No Strings Attached (film)

No Strings Attached
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Ivan Reitman
Produced by	Jeffrey Clifford Joe Medjuck Ivan Reitman
Screenplay by	Elizabeth Meriwether
Story by	Elizabeth Meriwether Mike Samonek
Starring	Natalie Portman Ashton Kutcher Cary Elwes Kevin Kline
Music by	John Debney
Cinematography	Rogier Stoffers
Editing by	Dana E. Glauberman
Studio	Cold Spring Pictures Spyglass Entertainment The Montecito Picture Company
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release date(s)	January 21, 2011 (2011-01-21)
Running time	108 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$25 million[1]
Box office	$147,780,440[2]

No Strings Attached is a 2011 American romantic comedy film starring Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher. The film is directed by Ivan Reitman and is about two friends, Emma (Portman) and Adam (Kutcher), who decide to make a pact to have "no strings attached" casual sex without falling in love with each other. The film was released in the United States and Canada on January 21, 2011.

Plot

Emma (Natalie Portman) and Adam (Ashton Kutcher) initially meet as teenagers at summer camp. They meet again ten years later at a party at the University of Michigan, where Adam is a student and Emma is visiting for her father's funeral in Ann Arbor. A year later, Emma and Adam have another fortuitous meeting while at a farmer's market in Los Angeles, where Emma has just become a resident at a local hospital and Adam is a production assistant for Secret High, a music TV-show, with aspirations of becoming a staff writer for the show. Adam takes down Emma’s phone number, but the two don't have contact again for another year.

Now a year later, Adam becomes distraught when he learns that his eccentric father (Kevin Kline)—who used to be the star of a TV show called Great Scott—is having a relationship with Adam’s ex-girlfriend Vanessa (Ophelia Lovibond). Determined to "get back on the wagon", Adam starts calling every woman in his cell phone. The next day, he wakes up after a drunken night to find out that he text-messaged Emma and came to the home she shares with some other residents, including her best friend Patrice (Greta Gerwig). Emma leads Adam to her bedroom to retrieve his pants, where the two of them wind up having sex.

Because of both her belief that ‘no two people were meant to be together forever' and the pressures of her job, Emma proposes that they have casual sex with each other before setting some ground rules to prevent their relationship from becoming too serious. At first things go well, but then Adam starts becoming jealous of the possibility of Emma being with another doctor, Sam. Although denying that he is jealous, Adam starts presenting her with gifts, which she rebuffs.

Adam becomes more distraught when his father asks him to dinner with Vanessa on Adam’s birthday, where they announce that they’re planning to have a baby together. Emma, who accompanied Adam to the dinner, berates the couple while defending Adam. Adam eventually convinces her to go out with him on a date on Valentine’s Day. Things come to a head when Emma starts becoming too uncomfortable about being on a date with Adam. Adam tells Emma that he loves her, but she grows angry, telling him he should go out with another woman who ‘isn’t going to hurt you’. Adam drops Emma off at her hospital and drives off.

Six weeks later, a script Adam had written for his show and submitted through Lucy (Lake Bell), the production assistant on the show, is being filmed, and Adam gets a writing job on the show. Emma, meanwhile, has become distraught at not being with Adam, which is compounded by her younger sister Katie's (Olivia Thirlby) upcoming wedding the next day and her widowed mother (Talia Balsam) arriving with a new boyfriend.

Emma tries calling Adam, but Adam rebuffs her on the phone. Emma realizes she wants to be with him, and drives down to his home. Adam, however, arrives home with Lucy, whom Emma takes to be Adam's new girlfriend. Emma tearfully starts driving back to the wedding.

Before Adam and Lucy can have sex, Vanessa calls Adam—his father is in the hospital, having overdosed on Purple Drank. Arriving at the hospital, Vanessa confesses that she doesn’t want to be with an older man and that she's scared of old people. She dumps her dog off on Adam and leaves for a party. Adam talks to his father and chastises him, but tells him he’ll call tomorrow.

On the way out, Adam calls Emma back. Adam angrily tells Emma that she needs to have the conversation she wants in person—which she does; Emma’s friend and resident Shira (Mindy Kaling) noticed Adam's father arriving and called Emma. Adam and Emma eventually reconcile, and after a morning of eating breakfast, they go together to Emma’s sister’s wedding. Emma asks, “So, what happens now?” and Adam silently holds her hand.

In the concluding pictures, it is seen that Lucy—left stranded when Adam and Emma found each other—has taken up with Adam's father, replacing the feckless Vanessa. Eli and Patrice are shown meeting Eli's two gay dads. Vanessa is seen in an elevator with old people, being visibly disconcerted. Sam is seen with Shira telling her that he wants to see other people, to which she responds that she has already been seeing many other people. Emma is later seen as the delivery doctor to her sister Katie, whose husband ineffectually tries to soothe her. Guy is seen welcoming someone into the on-call room, who turns out to be Sam. The last scene concludes with Adam and Emma snuggling together while asleep.

Cast

• Natalie Portman as Dr. Emma K. Kurtzman
• Ashton Kutcher as Adam Franklin
• Greta Gerwig as Patrice, Emma's friend
• Jake Johnson as Eli, Adam's friend
• Cary Elwes as Dr. Metzner
• Mindy Kaling as Shira, Emma's friend
• Kevin Kline as Alvin Franklin, Adam's father
• Chris Bridges as Wallace, Adam's friend
• Olivia Thirlby as Katie Kurtzman, Emma's young sister
• Lake Bell as Lucy
• Ophelia Lovibond as Vanessa, Alvin's girlfriend
• Talia Balsam as Sandra Kurtzman, Emma and Katie's mother
• Guy Branum as Guy, Emma's friend
• Phil LaMarr as Police Officer
• Adhir Kalyan as Kevin, Katie's fiancé
• Ben Lawson as Sam, a co-worker of Emma, that likes her
• Matthew Moy as Chuck, guy taking pictures on his cellphone
• Jennifer Irwin as Megan, Adam's boss
• Abby Elliot as Joy
• Nasim Pedrad as Writer
• Mollee Gray as Sari
• Stefanie Scott as Young Emma

Production

No Strings Attached is directed by Ivan Reitman based on a screenplay by Elizabeth Meriwether titled Friends With Benefits.^{[citation needed]} The title was changed to avoid confusion with a different film titled Friends with Benefits that opened on July 22, 2011. The Paramount Pictures film was first announced in March 2010 as an untitled project. Actors Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman were cast in the lead roles, and Paramount anticipated a release date of January 7, 2011.^[3] Reitman said about the premise of casual sex, "I noticed from my own kids that with this generation in particular, young people find it easier to have a sexual relationship than an emotional one. That is how the sexes deal with each other today."^[4] Principal photography began in May 2010.^[5] By November 2010, the film was titled No Strings Attached with a new release date of January 21, 2011.^[4]

Though the timing was coincidental, Portman welcomed the chance to portray a character in contrast^{[clarification needed]} to her role in Black Swan.^[6]

Release

Theatrical run

No Strings Attached had its world premiere on January 11, 2011 at the Fox Village Theater in Los Angeles, California.^[7] The film was released in 3,018 theaters in the United States and Canada on January 21, 2011.^[2] Its target demographic was women between 17 and 24 years old, and its primary competition was The Dilemma.^{[citation needed]} Interest tracking reflected the target demographic's gaining interest in the film leading up to its release, and tracking also revealed "good early awareness" from Hispanic audiences.^{[citation needed]} The studio predicted for the film to gross in the "mid-to-high teens" millions,^[8] similar to past romantic comedies rated "R" (restricted to 17 years old and up) by the Motion Picture Association of America. With No Strings Attached as the only wide opener in the United States and Canada, it was uncertain if it would rank first at the box office above The Green Hornet, which opened the previous weekend in first place with $33.5 million.^[1]

Ultimately, No Strings Attached beat The Green Hornet with an opening weekend gross of $20.3 million. The attendance was "overwhelmingly female" with 70% of the audience being women.^[9] According to CinemaScore, audiences under the age of 25 gave the film an "A-" grade while audiences over the age of 25 gave it a "B" grade. Future grosses were expected to be dependent on the younger demographic.^[10]

The film has grossed $70.7 million in the United States and Canada and $77.1 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $147.7 million.^[2]

Home media

No Strings Attached was released on DVD and Blu-ray Disc on May 10, 2011.^[11]

Reception

The film has received mixed reviews. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 49% based on reviews from 161 critics and reports a rating average of 5.3 out of 10.^[12] At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 50% based on 36 reviews.^[13] Rotten Tomatoes reported that critics described No Strings Attached as having "moments of warmth and sweetness that are spoiled by a predictable narrative and a dirty mind." It said, "The pundits say Portman and Kutcher keep things genial and easygoing, but they're let down by a middling script that shoehorns in a little too much raunchy material."^[14]

Critic David Edelstein described No Strings Attached as a film with "a supposedly feminist veneer...(that) never makes the case for Emma's point of view. It's almost a feminist backlash movie, and it didn't have to be. There are plenty of reasons for brilliant young women, especially with the stress of a medical career, to approach time- and emotion-consuming relationships warily." He expressed disappointment on overuse of stock characters, as well as Reitman's "heavy-handed" direction and a story that is ultimately "corny and contrived and conservative."^[15] A. O. Scott called the film "not entirely terrible...high praise indeed, given that this is a film aspiring to match the achievement of 27 Dresses, When in Rome and Leap Year; according to Scott, the film is "Love & Other Drugs without the disease", a film whose pleasures "are to be found in the brisk, easy humor of some of Ms. Meriwether's dialogue and in the talented people scattered around Ms. Portman and Mr. Kutcher like fresh herbs strewn on a serving of overcooked fish."^[16] Scott considered "the film's great squandered opportunity—and also the source of some of its best comic moments—is that Ms. Gerwig and Mindy Kaling in effect share the role of Emma’s zany sidekick. How can this be? Why are these two entirely original and of-the-moment performers marginal players in this agreeable, lackluster picture and not stars of the year’s greatest girl-bromance?... To imagine Ms. Kaling and Ms. Gerwig in a remake of Thelma and Louise or the Wedding Crashers is to experience an equal measure of frustration and hope. Why can’t we have a few movies like that and not quite so many like this?"^[16]

Music

Main article: No Strings Attached: Music from the Motion Picture

The soundtrack includes songs such as "Bossa Nova Baby" (from 1963), "I Wanna Sex You Up" (from 1991), the 2010 European-charting "Bang Bang Bang", the 2010 Australian-charting "Love Lost", and a cover version of "99 Problems".

References

1. ^ ^{a b} McClintock, Pamela (January 20, 2011). "Natalie Portman's 'No Strings Attached' Goes Up Against 'Green Hornet' at the Box Office". The Hollywood Reporter. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/natalie-portmans-no-strings-attached-74076. 
2. ^ ^{a b c} "No Strings Attached (2011)". Box Office Mojo. Amazon.com. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=friendswithbenefits.htm. Retrieved April 11, 2011. 
3. ^ McClintock, Pamela (March 17, 2010). "Reitman to direct Kutcher, Portman". Variety. http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118016612. 
4. ^ ^{a b} Wloszczyna, Susan (November 4, 2010). "First look: Kutcher, Portman star in 'No Strings Attached'". USA Today. http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2010-11-04-nostrings04_ST_N.htm. 
5. ^ Rooney, David (May 5, 2010). "Making a Success of Her Messiness on Two Coasts". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/theater/09meriwether.html. 
6. ^ Natalie Portman 'Really Proud' Of 'No Strings Attached'
7. ^ McNary, Dave (January 12, 2011). "'Strings' preem pulls in celebs". Variety. http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118030137?categoryid=13&cs=1&nid=2564. 
8. ^ Abrams, Rachel (January 21, 2011). "Will Par's 'Strings' resonate?". Variety. http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118030606. 
9. ^ Stewart, Andrew (January 23, 2011). "'No Strings' tops weekend B.O.". Variety. http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118030702. 
10. ^ Fritz, Ben (January 24, 2011). "Company Town: Women help make 'No Strings Attached' a winner". Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-box-office-20110124,0,5261378.story. 
11. ^ "No Strings Attached (2011)". VideoETA.com. Retrieved 2011-08-02.
12. ^ "No Strings Attached". Rotten Tomatoes. Flixster. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/no_strings_attached_2011/. Retrieved February 8, 2011. 
13. ^ "No Strings Attached". Metacritic. CBS. http://www.metacritic.com/movie/no-strings-attached. Retrieved February 8, 2011. 
14. ^ Ryan, Tim (January 21, 2011). "Critics Consensus: No Strings Attached Is A Little Frayed". Rotten Tomatoes (Flixster). http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1921775/news/1921775/critics-consensus-emno-strings-attachedem-is-a-little-frayed/. Retrieved January 21, 2011. 
15. ^ Edelstein, David (January 21, 2011). "'No Strings Attached': Corny, Contrived, Conservative". NPR. http://www.npr.org/2011/01/21/133091157/no-strings-attached-corny-contrived-conservative. 
16. ^ ^{a b} Scott, A.O. (January 20, 2011). "A Firm Commitment to Casual". The New York Times. http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/movies/21nostringsattached.html. Retrieved 2011-08-24. 

External links

• Official website
• No Strings Attached at the Internet Movie Database
• No Strings Attached at AllRovi