21 Mar It’s the guy who wants to be all cozy and romantic, and the girl who just wants sex!
The hook: Emma (Natalie Portman) is a med student. Adam (Kutcher) is a P.A. on a television show that one suspects was pitched as High School Musical: The Series. They have a history: 15 years ago, Adam made a humiliating pass at Emma at summer c 5 years ago, they bumped into one another at a fraternity party and he accompanied her to her father's funeral the next day; one year ago, they discovered that each was living in Los Angeles and swapped phone numbers. All of this is laid out by the film with aggravating slowness over the course of a first act that will not get started with any sort of efficiency, and if you think that 110 minutes seems like an awful lot of time for a paint-by-numbers romcom, guess what: you're absolutely right, and it's shit like this that makes those 110 minutes crawl by like an inchworm on a cold day.
But I was talking about the hook: Emma and Adam are fucking. How exactly they are fucking is immaterial; it's one of the things the movie lays out with a deliberateness of exposition that would have made Leo Tolstoy cough and look at his wristwatch out of the corner of his eye. I'M SORRY. I won't keep harping on how goddamn slow the movie is, but it is one of the chief responsibilities of a comedy to scintillate and bubble and race by at a goodly pace; No Strings Attached almost deserves to be called light drama in this regard.
But there comes a point where American films' abject terror of actually praising sex gets frustrating
At any rate, the kids are fucking, and they have a very strict set of rules to make sure they don't fall in love. Most of these were put in place at Emma's insistence, since she has a pronounced emotional block that causes her to fear emotional intimacy more than anything else in the world, for no particular reason other than to enable the plot.