Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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When Adam Met Emma No Strings Attached (Rated R) by HEATHER GRIFFITHS Wow. I don’t even know with this movie. First of all, Michael Bay, I don’t care how much cool archival footage you put into your new Transformers movie. Your use of Megan Fox in your previous films has guaranteed a series of one star rat- ings for whatever mindless explosions you call a movie from now until the literal end of time. That is the meaning of hate, and that is on you. Second, Ivan Reitman, I was pretty much committed to hating your movie. I don’t like Natalie Portman playing dam- aged, I don’t like Ashton Kutcher. I don’t like pretending that no strings attached relationships ever work (Trust me on this. One of the two people is attaching strings to their emotionally unavailable partner, and the reason that partner is emotionally unavailable is that they are extra messed up. I’ve tried this from both sides and nobody goes home happy). Imagine my surprise when No Strings Attached (108 min- utes) failed to irritate me to my very soul. Well played Reitman. Well played. So the highlight of the movie is Emma (Portman). She is so quirky! She takes inappropriately dressed near strangers to funerals! She is thin and so pretty… but she’s smart too! Because she’ll be a doctor! I bet if she were a real person we would totally hang out! And have adventures! And say weird things to each other until we lost track of what was real and what was sarcastic! So basically, take the character from Garden State, and make that character more of a person and less of a social problem, and there you go. Adam (Kutcher) is just the right blend of awkward sincerity and the mean cousin you had a crush on when you were six, before you knew that mean = mean and still thought that mean = secretly great person who would be nice if you could just find their gooey caramel center. Basically, he comes off as a real A Friend to the End Matthew Perry recycles his old character in Mr. Sunshine TV by DEAN ROBBINS Matthew Perry created one of the all-time great TV characters during his stint on Friends: a nervous schlub who compensated for his deficiencies with razor-sharp wisecracks. Perry has tried to peddle the same character in several productions since then, but he’s never found a context that fits him the way Friends did. Mr. Sunshine (Wednesday, 9:30 p.m., ABC) contin- ues the losing streak. Maybe “losing streak” is too strong a phrase. The new sitcom isn’t ter- rible, but it’s also not terribly good so far. Perry plays the boss of an arena, overseeing events that range from circuses to hockey games. There’s farce involving clowns and elephants on the loose, plus ensemble comedy with Allison Janney as the facility’s obnoxious owner and Andrea Anders as a sexy marketing manager. Perry doesn’t seem quite right at the center of all this, partly because his char- acter is too much of a basket case to register as the boss of anything. Besides, if the actor were really on top of his game, would we need all those clowns and elephants to generate laughs? Face Off Wednesday, 10 pm (SyFy) This reality series pits special-effects makeup artists against each other to see who can create the coolest or ugliest faces. It’s an inspired idea, allowing us a peek at a novel sort of craftsmanship. The artists are given all sorts of creative challenges, including one where they must incorporate elements from a party into their designs. That leads to pineapple-leaf scales, cauliflower teeth and other grotesque solutions. I admired the contestants’ ingenuity while losing all taste for pineapple and WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM cauliflower for several days. The Sunset Limited Saturday, 9 pm (HBO) I love writer Cormac McCarthy and actors Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel Jackson. But I don’t like The Sunset Limited at all, even though McCarthy wrote it and Jones and Jackson star in it. All of them bomb out in this two-person play adaptation about a suicidal professor (Jones) and the Bible-thumping murderer (Jackson) who saves his life. The two characters sit in a room and talk about deep subjects, from God to civilization to the death of meaning. The conversational rhythms feel wrong (blame that partly on Jones, who serves as director), and the strenuous attempts at profun- dity are the stuff of late-night college-dorm bull sessions. “Suffering and human destiny are the same thing!” the professor declaims in one of his excruciating philosophical rants. I don’t know about that, but I did come to believe that suffering and The Sunset Limited were the same thing. Mad Love Monday, 8:30 pm (CBS) In this new sitcom, young couples hook up and unhook, ad infinitum. You can usually tell how desperate a writing staff is by how soon they go for a witless defecation joke – and here, it’s within the first minute. That joke is followed by wit- less boob jokes, fat jokes, masturbation jokes and vagina jokes. Yep, you can cut the desperation with a knife. The worst thing about Mad Love is the constant bickering. Larry (Tyler Labine) and Connie (Judy Greer) are thrown together when their better-looking friends hook up (see above), and they develop a very unpleasant insult relationship. “There wouldn’t be enough alcohol in the world for me to sleep with you!” Connie sneers. Believe it or not, that’s supposed to be a punchline. I can see myself developing a very unpleasant insult relationship with Mad Love. FEBRUARY 9-15, 2011 UCW 21 person, and I didn’t know he had that in him. Since it can’t possibly be his wonderful acting (because let’s face it, Kelso can’t act), let’s give Reitman credit for that one too. Anyway, much like Harry Met Sally, Adam and Emma keep meeting each other, until finally they realize they like each other. But they don’t like like each other, they just sorta like each other, and it’s all so romantic comedy I want to scream, but instead a single tear flows down my cheek because it’s all so romantic comedy. And I don’t want to like it, but I do, so here we are. The sixteen year old girl in me just puked up emotions all over the popcorn. It all starts when Adam gets some bad news from his dad regarding his ex-girlfriend, and winds up naked on Emma’s couch. Since Emma is so busy, and Adam is so confident in his sexiness, they decide to pretend that they don’t sorta like each other in a romantic way and in- stead just get naked as friends. And boy, I wouldn’t have guessed it, but Natalie Portman is a bite kisser. I have never seen her so aggressive before, and it kinda works for the character, but I have a real fear that she is literally going to eat Kutcher’s lips right off his face. Well, when you sign up for a romantic comedy you pretty much know what you are going to get. This one was better than it had any right to be, so go and check it out with your friends from high school. You probably won’t regret it. HEATHER GRIFFITHS, Contributing Writer COMMENTS? 484-6200 ext. 222 or editor@upandcomingweekly.com