No Strings Attached

No Strings Attached

by Elizabeth Meriwether and Michael Samonek

Traditional Hollywood is slightly pornographic, which is probably why real pornography is so rampant there -- in the valley or wherever it's shot.

I was afraid that this movie was going to destroy Natalie Portman but thankfully, unlike most movies featuring the twit in the picture, it doesn't destroy its co-stars as well. I'm thinking of that dreadful movie where he fucked Anne Heche. Who?

Ashton Kutcher is probably the worst male actor to come along since... hmmm... I can't think of any male actor worse than this asshole... oh Burt Reynolds. Burt Reynolds perfected the irritating habit of winking at the camera, as if to say, "Oh yes we know this sucks but it's all good natured fun." It's pretty much the same as monster truck rallies, roller derby, demolition derbys and "Professional" wrestling. Get some beer (and some smokes in ye olden days), watch guys destroy things without risking a single thing. I don't understand it. But then I suppose the audience isn't taking any chances either. It's what separates those "activities" from their 'legitimate' counterparts. A real car race actually poses a risk for the drivers. Real wrestling is not pre-determined. And actors who actually act don't constantly wink at the camera or always keep one part of their mind behind on the other side of it.

In Hollywood, and now, unfortunately, most of the country, people are growing up with two points of view: they are always aware of the camera and that somebody is watching them, or has the potential to watch them. Why do people need to film themselves having sex (on cell phone cameras, no less), if they're not going to use it to masturbate later? What matters more to people these days is that they look right while doing anything. This is how porn has infected us. Facebook is pornography. Twitter is pornography. You Tube is pornography. Sex and The City is pornography. All over New York there are (maybe more "were" now) women running around trying to have Carrie Bradshaw type lives. That's not healthy.

This movie is fortunately well written enough that for brief moments, you can actually forget that a porno actor is one of the leads. The movie is about the fear of a woman to feel and I think it's because it's primarily about the woman's problem (the woman in this picture, has the harder journey), that we can overlook the smug, creepy I'm-so-famous acting of the male lead. But I'll never watch it a second time.

Usurper

This review is about a book.

Addiction memoirs fascinate me only because they are almost entirely about action and almost nothing about feeling. Bill Clegg's "Portrait Of An Addict As A Young Man," was interesting for about five minutes until I realized that his play on the title of James Joyce's first novel was simply an appropriation, and not actually relevant. Of course I finished the book, if that's what you could call it --- there is only one book that I have ever not finished and maybe someday I'll tell you --- but it's nothing but a single note, and only reinforces the fact that publishing is an insular dead party staffed full of pretty boys and girls who are, literally, going outside to smoke crack.

I used the title Usurper for this blog utterance because when I got to the end of the first chapter of Ulysses, I realized that I had been a very lazy reader all my life, and had to look up the definition of a word that I should have known. This is a lazy book and should have been called Usurper.

There is nothing in this book that warrants "borrowing" from James Joyce. Stealing that title is just another form of drug use. But he's not a writer and this is a memoir, so I guess you're allowed to.

Oh my, he spent seventy grand on crack. Who cares? We're supposed to be fascinated because he was a successful literary agent and had a Manhattan friends and so on. I have Manhattan friends, but I'm not successful. Yet if I told the same story it wouldn't be interesting, thanks to Warhol and our obsession with fame. That is all this book is about, is fame, so it's another entry into the anus, I mean annals, of American literature.

He basically paid no price for any of his doings. He was re-hired back into the industry after he got clean, and is apparently making money off of it (and his retelling of it). That 70,000 dollars he blew on crack was nothing compared to the money he has already gotten from the movie rights. You get page after page of monotonous drug taking and then finally, once he finally gets his boyfriend (Ira Sachs, left in the photo above, with his new partner) to leave him, by attempting suicide and failing, he turns things around. This memoir once again, like all addiction memoirs, (I haven't read Mary's yet), shows that addiction is simply a format, and offers no insight into the mysteries of human behavior.

I was very disappointed.

Something that has always bugged me about James Cameron movies is his liberalism. His liberalism always seems to be couched in the comfy nook of technology.