I Wanna Be Your Lover

by James Hansen

In what is sure to come as a surprise to entertainment prognosticators damning Natalie Portman’s Oscar hopes for making her post-Academy Award win “shit movie” before she even wins the award, Portman’s “shit movie” – Ivan Reitman’s No Strings Attached (and, incidentally, executive produced by Portman) – is far from an awards kiss of death (if you believe in such things) and actually shows more nuance than most mainstream romantic comedies, not to mention “awards movies” which seem more and more willing to abandon any subtlety in favor of bludgeoning audiences with their awardyness.

While not as radical as James L. Brooks’ How Do You Know?, the widely reviled film which found an equally ardent cadre of supporters (#TeamHowDoYouKnow?!), No Strings Attached literally passes over the typically conservative romcom formulas – the film opens with a seemingly sloppy sequence of flashbacks which hopscotch over classic romcom scenarios (questions of teenage virginity at summer camp, slutting it up in college frat houses) – and reverses them. Sex, here, is not an end goal where the triumphant white male claims his prize and high-fives his buddies. Rather, in No Strings Attached, sex is a given component of a relationship, a starting point from which issues of self inevitably arise for both persons involved. It isn’t really a question of “Can sex friends stay best friends?,” but when, why, and how silly pleasure transforms into more complex companionship. Oh yeah, it's also funny.


The aforementioned romcom scenarios revolve around Emma (Natalie Portman) and Adam (Ashton Kutcher), two sensitive, loner kids at camp who go different directions (he, a frat life at Michigan, she, working to become a doctor at MIT), before ending up in the same place (Los Angeles) where things come full circle. A night of binge drinking with his pals, Wallace (Ludacris!) and Eli (Jake Johnson), ends with Adam waking up in an unfamiliar apartment and re-living the classic college situation, Dude, What’d I Put My Dick In? Luckily, Emma’s doctor roomates, Patrice (the always exciting Greta Gerwig) and Shira (Mindy Kaling), resisted the swoons of a naked, depressed Adam. So, too, did Emma, at least the night before, but a passing glance here, a naked guy there, and their multiple almost-happened moments finally happens. No big deal – some afternoon sex, Emma’s off to work, and Adam heads home.


Naturally, this is just the beginning (else we wouldn’t have a movie). Though the major storylines are all by the book, No Strings Attached gleefully bounds along thanks to the supporting cast. Gerwig, after conquering the indie world with her unique, natural energy, had a breakout year in 2010 with her role in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg. Here, she provides each of her scenes with a surprising vibrancy, instrumental to the maintaining the film’s casual charm without stopping it dead in its tracks, as so often happens with secondary characters in mainstream comedy. The characters aren't floundering aimlessly in screenplay mechanics, but part of a developed world. (Watch how the crazy producer with a crush on Adam transforms from a one-line joke to an actual character). The awkwardly constructed subplot between Adam, a would-be writer spending his days assisting on a High School Musical knockoff, and his aloof father (Kevin Kline), a famed sitcom actor, comes closest to sinking the film, yet, on the brink of disaster, Kline schmoozes his way through a birthday song, which is funny, yes, but also an exemplary, desperate charade of trying to regain love and respect once it has been lost.

Of course, such charades aren’t needed – something Kline’s ridiculous charicature won’t understand – and, to its credit, No Strings Attached doesn’t solve Adam and Emma’s dilemma with the vapid scenarios that pile up near the film’s conclusion. And while the genre mechanics fall back into all too familiar territory – Emma is the confused one and has to come running back to her [squeaky clean perfect] man, duh – No Strings Attached ends with a nice touch, a punch line, a final reversal of the scenarios it skips at the beginning. For Emma and Adam, it isn’t a question of sex. It’s the problem of breakfast.

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Pussy Control

by James Hansen

Mirroring its own central conceit in several unfortunate ways, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan functions as a double-edged sword on which it repeatedly impales itself. At once an artistic “prestige picture” and a Tex Avery-esque Looney Tunes riff on Tchaikovsky’s famed ballet Swan Lake, Black Swan tempestuously navigates these concepts alongside the similarly fractured mental journey of doomed protagonist Nina Sayers/The Swan Queen (Natalie Portman).

Nina’s personality splits when she is chosen to perform both Swan roles in the highly anticipated ballet. She must be The White Swan of purity and precision and also The Black Swan of fear, desire, and improvisation. With mounting pressure from director Thomas Leroy/The Gentleman (Vincent Cassel) and a unique relationship with new girl Lily/The Black Swan (Mila Kunis), Nina tries to loosen up from her White Swan tendencies to achieve artistic perfection by embodying both states of mind. This mixture of reality and fantasy, good and evil, failure and success pushes Nina beyond anything she has experienced before. She is in a new, strange world which she must either journey through or become lost within.


Black Swan’s journey quickly reveals itself as having little to do with art or artists, but rather dicks, pussies, and earth-shaking orgasms. Thomas chooses Nina for The Swan Queen after a timid request for a second audition results in a seductive, unwanted kiss in which Nina bites his lip. Thomas questions Nina’s sex life and suggests she have sex. After multiple masturbation attempts with no “success,” Nina goes out with Lily and explores her Black Swan side. With barely a hint at lesberation, Nina is rolling on E and howling in her bed via Lily’s magical cunnilingus. Nina’s orgasm is more than a sign of sexual pleasure, but one of the perfection she seeks in life, work, and art. Still, this false moment of perfection leaves Nina lost in time, late for work, and threatens her success in the ballet. Her climactic scenes late in the film with Lily and Thomas indicate a further presumption of sexual pleasure as cataclysmic, threatening, overly demanding, and strangely confining. The residual effects of sexuality understood in this manner come through in Nina’s final swan song, which make her choices harder to stomach. Threatened by a perfect pleasure outside of her art, she destroys it.


Yet – no matter the bizarre, enormously entertaining, trash genre hijinx – Black Swan remains a thuddingly literal extension of Swan Lake and purely surface level. Nina’s existential crisis, fear of failure, and ambiguous sexuality plays out as a cartoonish fodder. Instead of exploring the ideas of psycho-bisexuality, artistic creativity, or pressures on femininity which seem inherent in the mtaerial, screenwriters Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, and John McLaughlin loads the script with softballs (“lose yourself”) which they pay off by literalizing the terse statements. This strangely unthoughtful approach creates a checklist for Nina’s tragically battered psyche and quickly knocks off each aspect as Black Swan plods forward becoming simultaneously more entertaining (as The Black Swan of hilarious trash spectacle) and disappointing (as The White Swan of an artistically considered film) as it goes along. (For more on this, see Martha Polk’s terrific critique).


That it devolves into sexual games is a further indication that Aronofsky’s direction of underlying dualisms is far from complex. Constantly maintaining an obvious grip on the Swan Lake story told several time throughout the film, Black Swan shows neither controlled mania or tight composition of cinema made by true artists. In a journey of a fracture mind, everything is perfectly clear and logical. Unfortunately, this also means that Black Swan works only off statements, rather than instilling thought or ideas. By bringing everything pointedly to the surface, Black Swan chooses to stay shallow.

Entertaining enough for a B, but thoughtfulness earns it a C+

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