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 …

SILVERADO: I Got There Just Short of Too Late

Silverado (1985) – Directed by Lawrence Kasdan – Starring Kevin Kline, Scott Glenn, Danny Glover, Kevin Costner, Brian Dennehy, Linda Hunt, Jeff Goldblum, Rosanna Arquette, John Cleese, Ray Baker, Lynn Whitfield, and Jeff Fahey.

Lawrence Kasdan’s SILVERADO is determined to be both a classic Western and a non-traditional Western. The film contains plenty of gun fights, scoundrels, anti-heroes, shifty locals, revenge, testosterone, big shots of open spaces, and clustered shots of a small town built in the mud and out of wood, but it also steadfastly refuses to give us a traditional tough guy and it refuses to have any of the violence lead to any actual consequence.

Kasdan’s script is a technically proficient work that’s probably not taught in too many film schools anymore, but should be because everything in SILVERADO is here for a reason, a pretty solid achievement for a film that clocks in at over 2 hours. Kasdan also masterfully “tricks” you into his script. In the opening half hour where he introduces the main characters, Kasdan imbues SILVERADO with a whimsical energy (at least, whimsical for a Western, at least.) Paden (Kevin Kline) has a relaxed approach to life; left for dead in the middle of the desert by scoundrels who took his horse and possessions, leaving him with only his one-piece red undergarments, Paden has simply decided to lay in the sun and wait for the end.

Emmett (Scott Glenn) is established in the film’s firs scene as the traditional Western bad-ass, killing a group of men who’ve come to kill him, but the competently shot action scene where Emmett stays inside his shack and kills people through the walls and ceiling can’t compete with the image of Paden lying peacefully in the sand, and then his first words to Emmett, hoarsely whispered from his prone position: “Pleased to meet you.” Kline is so good as Paden that I’m willing to forgive his role in the mostly dreadful Wild Wild West.

When Paden and Emmett had first come to Turley, Paden sees the man who stole his horse and he goes into the nearest store to buy a gun to get the horse back. He takes the nicest gun out of the case but the only money he has is the single coin piece Emmett gave him to help out with some clothes, so he ends up leaving the store with the crummiest gun in the case. He moves to the middle of the street, still wearing only those red overall undies, putting bullets in the creaky gun as the horse thief rides down on him, shooting at Paden without success. One of the bullets goes through the undies right at the crotch, the thermals hanging low enough to not damage anything hanging. Paden finally gets his bullet in and shoots the man dead.

After Paden kills the guy, the scene cuts to him getting happily licked in the face by his horse. The army officer investigating the incident asks Paden why he should take his word that the horse is Paden’s.

“Can’t you see this horse loves?” Paden asks.

“I had a woman do that to me once,” the officer replies back, “but that didn’t make her my wife.”

The scene wonderfully blends violence with humor, presenting scene as amusing as it is violent, which seems to portend that SILVERADO is going to be more pleasant than anything else, with a West that’s clearly created for a Hollywood production.

This scene also introduces one of the film’s antagonists in Cobb (Brian Dennehy), a rough older guy in whose gang Paden used to ride. Dennehy gives the best performance in a film full of great performances; every scene he’s in he owns and the back-and-forth between him and Kline is a pure treat to watch, Cobb’s grinning wickedness perfectly countering with Paden’s outer calm.

Kline plays Paden as a perfectly affable guy, but though the exterior is cool, he’s wary of his insides burning too bright. He has a code, but it’s not the traditional tough guy code you might expect to find in a Western. Instead, when Emmett and Paden ride into the town of Turley, finding Emmett’s manchild-like brother Jake (Kevin Costner) arrested for murder and set to hang. Emmett tells Paden he’s going to break Jake out of jail and Paden tells Emmett somberly that he’s going to have to deal himself out. He doesn’t get too deep into why, but he Paden and Emmett head into a saloon, Paden sees the guy who stole his hat, and another thief gets gunned down by the calm Paden.

With Paden now in jail alongside Jake, he decides to help him escape.

Funny the things jail can do to a man.

Turley also contains another of Kasdan’s “tricks” into getting you to think SILVERADO is just going to be an enjoyable Western – John Cleese is the sheriff. Now, Cleese doesn’t do anything silly. In fact, he’s downright no nonsense. Paden and Emmett are having lunch at a saloon when Mal (Danny Glover) comes in and asks for a drink. This becomes a big deal because Danny Glover is black, which means Mal is black, which means there’s plenty of white folk that don’t take too kindly to his kind being around. The saloon keeper wants him gone, some local cowboys try to rough him up. Paden and Emmett just sit there and watch – it’s not their fight. That’s not to say they’re not moved by what’s going on, as Paden mentions to Emmett (apparently lost in his dinner plate but actually completely aware of what’s going on around him) that the situation seems downright unfair. Emmett wants to know, “Unfair to who?”

Showing that a dude on the frontier is a cool guy because he’s nice to a non-white is a a trope as old as white people have been on the American frontier, of course, and Paden and Emmett prove their progressiveness by taking Mal’s side (the truthful side) when Sheriff John Cleese shows up to figure out what’s what. Sheriff Langston lets Mal go but tells him to get out of town, then sits down at Emmett and Paden’s table, helps himself to some of their bread, and proceeds to interrogate them as to why they’re in town. “Just meeting a guy,” Emmett tells him, and describes his brother.

“I know where he is,” Langston tells him, and then we’re off to the jail.

Jake and Paden escape with some help from Emmett and the threw cowboys ride hard out of town, Langston and his posse hard on their trail. When the posse closes in, a gunshot is heard and bullets start hitting things near Langston. One of the deputies tells the sheriff they’re lucky this shooter is such a bad shot, but Langston calls him an idiot and says, “He’s hit everything he’s aimed at.” The shooter is Mal, paying Paden and Emmett back, and when he knocks Langston’s hat off his head, the sheriff remarks that, “Today, my jurisdiction ends right here.”

That moment is the demarcation point in the movie. Having suitably introduced his four heroes, and created a bond between them, Kasdan’s picture turns much more serious. SILVERADO doesn’t get glumly serious like Kasdan’s later Western, Wyatt Earp (which seems determined to have absolutely no fun), but the men ride to Silverado (helping a caravan along the way, in part so Paden can hit on Rosanna Arquette) and settle into their lives.

For Mal, it’s a visit to his parent’s homestead, where he finds the main building nearly burned to the ground and hordes of cattle grazing on the land. His parents are nowhere in sight, but later that night his father returns and tells him he’s being run off the land by the cattle rancher Ethan McKendrick (Ray Baker). After Mal scares off two of McKendrick’s thugs, they return the next day with more men and kill Mal’s dad.

For Emmett and Jake, it’s reconnecting with their sister’s family, but there’s pre-existing bad blood with McKendrick. Emmett went to jail for killing McKendrick’s father in self-defense years earlier, and while McKendrick says that’s in the past, he wouldn’t make a very good antagonist if that were true. McKendrick sends his men after Emmett and Jake, kidnapping their nephew in the process. Emmett only survives the ambush thanks to the intervention of Mal. The travelling companions have now been joined as allies against McKendrick. With Emmett to hurt to travel, Mal goes to town for him, but he’s betrayed by “Slick” Stanhope (Jeff Goldblum), a gambler who’s involved with Mal’s sister (Lynn Whitfield), and Cobb’s men get the jump on him.

Cobb is the would-be bigshot of Silverado, as he’s both the sheriff of the town and the owner of the main saloon. He hires Paden to help run the place, and uses Paden’s affection for Stella (Linda Hunt), the other co-manager of the place to keep Paden out of the conflict that’s coming between McKendrick and Emmett, Jake, and Mal. Paden agrees, but Stella won’t have it, and Paden asserts himself back into the fray.

What follows is a raid by Mal, Paden, and Emmett (Jake has been kidnapped by the McKendricks) on the McKendrick compound, and then a big gunfight in town that sees the four men emerge victorious and virtually unscathed. The film’s final action piece sees a showdown between Paden and Cobb that ends with Paden victorious.

If there’s a complaint about SILVERADO it’s this final sequence that sees all the good guys end up happy and alive, but then you realize that despite the serious themes since our protagonists left Turley, SILVERADO was never really meant to be a realistic Western as much as it’s meant to be a new kind of Hollywood Western, built on the classic model but infused with contemporary sensibilities. Westerns were out of style when Kasdan made SILVERADO, and so it’s a wise decision to play it relatively safe and give people a happy ending. That’s not to say SILVERADO is simplistic, because it’s not. Kasdan gives you plenty of stuff to chew on – far, far too much to get into here, but know this if you haven’t seen the movie – SILVERADO is a professional movie made by smart people and starring fantastic actors. Brian Dennehy gives the performance of his career, Kevin Kline gives one of his best, and the rest of the all-star cast is right there with him.

SILVERADO is one of those films that always seems to get overlooked or fails to get mentioned alongside the great Westerns, and while I certainly wouldn’t put it in the rarefied air category of Once Upon a Time in the West and Unforgiven, I wouldn’t put it all that far behind them, either. SILVERADO is an immensely satisfying and enjoyable film.

WILD WILD WEST: Never Drum on a White Lady’s Boobies at a Big Redneck Dance

Wild Wild West (1999) – Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld – Starring Will Smith, Kevin Kline, Salma Hayek, Kenneth Branagh, M. Emmett Walsh, Bai Ling, and Ted Levine.

Sometimes a really talented and eclectic cast comes together and makes something magical.

This is not one of those times.

Oh, was that an obvious, easy, and incredibly lame attempt at humor? Well, imagine that for 105 minutes and you’ve got WILD WILD WEST, a film with lots of talent and not much to admire. Here’s what I like: Kevin Kline as President Grant. Here’s what I don’t like: almost everything else.

This is not to say that WILD WILD WEST isn’t worth a watch, because the effects are nice, the steampunk look is kinda cool, it’s paced exceedingly well, and … um, well, you get to see half of Salma Hayek’s ass. WILD WILD WEST almost works as a sort of bright, stupid, exaggerated cartoon, but it fails even in that regard because as evil as Dr. Arliss Loveless (Kenneth Branagh) is, it gets a little old listening to Jim West (Will Smith) make crack after crack about Loveless missing his legs and Loveless making racial crack after racial crack at West’s expense. The jokes just aren’t that good, so it’s like listening to two idiots on the playground picking the most obvious target of their opponent and hitting it repeatedly.

The biggest problem with WEST, however, is that there is almost zero chemistry between Smith and Kevin Kline – at least, when Kevin Kline is playing Artemus Gordon instead of the President. Their team-up is just too manufactured – West is the headstrong, shoot first gunslinger and Gordon is the contemplative, shoot never scientist – and Smith and Kline just don’t compliment each other at all. It’s clear that Sonnenfeld is trying to replicate his Men in Black success by having Will Smith’s personality team up with a straight-laced white guy, but where the hardness of Tommy Lee Jones made for an appropriate foil for Smith, Kevin Kline’s comedic dopiness doesn’t.

Forget that nothing here feels like a Western, nothing here feels like it belongs together. Smith and Kline never get on the same page, and their silly, childish bickering throughout the film gets old before it even gets going.

It’s probably unfair to blame one of them over the other, but the problem is Smith’s Jim West. While there are plenty of problems with the conception of Kline’s Artemus Gordon, at least that character is consistent through the film. Smith’s West, on the other hand, is here and there, shifting between sullenness at the memory of his parents murder and making cheap jokes at someone else’s expense. Because the film isn’t all that interested in being serious, the treatment of West’s parents feels like it’s been shoehorned into the movie just because someone thought, “Hey, we need to have a serious back story.”

“Why?”

“Um … because we did that in Men in Black?”

The film would’ve been better without it, because the introduction of this story angle – that Loveless was responsible for the murder of an entire freed black town, including West’s parents – makes this a revenge flick, which puts that subplot at odds with the generally comedic presentation of the rest of the film.

Unfortunately for Smith (and us), a film like this needs a rock-solid center for the zaniness of the rest of the film to work against. Smith has an incredibly likable and personable persona, but the film would’ve been better toning Smith’s charm down and being the straight man to all of Sonnenfeld’s gags. Instead, Smith and Sonnenfeld conspire to have Jim West be the super-cool, self-contained gunslinger in one scene and the “I can’t believe this is happening!” screamer in the next. Compare that to Kline’s take on President Grant, who stoically stands there, facing down Loveless’ giant steampunk spider while everyone else runs away screaming. With Smith’s West, there’s just too much performance in the performance, and if he could have toned down his act, and made us believe in this character’s quest for revenge …

Well, maybe the studio thought that if you’re going to hire Will Smith, you might as well get Will Smith to do all the things that make people pay to see a Will Smith movie.

It’s a shame because Smith is obviously a talented, if non-risk-taking, performer.

None of this is to suggest that the fault for this entire movie lays at Smith’s feet. As I mentioned earlier, there’s no chemistry at all between Smith and Kline, and the awful script couldn’t have inspired them to give much of a crap beyond their professionalism. There’s a lot of infantile boob jokes (including the title of this review, which is one of the funnier lines in the film), including a numbing scene where they play a game of “touch my breast” with the fake boobs Gordon has made for his women’s costume.

Because he’s a master of disguise. He’s terrible at it, but I suppose that’s supposed to be funny.

Salma Hayek is a bright spot playing Rita, who cons the two guys into helping her by playing the damsel in distress. She tells them she wants to find her father, but it’s really her husband she’s after, and her eye-batting, exaggerated performance generally works to pit the two guys against each other. But it’s not nearly enough. Kenneth Branagh tries, too, in a truly ridiculous role that he nonetheless commits to playing to the nth degree, and it looks like he’s enjoying a chance to ham it up in what he realizes is a silly role in a silly movie.

Looking back at when WILD WILD WEST was released, I think part of the intensity of the negative reaction was that in 1999 it didn’t seem like Smith could do anything wrong, but then he releases a bad movie and a bad theme song, and it all felt a little too calculated. In hindsight, WILD WILD WEST is not a good film (and it’s especially not a good western as it feels about as “western” as Star Trek‘s alien planets feel alien – like it was all done on a sound stage), but it’s not the worst movie ever made, nor the worst movie any of the main actors associated with the film ever made. It’s just a bad film, and a misstep in Smith’s career. Obviously, the guy’s done okay for himself since then so he probably learned some lesson from making a bad movie, but I wish the lesson learned had got him to actually accept roles like Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained and stop taking roles like Hitch.

Because Hitch really, really blows.

I need to take back the crack I made at WEST during my Jonah Hex review, which I titled, “Less Sucky than Wild Wild West, More Sucky Than Everything Else.” It’s more like a suckiness tie, really. My bad!

At least WILD WILD WEST has Ted Levine in it, so at the very least you can make the film better by adding, “Put the f*cking lotion in the basket!” or “Monk!” after every sentence he utters.