Post a Comment. Rather earthy, as well. When Emma Natalie Portman, on the couch and her roommates -- Shira Mindy Kaling, standing and Patrice Greta Gerwig -- retreat into their apartment because it's "that time of the month," Adam Ashton Kutcher surprises them all by arriving with cupcakes and a rather unusual mix CD. And therein lies the initial problem. For about the first 15 minutes, writers Elizabeth Meriwether and Michael Samonek try much too hard to enter smutty Judd Apatow territory, and the results are cringe-worthy.
The first eye-poppingly vulgar one-liner, exchanged between a boy and girl at a summer camp, delivers a galvanic shock: Did we really just hear that? A more apt question: Would a boy that age ever say such a thing to a girl that age?
Not for a heartbeat, which is precisely the problem. But then an odd thing happens: The banter turns measurably milder β if still quite randy β and Reitman manages the deft trick so frequently attempted, without success, by American filmmakers.
He gets very close to the playfully erotic tone of a French sex farce. Never a bad thing. Rather embarrassingly, Adam is starkers and stretched out on the living room couch; even worse, he has no recollection of the previous evening Kutcher, it should be mentioned, does marvelous work in this scene. His confused, hooded, sidelong glances are priceless, his deft efforts to shield his dangly bits a masterpiece of towel manipulation. Choreographing this scene, and getting it precisely right, must have been hilarious.
Goodness knows, the results are suitably funny. Emma, though, keeps herself apart from others: friendly but unwilling to probe her emotional self any deeper. But some physical itches still need to be scratched, and conventional love affairs become even more impossible when one is a med student working crazy shifts for up to 80 hours a week. Emma even establishes an amusing set of ground rules: no cuddling, no breakfasts the following morning, no overt acts of affection. Cue a cute montage of random-hours quickies in all sorts of crazy locations.
