NO STRINGS ATTACHED: It’s Like a Crime Scene in My Pants

No Strings Attached (2011) – Directed by Ivan Reitman – Starring Natalie Portman, Ashton Kutcher, Greta Gerwig, Jake Johnson, Mindy Kaling, Kevin Kline, Chris Bridges, Olivia Thirlby, Lake Bell, Ophelia Loviband, Abby Elliot, Talia Balsam, and Cary Elwes.

NO STRINGS ATTACHED is the kind of movie that tells the wrong story. It concentrates on the relationship between Adam and Emma (Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman), but it’s the most mindless relationship in the film. Adam is completely in love with Emma and Emma is emotionally distant. She just wants to have sex and he agrees because he’s infatuated with her, so they have lots and lots of sex and things get awkward because, well, they’re having lots and lots of sex and he’s infatuated with her and she doesn’t want to feel anything but can’t help herself.

So we have to spend 1 hour and 47 minutes watching them go through all the motions and back and forth and it’s rather tedious. I get that this is kind of the point of a romcom, but does it have to be so bland and predictable and stupid?

I’m much more interested in either the bizarre relationship between Adam’s dad (Kevin Kline) and his ex-girlfriend (Ophelia Loviband) or the growing relationship between his friend Eli (Jake Johnson) and Emma’s friend Patrice (Greta Gerwig). I’m much happier watching Eli and Patrice in their brief bits of relationship growth than in watching Adam and Emma struggle through their issues. That’s the relationship I want to see develop. Is that stupid? Is that wanting something romcoms don’t deliver? Wouldn’t people rather watch that than see two people cause each other misery for 90 minutes until finally realizing what we saw in the first frame?

I don’t get it.

Part of the problem is the script, which is terrible, but part of the problem is the odd pairing of Portman and Kutcher. Portman is way too good an actress to be in something this lame and predictable and lifeless and Kutcher spends most of the movie with a wounded puppy dog look on his face. It’s supposed to convey the fact that he’s in love and knows he can’t admit it to her or he risks losing her, but it comes off like he knows he’s in over his head just being on screen with Portman and Kevin Kline. I’ll say this for Kutcher, though – he might not be able to hang with Portman or Kline but he’s committed to the movie and committed to his character and he ends up coming out okay.

Kutcher is at his best when Portman and Kline are at their worst and it’s largely because of the script. When we get to the point in the film where Adam professes his love for Emma and she rejects him and he gets hurt and says they’ll never see each other again and then they spend months apart, only to have Emma finally realize she loves him and wants him back and blah blah blah, she drives her car and cries and eats doughnut holes and wipes powdered sugar across her face. It has to be one of the worst moments of her career.

A few scenes after that, Adam’s dad is in bed, recovering from an overdose of Purple Drank and Kline has to say, “I’ve six pictures of my c*ck on my phone and two of someone else’s, and I’m still pretty high on the cough syrup, so you can take this with a grain of salt, but we don’t pick who we fall in love with. And it never happens like it should.”

Honestly, someone wrote that and Kevin Kline agreed to say it.

NO STRINGS ATTACHED isn’t the worst movie I’ve ever watched, and there is a certain crashing of worlds going on here that gives the film a car wreck vibe to it, but it’s really just a film that’s one-half short of being mediocre. When I had cable I used to refer to movies like this as “AMC Movies,” because AMC always used to show a lot of really mediocre films with really big name casts. That’s what this is. In ten or twenty or fifty years people will stumble across this movie on whatever passes for their TV dial, see the list of actors, and settle in for a watch and maybe get some small enjoyment out of it.

For me, though, it left me wanting to see the stories we didn’t see rather than the Adam/Emma plot we got stuck with. Greta Gerwig hasn’t been in anything I’ve ever seen, but I’d like to see more of her because she conveys more about her character through her facial expressions than the silly dialogue provides. (Plus, she gets the best line of the film, complaining about her monthly menstrual phase and complains, “It’s like a crime scene in my pants.”) Same goes for Abby Elliot, who has a brief role as a waitress, but still manages to have a real presence on the screen that drew me in to her character far more than Portman did with the empty Emma construct. A romcom focused on the secondary characters who have to live through the silliness of the obvious Adam/Emma relationship would be a hundred times more interesting, and if they could get Gerwig, Elliot, Johnson, Mindy Kaling, Chris Bridges, and Olivia Thirlby to star in it, all the better.

Because that’s really where NO STRINGS ATTACHED falls apart. There’s an actual, honest-to-goodness story here about how single, professional women can be caught between their careers and traditional gender expectations but the film really isn’t interested in exploring any of that. It just wants Emma to be a woman with a job who likes to have casual sex but then gets waylaid by emotions. That’s it – there’s no exploration of that idea beyond her getting drunk at a party, getting jealous over thinking Adam is hooking up with two women she decides are skanks, and then bursting into his apartment.

Alternately, this film could have presented a very real story about Adam and his love for Emma and the gender expectations of his buddies telling him to hook up with anyone and everyone to get over the girl he’s clearly not going to get over. Adam’s a good guy, but he’s a sap, and if STRINGS was actually interested in telling a story, he would have found someone else, someone who had as good a heart as him. Or it would have simply let him gain an identity that wasn’t tied to being in love. Unfortunately, STRINGS doesn’t want to tell a story – it just wants to feed our expectations and so at the end of the film, Emma cries and Adam takes her back and happily ever after is promised.

For nearly everyone.

Just like in real life …

DISNEY’S A CHRISTMAS CAROL: The Ghost of Animated Christmas Performance Capture

Disney’s A Christmas Carol (2009) – Directed by Robert Zemeckis – Starring Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman, Cary Elwes, Sammi Hanratty, Colin Firth, Bob Hoskins, Robin Wright Penn, Ryan Ochoa, and Molly C. Quinn.

When I watched Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol the other night and wasn’t remotely moved by it, I began to wonder if maybe I’d hit my limit on adaptations of Charles Dickens’ classic. Combine this with my general dislike of Jim Carrey and my general dislike of performance capture and my hopes weren’t too high for DISNEY’S A CHRISTMAS CAROL adaptation to win me over. In fact, I only watched it because Netflix had it streaming and I wanted something playing in the background while I wrote the review for Love Actually.

It was to my incredible surprise that by the time Jacob Marley (Gary Oldman) had threatened and warned Ebeneezer Scrooge (Jim Carrey) about what his future held for him I was totally engrossed in the film, and by the time it ended I was willing to rank DISNEY’S A CHRISTMAS CAROL among my favorite adaptations of Dickens’ tale.

This is a prime example of why I like doing these themed months; without spending the month purposely looking for holiday films to watch I wouldn’t bother with a film starring Jim Carrey and made with performance capture, especially when there are other versions of this story that I wanted to see more. (Like Scrooged. How I managed to go all this time without seeing Scrooged is beyond me, but it’s an oversight that’s since been corrected. Expect it to be the next film reviewed.) But because I’m on the lookout for holiday movies this month and because it was streaming on Netflix I’ve found a great film to add to the holiday rotation. DISNEY’S adaptation strikes the perfect balance between being a kid’s movie and an adult’s movie, and Robert Zemeckis has wrung seemingly every bit of humor, fright, and action possible out of this story.

But did it have to be performance capture?

Performance capture is just generally pretty creepy-looking. I enjoyed Zemeckis’ previous movies made with this technique (The Polar Express, Beowulf), but my enjoyment was in spite of the performance capture and not enhanced by it. After seeing several movies made with this technique now, I still have to wonder … why? It’s not as good as live-action, it’s not as good as hand-drawn animation, and it’s not as good as CGI. It just looks … off. If the movie is good I’ll suffer through it, but it’s usually not a pleasant watch.

It’s to Zemeckis’ credit that A CHRISTMAS CAROL is the best performance capture I’ve seen; it looks good enough that I actually didn’t mind watching most of it. I’m not sure why most of the actors play multiple roles (Carrey is not only Scrooge, but all of the Ghosts of Christmas; Oldman is Bob Cratchit, Jacob Marley, and Tiny Tim) except maybe to save some cash for the studio, but it can be a bit disconcerting to see vaguely familiar faces popping up on multiple bodies.

What helps keep things righted, however, is that Zemeckis just might have done the best job in any Christmas Carol adaptation of making London look interesting.

Because honestly, mid-nineteenth century London normally looks like a wet fart – stinky, soggy, and brown.

That’s nothing against the city, but a city that big from that era was awash in greys, browns, and blacks. When you combine that with the general dreary tone of the story, there’s not a lot of room for color in A Christmas Carol, but Zemeckis has done a masterful job of infusing Scrooge’s adventure with a real vibrancy. This adaptation moves, and it moves in loads of color. London is still the same drab, dreary place it always is, but Zemeckis has infused every possible aspect of the story that he can with color and movement.

Zemeckis wisely builds off the cold, muted, dull colors of London by filling out the palette with the Ghosts. As the film progresses, Zemeckis brings more and more color into the film as the action picks up. The Ghost of Christmas Past, for instance, is a flickering, white candle person, while the Ghost of Christmas Present is a big, fat redhead. The first is wispy and quiet while the second is rotund and loud. By the time we get to the Ghost of Christmas Future, Zemeckis slams the palette all the way back down with the midnight black ghost and his nightmarish horses.

There’s plenty of action, too. I absolutely love the way the film treats the ghostly visions, with Scrooge’s contemporary environment often dissolving to reveal the vision. The best example of this comes with the Ghost of Christmas Present as the floor of their ornate room dissolves to reveal the city of London. The room goes swooping over the city, giving us a wonderful and rich vision of the bright, warm room and the harsh, cold city. As creepy as the human characters can be to look at, the environments look amazing.

As for the story itself, it’s A Christmas Carol, and importantly, Zemeckis keeps Carrey contained inside his characters. Maybe Carrey’s at a point in his career where he just can’t go crazy for the entire shoot, or maybe the performance capture process forces him to play roles rather than allowing his roles to become a Carrey caricature. Whatever the case, he’s rarely been better than he is as Scrooge. He’s so good you rarely notice it’s him, whereas the Past and Present Ghosts see Carrey’s features shine through. I like how Zemeckis decides to have Scrooge spend Christmas dinner with his nephew, even if the performance capture version of Colin Firth is creepy to look at.

And that’s what it really comes down to with DISNEY’S A CHRISTMAS CAROL – it’s a really good adaptation that is, at times, really creepy to look at. It’s a bit disconcerting to see Carrey’s and Oldman’s image shining through so many characters, but the story is really well told, and it’s perfectly paced. Even with the creepiness of performance capture, this is a gorgeous film to watch and completely engaging from start to finish.

Be sure to check out the Holiday Review Index for all the Holiday-themed reviews to be found at Atomic Anxiety.