The trailer for No Strings Attached: Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher are friends with benefits and Ludacris
While the tolling of the 2011 bell heralds the beginning of the Year of Big-Ass Battlin’ Robots, this is also the year when Hollywood catches onto “friends with benefits” and celebrates meaningless rutting with your likable yet emotionally incompatible compadres by proving that it’s all just an elaborate prelude to falling in lurve. First up is Ivan Reitman’s No Strings Attached—formerly titled Fuckbuddies, until uncooler heads prevailed—which finds probable Oscar nominee Natalie Portman using her immunity for this round to stave off the career infection of starring in a romantic comedy with America’s ass-heart Ashton Kutcher.
Speaking of asses, you’ll see Kutcher’s in this red-band trailer but not Portman’s, as the latter comforts the former after he discovers that his dad (Kevin Kline) is fucking his ex-girlfriend. We mention the “fucking” both because this little preview is definitely NSFW and because, damn, it seriously works overtime to remind us that the film is cavalierly rrrrribald in an Apatowian manner, what with scenes like Mindy Kaling oh-so-naturally sighing that she is “single as fuck” and shouting, “We’re sluts!” while at work in a hospital, as one would oh-so-naturally do, even more natural talk of “eating out” and casually delivered phrases such as “tunnel-buddies” between Kutcher and his best bro Ludacris, a scene where Kutcher makes Portman a menstruation-themed mix CD while Greta Gerwig looks on, and a gag where Portman dons 3-D glasses, stares at Kutcher’s penis, and declares, “Wow, it looks like it’s coming right at me.”
Look, nothing against dick jokes or the word “fuck”—really, both can be awesome—but judging from these two and a half minutes, seemingly every character involved in this thing is basically a walking raw genital. Here’s hoping the actual film balances all the “Hey, I’m watching porn here and also sending you an ASCII representation of my penis on your phone and talking loudly about it all with everyone because this is the 21st century, bitch!” stuff that only exists in screenplays with some recognizably human behavior, otherwise it’s actually a pretty good argument for quiet monogamy.