NO STRINGS ATTACHED- Review

Natalie Portman has Thor and Your Highness lined up this year, so it's a more promising slate than any Best Actress winner of recent years has had after picking up a little golden bloke. Charlize Theron was in Hancock, Halle Berry was in Catwoman, and Sandra Bullock appears to have disappeared off the face of the Earth. But in the same weekend as Portman won, we got No Strings Attached. Er, can you give that Oscar back, please?

Ashton Kutcher plays Adam, an all-round nice guy who's unfortunately discovered that his TV star dad is boning his ex-girlfriend. Portman serves as executive producer here, and also stars as Emma, an old friend who becomes Adam's friend with benefits after he goes on a self-destructive drunken bender to try and find himself a woman. The terms of their relationship are firmly set out- it's just about the sex and there should be no emotional attachment. But then...!

Yeah, you can probably see how this one's going to pan out from the scant synopsis provided. Hell, you can probably tell from the poster. Fuck, even the trailer has some pretty reliable pointers. The most annoying thing about repetitive romcoms, or repetitive horrors, or repetitive films of any genre, is that my subsequent reviews become repetitive as well. For generic and formulaic filmmaking, No Strings Attached isn't as bad as either The Rite or I Am Number Four, but it remains that all three of these films came out last Friday.

My main bugbear with the film is that it's masquerading as a more offbeat and grown-up romcom, but a 15 certificate for strong language and a prurient fixation does not make a grown-up romcom. And you could never really call it off-beat because ultimately, it doth protest too much. Yeah, sex exists in this, unlike in 12A rated, Katherine Heigl-starring, lowest common denominator tosh. Yeah, there's what you might call an unconventional attitude to romance for a film with these stars and of this type. Yeah, you have to look at Kutcher's bare arse at one point.

These are all things that you don't see in your garden-variety romcom, but at the same time, it's too safe, and too conventional. Even though the terms of a sex-only arrangement are perfectly clear, everyone still winds up adhering to social norms, like wanting to get married and find a soulmate. It's more cheeky than risqué, and not really sexy at all. But it's precisely because it's a film with these stars and a film of this type that it can't stray too far from the beaten path. It's weird, because Portman can only be seen as sort of miscast in this one. There are happy-go-lucky moments that seem so forced when she's acting them that they're destined for scary slo-mo edits in the future.

It's real nightmare fuel at times, and Emma's interactions with Adam gradually make her seem at least 70% as neurotic as Portman's character in Black Swan. Just don't expect her to pick up an Oscar for this one. Kutcher is entirely within his comfort zone, because he always plays the guy who's kind of a player, but not in a way that's threatening. In these films, he's always that guy who women want to screw and men don't mind hanging around with, him being so cool and whatnot. The only room for variation seems to be how annoying he is while doing that, and to his credit, that's dialled way down here, compared to something like Killers.

The rest of the casting is a little strange too. I spent quite a lot of time thinking that Emma's boss, a bearded and fuzzy looking doctor, reminded me of Cary Elwes. And then it turned out he was played by Cary Elwes. It's such a negligible role that you wonder what ever attracted him to it. Kevin Kline plays Adam's dad and just seems pretty happy to be back on the big screen being funny again- I like Kline, and don't begrudge him for making me chuckle in this one.

Ophelia Lovibond, so promising in 4.3.2.1, somehow sounds like an American actress doing a bad British accent when she is in fact British- it's almost like she was directed that way. Greta Gerwig and Olivia Thirlby are more interesting and more natural than the leading lady's character, and if this is beginning to sound like a big cast, that's because it is. So big, in fact, that we get the dreaded credits montage that shows what happened to everyone after Adam and Emma's thread was wrapped up. It's an excruciating footnote- from now on, let's end these films when the credits begin, eh?

No Strings Attached is a romcom that is more like than unlike, and it's too familiar to really distinguish it as its own beast. It made me laugh a couple of times, but not nearly enough. In the weekend of its release, its leads won awards- Portman got Best Actress at the Oscars of course, but Ashton Kutcher picked up Worst Actor at the Golden Raspberries. The former cannot elevate the latter, because she's completely out of her element in this territory. And in any case, it's a film that shows his nipples and not hers- Love and Other Drugs broke more taboos than this pretender.

No Strings Attached is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen No Strings Attached, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

Countdown Conundrum

As something of a regular disclaimer, it's only my opinion here- others are available. As ever, mild spoilers may occur in the process of reviewing, but never so far as to spoil any major plot developments.

Women are good. Hang on... women are usually good. And as Hollywood thinks the World Cup means the rest of the world just stops, and duly aren't releasing many of their big action features in June, the month ahead in cinema looks to be very lady-friendly with the likes of Killers and Letters to Juliet coming in the next few weeks. To kick it off though, we have two films that prominently feature women that also seem to be targeted at men, 4.3.2.1 and She's Out Of My League. As we shall see, one of these things is not like the other.
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4.3.2.1 marks a sensible progression by Noel Clarke, a director who has the serenity to accept that Hollywood blockbusters will always be more widely shown while at the same time driving for British cinema to be a bit more ambitious. And so here we have a film centring around four women over three days in two different cities, with one big crime affecting all of them. The story is told in vignettes that interconnect over the weekend the film covers, as our heroines respectively deal with parents getting divorced, a resentful adoptive brother, an audition for a prestigious musical education and most pressingly, a diamond heist gone wrong...

Ambition, as I've said, is good, and it certainly pays off in 4.3.2.1, and it looks more stylish and well constructed than many other British films of the last year or so. The price it pays is around a million studio logos at the beginning to appease all of its financiers, just so you're appreciating the effort this kind of film takes in the UK from frame one. The trouble is that it's a little disjointed. When we first meet our protagonists, played by Ophelia Lovibond, Tamsin Egerton, Shanika Warren-Markland and Emma Roberts, they're close friends with big plans for the weekend. As they diverge, the waters are muddied somewhat.

The vignette format makes a two hour film feel a lot longer than it really is. That's not a bad thing if it's consistently good, but the countdown to the ending is so overt that by the time we get to the third segment, you'll looking at your watch and wondering how many more stylised flashbacks to the beginning we'll get. It's this that prevents a good film from being great, in my estimation, and I still enjoyed 4.3.2.1 a lot.

What's good about the film is very good. There's a strong sense of humour running throughout and there's some fine acting too. All four of the leads are fantastic, with Lovibond and Warren-Markland in particular showing off what they can do in their first major roles. Likewise, Roberts and Egerton are very likable. As each of the four parts of the story centres on one of them, it'd be easy to overlook the rest of the cast, but they were excellent too. Any film that casts Nick Briggs, voice of the Daleks, as the face of a supermarket chain has to be good in my book. Clarke himself has a role that appears at first to massage his ego, but is nicely and quickly subverted in the course of the plot's escalation.

Gender politics is an interesting topic in this film, really. If the women are put down, they always go down swinging and they're all very capable of getting even, but you wonder if they had to dispense with their clothes in the process. Clarke wrote the script after someone told him he didn't write women well, and he mostly proves them wrong, but he's at cross-purposes when still trying to avoid alienating the audiences who made him successful, i.e. young men. This is most apparent in a lesbian sex scene midway through, with dynamic camera angles on the naked women, set to blaring house music. Compare this to a relatively chaste hetero scene earlier, which is more important to a character's story than the latter scene and unfolds fairly routinely.

4.3.2.1 may be Clarke's most vigorous film to date, and it just barely overshoots the desired effect. The narrative is somewhat entangled in its structure and the gender politics don't quite balance out. To compensate for empowered women, the men are all of the type you see in adverts- incompetent pillocks. Nevertheless, it's a film about four women who are capable, independent and sexualised without being objectified, well-acted by all concerned. Insert joke about not going to see Sex and the City 2 here. This is the more stylish and entertaining alternative, and it's worth supporting in cinemas if you want to see more ambitious British films.
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I exited the cinema after seeing She's Out Of My League with an immediate need to review it. Not because I have anything hugely important to say about how good or bad it is, but simply for posterity. If I don't review it now, I'll have forgotten all about it by tomorrow. It's about Kirk, an airport security guard who has a chance encounter with Molly, an enterprising events planner and all-around "hot chick". On account of an antiquated system, self-esteem issues abound as the two start dating. We're asked to follow little more than why a "10" would date a "5".

And therein lies the problem. This is a film that is entirely superficial and vacuous. All of the conflict comes from the idea that everyone has a ranking out of 10 in terms of attractiveness. Hottest of the hot would be a 10 and The Elephant Man would be a 1, I guess. What absolute bollocks, especially as a topic for a romcom. I say this not only because I'm probably about a 4 myself, which by this film's logic places me in the rafters wearing half a face mask and lusting after a piano player, but because it sucks any potential romance right out of the film. This is a romantic comedy without the romance!

More than that, because Alice Eve's buxom Molly is "a hard 10", it requires every other character to act like a complete moron around her. If they're not slack-jawed from awe at her cleavage or smile or whatever pixel-perfect bit of anatomy is showcased at any given point, they're being ridiculously misogynistic and sexually harassing her in some way or another. The consequence of all this is that when the film reaches its woobie stages and has morals like "If somebody loves you, then you're a 10 too", it completely dismisses everything that comes before and after.


Jay Baruchel is more or less overshadowed by the superficial goings-on, but he's a much better actor than most of the others who feature here. He can't excavate any memorable moments from the script though, instead reduced to bantering inanely with his three buddies. You know, that dynamic of four friends that hasn't been done a million times since The Hangover alone, never mind The 40-Year-Old Virgin or even Sex and the City. The comedy falls flat more than it soars. At best it manages to hover limply every now and then, mostly courtesy of supporting roles by Krysten Ritter and TJ Miller.

What depressed me most about it was not the systematic approach to romance that prevails for most of the running time- and boy, does that running time feel a lot longer than it's supposed to be- was the credits. It was specifically the writing credit, for Sean Anders and John Morris. They wrote last year's Sex Drive, which had a piss-poor pun for a title but was much better and much funnier than you'd think. The very worst you could say about it is that it's a guilty pleasure, and I can remember that better than a film I saw today. More recently, Anders and Morris penned Hot Tub Time Machine, which I didn't realise until reading around this one. And now here they steal no less than two bawdy setpieces from the first American Pie films and utterly forget to write any jokes that raise anything louder than a small titter.

This film is balls. Trevor Eve, the elder Eve, is well-renowned on British television for taking the lion's share of close-up shots and he appears here with his daughter playing her dad in the film as well. It looks like Alice Eve has inherited his thirst for the limelight, because She's Out Of My League is cinematic onanism for her. More disappointingly than anything else, it is a romantic comedy without romance and without any real laughs. I can feel myself forgetting it even as I type. It's not awful, but it's not sweet, original or likable either, and from the writers of a film I previously enjoyed, it's especially unforgivable.
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If you've seen 4.3.2.1 or She's Out Of My League and want to share your thoughts on the film or on my reviews, please comment below. If you want to rest assured that I'll stop mentioning Sex and the City as a frame of reference from here on out, have no fear- we're done with that.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

My Bloody Quarantine

I've still got legs! And with my limbs intact, I really can't ignore the fact that I have to review Valentine's Day, giving even more thought to two hours of my life that would have been more pleasurably spent slamming my head in a car door while the massive cast took it in turns to cut the all the webs between my fingers and toes with scissors. Cringing? That's nothing to actually watching the film.

The sole reason this gets a post of its own is because it is literally tainted. I have also seen From Paris with Love, which... SPOILER ALERT... was pants, but not so pants as to deserve the fate of being "the one I reviewed alongside Valentine's Day." Yes folks, this is the blog's first ever conscious quarantine of a film review.

***WARNING***
THE FOLLOWING REVIEW CONTAINS EXTREME PREJUDICE TOWARDS AWFUL SHIT.
IF YOU OR ANYONE YOU KNOW HAVE BEEN AFFECTED BY AWFUL SHIT, PLEASE PROCEED WITH CAUTION.

Sigh. OK, here goes. If I were to take a run at what this film's about, I could sum it up by saying it follows a number of tumultuous relationships and unlikable people on one Valentine's Day in LA. More operatively, very famous actors playing unlikable people. The traditional, but largely unconscious format of these reviews usually sets aside a paragraph to talk about the cast and their performances, so I'll take a run at that now. Deep breath...

Ashton Kutcher is irksome and twee, Jennifer Garner is a downright stupid character played by a usually enjoyable actress, Patrick Dempsey succeeds only for being a smarmy fuck finally cast in the thankless role of "Smarmy Fuck #2", Queen Latifah is still pointing out that she's a larger lady for anyone who hasn't noticed, Jamie Foxx continues to bend over and take an arse-fucking to his career in the name of a paycheck, Jessica Biel's character spends the whole film voicing problems with commercialised love that really should've been considered by the writers, Anne Hathaway is winsome but underused, Topher Grace builds in annoyance on the foundation of the less than sterling performance he gave in Spider-Man 3, Taylors Swift and Lautner are just abominable, Hector Elizondo is bewildered and Shirley Maclaine sort of deceives him and then dresses up as a Quality Street at the end, and finally, Jessica Alba, Bradley Cooper and Julia Roberts are all pointless addendums to a horrifying running time.

Yes, this film runs for 125 minutes and covers no more ground than a dead baby turtle. Cringing again? A dead baby turtle would hardly be more abhorrent than this film. In the same way as (500) Days of Summer was a terrific romantic comedy but not a great date movie, I literally cannot imagine a worse date movie that this. No other film in recent memory tries so tepidly to quantify love with dialogue that sounds like it comes from the trailer narration of a Jennifer Aniston film rather than anything else. The odd thing is that this film came out on the weekend of February 14th, and another Garry Marshall-directed film was re-released for the day, Pretty Woman. Valentine's Day has, unbelievably, become a huge hit in the States, but it's almost like they were hedging their bets by counter-programming against their own awful piece of celluloid crap.

Some will call me bitter- that's the stock excuse against people who call Valentine's Day the crass and commercialised greeting-card-company funding drive that it actually is. No, sorry, this is just a bad film. The mooted sequel, New Year's Eve may be doubly terrible, but it won't be certainly won't be better than this. If Valentine's Day is about love, then it's not about watching Valentine's Day, and given how that's the one day of the year when you're presumably supposed to watch this awful shit in years to come, they've failed on every single level. Even by the measure of people who like it, and I presume those who contributed to the Memorable Quotes page on IMDB do, there is not a single funny line in the thing. It's a film about a bunch of attractive actors tricking you into an auditorium to steal your money and worse, what feels like a year of your life. It is just abysmal- it's not the worst film I've ever seen, but it's down there.

To end on a sensitive note- February 14th isn't just one day of the year where you should be romantic with your loved one. You should show your appreciation all year round, signify your feelings with every loving caress. And most importantly, the time not to watch Valentine's Day with them is all year round. Avoid this film like genital warts.

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Righto, everyone to the radiation showers if you read through all of that, and then back here later in the week for the review of From Paris With Love, which will likely be paired off with either Precious or The Crazies, and then there'll be a look at Disney's Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland by Disney at the weekend. If you've seen Valentine's Day, please do get in touch with the comments below. We have to stick together here- we didn't die, so we can presumably survive anything. Be strong, everyone. Jesus loves you.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch it. Really, I know I did, but don't go and see it. Don't!

The Twin Dilemma

January is traditionally a dreary month in the cinematic calendar, and you could say it's been a bit one note, falling back on the traditional tropes of vampire films, music biopics and post-apocalypse films. Right at the end of the month, we have two romantic comedies, Up in the Air and All About Steve. As something of a regular disclaimer, it's only my opinion here- others are available. As ever, mild spoilers may occur in the process of reviewing, but never so far as to spoil any major plot developments.

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Up in the Air is obviously not to be confused with Pixar's Up, in a title-related oversight that's only surpassed by last year giving us post-apocalyptic animation 9 and musical luvvie-fest Nine. Semantics aside, Up in the Air is all about Ryan Bingham, a specialist contracted by companies to fly around America firing their employees for them. This jet-setting lifestyle is without strings or attachments, and that's just the way Ryan likes it. His life is disrupted by the arrival of Natalie, who threatens to ground him with her more cost-effective proposal for Ryan's company. Ryan aims to prove that a personal touch is needed by taking Natalie with him as he works, despite lacking anything close to a personal connection himself.

Jason Reitman's latest is closer to Thank You For Smoking than to Juno, covering similar ground with George Clooney's Ryan being a middle-aged man who has problems relating to his relatives because of his job. Up in the Air is a considerably lighter film, veering towards romantic comedy rather than delivering harsh satire. Although my previous exasperation with the worst shortcuts of the genre have been well-documented, I found there was a lot to enjoy in this.

Clooney isn't really straying outside of his comfort zone as an actor to play Ryan, but then he's played enough oddballs and idiots in recent films to warrant a return to his tried and tested formula. The last time he was playing "typical Clooney", he was an animated fox, so I'll cut the guy a break. He is the only cast-member of Batman & Robin I've forgiven to date. Besides which, it's the script that makes Ryan such a sympathetic character rather than the performance.

In fairness, I can't go without mentioning Anna Kendrick's excellent performance as Natalie for one major reason. It was bugging me all the way through because I recognised Kendrick from something else. I gave her IMDB a look, and it turns out she's been slumming it as a supporting character in the Twilight films! One of the really superfluous characters who exists to praise Bella! And yet she can give performances like this!


My incredulity at this really knows no bounds, but suffice it to say that she's one of the few performers in Twilight who I actually rate, and she's brilliant in this. Her chemistry with Clooney is totally platonic, and really complements the sparkling and witty script.

Vera Farmiga and Jason Bateman are on fine form too, and the film enjoys the traditional 20% extra quotient of awesomeness that I award any film for featuring Sam Elliot. The man's a legend, and I have no problem with the fact that he seems to be channel that scene he had with Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski in this.

On top of the central character study of Ryan though, there's a motif around what it is to lose your job. Ryan goes from place to place firing people, with Reitman casting people who had actually lost their jobs as the unfortunate victims of Ryan's schtick. And then of course Ryan is in danger of becoming obsolete himself if Natalie's proposal is accepted by his bosses.

In this economy, it's a particularly timely subject for a film. Although it's just not practical to do what Clooney does and embark on an affair with Vera Farmiga, the underlying message is that your job shouldn't define who you are as a person. It's not just grasping at the heartstrings like your bog-standard romcom- it's actually really profound. Maybe my personal enjoyment of the film is down to having lost two jobs during the recession, which they're now saying is over, but it's like Vietnam or a particularly timely joke- you had to be there. That aside, it is still a very well-crafted film.

Rarely predictable and highly enjoyable, Up in the Air is that elusive beast that I'll always praise whenever it appears- a romcom that doesn't glamorise deplorable characters or resort to cookie-cutter formula, and instead tells an enjoyable story. Clooney's playing a character whose line of work is becoming obsolete, but in real life, he's continuing to pick interesting projects like this one instead of resting on his laurels. Despite an utterly schmaltzy last line that made me feel physically sick for a couple of minutes, this is a satisfying and likable romantic comedy.


Now, what to say on the subject of All About Steve? It follows Mary Horowitz, a relentlessly twee crossword constructor who lives with her long-suffering parents while her flat is being fumigated. They set their daughter up on a blind date with Steve, a news cameraman who is frequently on the road. When Steve tries to let Mary down gently, she misreads the signs and sets out across country to er... stalk him. Yeah, really. Hilarity ensues, I say with the largest dollop of irony your web browser can support.

Tonally, it is all over the place. With its subject matter, I reckon that with the raw footage, an editing suite and some creepy music, even a monkey could transform it into a very passable horror film. Maybe reshoot all the scenes with Mary's parents so they're tied to a bed, Misery-style, everytime they appear. In trying to set up a message for individuality, what the writer has actually done is cast Sandra Bullock as an overbearing and unlikable woman.

More than that, there are two films at war with each other in All About Steve. There's the aforementioned horror film of Mary's character, mixed in with some element of genuinely funny satire of 24 hour rolling news culture. I wouldn't say a whole film around Thomas Haden-Church's conceited newsman would be funny, but I did laugh at some of the jokes involving him for the same reason I laugh at Charlie Brooker's Newswipe. What this film does is take two films that would be fairly mediocre and merge them into a gestalt of incredibly inventive rubbish.

Early on in the film, Mary 'hilariously' ponders whether brain cancer is better than a lobotomy, or vice versa, and for a while I was thinking I'd prefer both to watching any more of the film. I'd went in expecting to hate the film, come back here and make some Kermodian declaration that if I saw 10 films worse than All About Steve in 2010, I would quit reviewing.

Don't get me wrong, it is absolutely awful, but when I'm constantly complaining that romantic comedies have a cookie-cutter formula that means you can tell the ending of any given film just from watching the trailer, this is something different. It goes to absurd and asinine extremes to be different, but I can't deny it's different.

It circumvents "so bad, it's good" and settles back in "bad" territory again, but there's something incredibly entertaining to watch about that. I can't really fault the performances so much as the writing, and although this may just be me finally having snapped, I have to make this statement- this film is the reason why I go to the cinema.

Let me put it this way, to conclude- All About Steve is like the dark twin of Up in the Air. Reitman's film subverts the traditional romcom template with likable characters and relatable situations. This film does it with cartoonishly abhorrent characters and a set piece where some deaf children fall down a mineshaft at a funfair. Reitman's film is great, and All About Steve is just awful. But my God, it's trying.

It's a one star out of five film, make no mistake, but it did make me laugh, which was way more than I was expecting. For sheer innovation of awfulness, and the fact that it's actually challenging me to write objectively about a film I really ought to hate with every iota of my being, I have to give some small acclaim. Very small. Really, don't pay to see this.

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You're probably all horribly confused now, but that's why this post is named for a similarly rubbish Doctor Who story from 1984. Basically, if you want an unequivocally well made and well judged romcom, see Up in the Air. If you want to challenge yourself a little more, join the ranks of the four or so people in the UK who've been to see All About Steve. And if you've seen either, why not share your comments below?

Given the absolute chaos of advertising that seems to be going on with The Lovely Bones, I have no idea if that's out this Friday or next month. That aside, the next trips to the cinema are likely to cover Ninja Assassin, Precious and/or Edge of Darkness.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.