No Strings Attached

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Plot:  Emma (Natalie Portman) and Adam (Ashton Kuscher) were childhood friends, and then meet as adults. Soon they are regularly hooking up for sex, and agree to just be friends. They even break-up, and see other people to create some distance. But one thing leads to another, and soon No Strings Attached is off to romantic comedy utopia.

Review:  The premise of No Strings Attached is two busy adults having sex regularly with no strings attached -- or no other commitments. This weak premise is not enough to build a movie around, but three things save it , supporting characters, sex-talk dialog, and Natalie Portman's acting. 


The minor characters included alternate love interests for both Emma and Adam, the best of which is Lucy played by Lake Bell - she was so funny as the nerdy, artsy assistant and Adams 2nd love interest. Kevin Kline as Adam's father has some interesting sitcom scenes.

There are a lot of jokes that are only funny because of their vulgarity and the frank way that the characters deliver them. Some were pretty funny, and none were actually offensive to me. The movie affects coolness by how frank and open it is about sex.

I liked Natalie Portman a lot in Black Swan, and she is good here in a much different role. We occasionally see the great facial acting we saw in Black Swan.

The film is actually a romantic comedy, but it takes a while to realize that. This makes the movie more likable since for a while we don't know where it is going.

Cast: Natalie Portman, Ashton Kuscher, Kevin Kline, Lake Bell

Directed by: Ivan Reitman, who has a cameo as the director of the Glee-like TV show within the movie

Rating: 2.5 stars; Probably would be 2.0 if I were more objective. It was surprisingly good based on the low expectations that I had going in.
 

More:  I was sure that No Strings Attached was written by a man, and that Emma -- the female sex fiend hottie -- was just a male writer trying to projecting the girl he would be if he were a girl -- that is actually a guy in a girl's body. It turns out that the real writers are two people, a woman and a man, Elizabeth Merriweather and co-author Mike Samonek. Of course, the character Adam is a writer, so he is clearly channelling one or both of them.

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Tron: Legacy

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Plot: A young man enters a computer world where his father was imprisoned years before, and battles computerized enemies to escape, with a girl he met there, to the real world.

Review: It is interesting to think about what it is like to live in a mathematical computer world, and Tron imagines a story there -- with a plot line and villains. The story only makes sense in a Science Fiction way, but it keeps our characters moving. There is a strong good guy/bad guy element to the story. Very little time is spent on the motivation for the villains. 


The visuals are interesting, much better than the trailer, which did not do a good job of showing off some of the art direction. There were a few excellent scenes like Zeus' disco, and some of the driving sequences. 


It is escapist fun, and I don't this there is a central morale, although one could write a thesis on all the threads of meaning.  Clearly the importance of the father/son relationship was there, and a basic battle between organic life and computerized perfection. Although organic life is the good side, the movie's Sci-Fi fanbase are going be rooting for the computer. There were multiple yoga references in the film, and as with The Matrix, in that the world is not actually real.

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Garrett Hedlund, Oliva Wilde

Directed by: Joseph Kosinski

Rating: 2.5 stars -- maybe just a little better than that.

More: Quorra is the main the romantic interest for Sam, and she is both really cute and a computer program. To keep Quorra and Sam's relationship from being creepy -- like falling in love with a sex-bot -- she needed to be 'Special.' The eight writers that Disney hired must have labored hard to fix this.  Their solution is awkward and hard to explain, they created a class of computer being that springs organically from the computerized utopia that the elder Flynn created. It takes a long time to realize that Quorra is the last one of these computer-angel creatures, and therefore super-special.

Even More: See my other Blog for a Quorra action figure.


Yet More: What will the sequel be like? Will it be in the real world?