No Strings Attached

It is impossible to say for sure, but the goal of this movie seems to have been to deconstruct the flimsy cultural assumption that all men want is sex. In this case, the sex is being had by a confused-looking Ashton Kutcher, and it is being had with the gerbil-sized body of Natalie Portman. All she wants to give him is sex, apparently; sex, free of typical female clinginess; glorious nights of bedbreaking sex with her breastless pre-adolescent frame and upsettingly miniature head. It’s every man’s dream!—or so we are given to believe by a pair of wisecracking buddies. One of the buddies may be black or ethnic. They weren’t in that much of the trailer and I don’t feel like watching it again.

Natalie Portman seems to be in a lot of movies at this time. Perhaps her agent has kidnapped the children of a casting director. Let us praise Allah that this agent does not represent Keira Knightley.

After a long and welcome retreat into the world of camera commercials, Kutcher is reminding us all why we fell in love with him in the first place: his lustrous head of shaggy hair. Surely this hair would best be put to use as a source of pleasure to a woman in the prime of her life. Alas, it has been vilely monopolized by a latter-day Circe. I am here referring to that older woman that he married. Who is it again? It’s some post-menopausal ex-actress. She’s like 48. I am really drawing a blank as to who this is. Dame Judi Dench maybe? I can sort of picture her face. Wait, no. That’s that other woman. The blooddrinking Republican congresswoman from Minnesota. God, what a Gorgon she is. She’s not married to Ashton Kutcher. Maybe I’ll look this up later, if I really have nothing to do.

I feel confident that the last scene of this movie is in either an airport or a baseball stadium.

Some review of this movie decried its matter-of-fact raunchiness, in the form of jokes about penises and periods. Indeed, this has become a regrettable recent trend of the rom-com genre. You may have noticed that Katherine Heigl was in a lot of stuff recently. Virtually every sentence out of her fish-like mouth pertained to her “lady parts.” Sweet mother of Christ. Surely the repeated invitation to envision the vagina of Katherine Heigl functions neither as romance nor comedy. It’s enough to make a man stop not watching movies for good.

One day our culture will determine that there is nothing funny about love. This movie has hastened that day’s arrival. Go see it! I didn’t.

rating: ★½☆☆☆

No Strings Attached (2011). dir. Ivan Reitman. Natalie Portman, Ashton Kutcher.

Exit Through The Gift Shop

If there’s one message we can take from this deeply irritating film, it’s this: not all graffiti is done by skulking urban youths endlessly replicating their own cretinous monosyllabic pseudonyms in hideous makeshift fonts from hell. A small fraction of it is apparently supposed to be art. This film—which is about the feckless substratum of drug-addicted would-be artists who are responsible for that piddling fraction—is completely unwatchable. Or at least I probably would have found it to be so, if I had watched it, which I haven’t.

rating: ★☆☆☆☆

Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010). dir. Banksy.

2666

The first thing you should know about Roberto Bolaño is this: he is foreign. I think Chilean, but possibly just Spanish. The second thing to know about Roberto Bolaño: he is, according to Wikipedia, dead. The third and final thing to know: he keeps showing up in The New Yorker. Hardly a week goes by wherein I do not pick up The New Yorker, page briskly though it in search of cartoons that are about dogs and cats pretending to have sophisticated human relationships with each other, and also dutifully note that the Fiction part has been written once again by Roberto Bolaño.

Do I read the Fiction thing? No. Of course not. The first sentence is always something like, “In the village of my grandparents, which does not appear on any map, a man named Luís Salazar was once said to have sold a fish to an unfamiliar woman, said to be Argentine, who was in every physical way identical to a cousin of his with an unpronounceable name of between eighteen and twenty-five syllables.” So why the hell would I read that.

It’s always either Roberto Bolaño or some Irish person.

Anyway, Bolaño is very trendy right now, and so it seems like a good idea to review 2666, which I keep hearing about. Is 2666 a sequel to Bolaño’s earlier work, The Savage Detectives? Let’s just say yes. So it’s also about detectives. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that it’s probably some unreliably narrated detective meta-story that keeps telescoping in on itself and conflating the protagonist’s search for clues with the reader’s search for narrative truth if such a thing even exists because the authenticity of all narration is in doubt, etc. In short, a book that makes normal human readers want to drown themselves in sputum. So basically we are talking about a Chilean or maybe Brazilian Paul Auster here. And we all know that Paul Auster is a serious dicknibbler.

I’ve been meaning to read something by Paul Auster but I never seem to get around to it.

I’m also going to hazard a guess that 2666 is about the future, specifically the year 2666, so there’s probably some kind of futuristic thing going on as well. By that, do we mean, say, nano-bots hovering and whizzing around in some exciting way? No. It’s probably more boring. It’s probably something about the future of government. I have no interest in reading about that. That sounds excruciating.

There’s a chance that Roberto Bolaño is actually from the Philippines, which would change everything. It would mean that the technology part is way more interesting, but the psychology is clumsy and under-conceived and ultimately sabotages the enjoyability of the entire book. This is the case with every Asian book ever.

Sometimes in The New Yorker two tabby cats are grimly enduring a long-failed marriage. That’s my favorite.

rating: ★★½☆☆

2666, Roberto Bolaño (2004). Editorial Anagrama: Barcelona.