Quick Review: No Strings Attached

There may be a new trend in movies: romantic couplings in which the guy gets all gushy and falls in love with the girl, but she just wants sex. There was "Love and Other Drugs" a couple of months ago with Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway. Coming up later this year is "Friends With Benefits," starring Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis. Right now there's "No Strings Attached," with Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman as the two friends, Adam and Emma -- actually, it doesn't seem they're very close friends at first; the film starts with flashbacks which seem to be the only times they've met prior to arriving at the present -- who have sex and afterwards agree to keep having sex without dating or anything romantic. It's Emma's doing, although there's not as specific a reason as Anne Hathaway's character in "Love and Other Drugs" had. She's just a standard commitment-phobe. Sure enough, Adam starts falling for her and tries to win her heart. It was better than I expected, and Portman shows she can do comedy, although it has a sappy and predictable end. It's rated R and, besides some raunchy language, features a sighting of Kutcher's bare butt. Between that and how much skin Gyllenhaal showed in his movie, Justin Timberlake has to step up. Also, "No Strings Attached" was titled "Friends With Benefits" before production began, and Kunis and Portman went at it in "Black Swan," so it seems to me that, with so much already in common between the films, Kutcher and Timberlake should have a sex scene in a movie as well. My grade: B.

Quick Reviews: Killers, Splice

It's time to catch up with the movies. I'm not sure if these are still in the theaters at this point, so they may not be helpful if you're trying to pick a movie to see this weekend. Sorry. Regular readers know I sometimes procrastinate with these. And this is a case where these two different films arrive at the same grade for different reasons.

I had low expectations for "Killers." First, the female lead is Katherine Heigl, who followed up her success on TV's "Grey's Anatomy" and the big-screen "Knocked Up" with mediocrity like "27 Dresses" and "The Ugly Truth." Here she plays Jen, a careful, cautious, not remotely spontaneous woman who is on vacation in France with her parents (the fabulous Catherine O'Hara and the not-bad Tom Selleck), when she meets Spencer (Ashton Kutcher), who asks her to dinner. Unbeknownst to her, he's a contract killer for some secret government agency (right after they meet he blows up a boat. This is the second reason for my low expectations: I can't buy Ashton Kutcher as a super-spy/killing machine type. Anyway, they fall in love rather quickly, he proposes, she accepts, and he quits his contract-killer job. Cut to three years later, they're settled into a nice house and a normal life when his old life comes back to haunt him, and it puts the couple's lives in jeopardy. I enjoyed it more than I expected, especially seeing the people that actually are out to kill Spencer. My grade: B-minus.