must never come into the equation. Which is obviously a recipe for lingering close-ups, an indie soundtrack and a play-by-play from the Big Book Of Quirky Relationships, including bringing your date a bunch of carrots after she specifically asked for «no flowers». Cute, but what the fuck are you supposed to do with a bunch of carrots all night? Eat them? Throw them away? Insert them into yourself?
No Strings Attached drops plenty of big, obvious hints that the two leads will — gasp — fall in love, yet insists on using every contrivance possible to keep them apart, including an agonising final third which seems to go on forever. You’re familiar with the now-customary ‘race to the airport’-style mad dash finale? There’s one of them, plus an extra half-hour of will-they/won’t-they horseshit before the shocking conclusion that, yes, they will. And all you have to do is sit through Natalie Portman being a bitch and Ashton Kutcher being a dick for what seems like a lifetime.