NO STRINGS ATTACHED

“NO STRINGS ATTACHED” (Ashton Kutcher & Natalie Portman)
This is the perfect date movie . . . if you want to end the relationship.
Adam (Kutcher) meets Emma (Portman) at summer camp when they’re in their early teens. After she consoles him for being treated like a geek by the other kids, he asks her for an uncouthed favor and she simply says 'no'.
They meet again in their late teens & since Ashton doesn’t look like such a geek anymore, Emma invites him on a date. We then see Emma’s mother, a grieving widow at her husband’s gravesite, surrounded by mourners dressed appropriately in black – Except Adam who is wearing bright yellow sweats with Michigan Wolverine lettering. Some audience members snickered at this – It turned me against this film and I knew the thing didn’t stand much of a chance of winning me back. That scene wasn’t funny because NO ONE WOULD EVER DO SOMETHING LIKE THAT. This (supposedly) young woman PURPOSELY RUINED HER FATHER’S FUNERAL – Made a complete mockery of her father’s death while showing a complete disregard for her mother’s devastation. Making Emma one callous bitch.
The film then turns into an episode of ‘Glee’ as we discover Adam’s job is as an assistant on the Ivan Reitman-directed TV show of singing and dancing high school students. The joke being that Reitman is the actual director of the movie. First James L. Burrows releases a total piece of crap & now Reitman sinks to his lowest level with this garbage.
By the time Adam & Emma reach their mid-thirties (& the actors actually start looking their age) they still behave like teenagers. This isn’t funny either, it’s more sad than anything else. ‘No Strings Attached’ is as meaningless as the casual sex these two immature airheads are constantly having as ‘friends with benefits’.
And the writing doesn’t help matters; within a two minute span each of the main characters asks someone, “What up?”
Whilst dining with Adam’s father (Kevin Kline as an over-the-hill one-time child star of an early 70’s sitcom called ‘Great Scott!’) Emma then has the gall to tell dad & his girlfriend (an ‘ex’ of Adam’s) that THEY’RE behaving like children.
Throughout the film Adam acts as though he can’t stand his father - hooking up with his ex-girlfriend was the last straw - yet when he hears that his father has OD’d on cough syrup, a panic-stricken Adam immediately rushes to the hospital, dumping Lucy, the well-built production assistant (Lake Bell) that adores him.
They try to make dad seem... well, I don’t know what Reitman was going for when he filmed a scene of dialogue where Kline states that he’s "58 years old and has 6 pictures of his (penis) on his phone – plus two others of someone else’s (penis)". . . I don’t normally like to use ‘text speak’ when I write, but after hearing this line I did think, “WTF?”
The only entertaining moment came for me when Adam burned a ‘period’ CD for Emma to play when it was her ‘time of the month’ – as Emma was reading off the titles, I felt certain that the obvious choice, Alice Cooper’s “Only Women (Bleed)” would start playing, but it didn’t – wasn’t even on the mix! So, to compensate, I started playing the song in my head – the long version – it was the best 5 minutes of the film.