What's Your Number? (2011)

I had nothing to do with the making of What’s Your Number? and yet I feel compelled to apologize to women everywhere for its existence.  The movie is the shameful philosophy of women’s magazines slapped onto the big screen as a moral lesson that feels painfully outdated in the 21st century or really anytime after 1960s.  It is a cruel, thoughtless picture that wants women to feel ashamed if they’ve slept with more than arbitrary number of men while casting no blame on guys who have racked up countless notches on their bedposts.  I can’t fathom why talented comic actors like Anna Faris and Chris Evans would decide to lead such a despicable picture, and not only are they wasted in this movie, only a handful of jokes get through.  But nothing can make up for the film’s awful subtext.

Ally (Faris) is having trouble finding the right guy.  She’s been fired from her job, her younger sister Daisy (Ari Graynor) is getting married, and Ally’s feeling the pressure to get her life right.  Then Marie Claire comes to the rescue when Ally finds an article saying that the average woman sleeps with 10.5 guys in her lifetime (I’ll let you argue what the .5 means).  Ally, having slept with 19 guys, can’t believe this irrefutable statistic, but her fears are confirmed when her sister and her sister’s friends all throw in numbers lower than 10 except for the one slutty friend who has a dreaded number of 13.  Ally swears she won’t go over 20 and the next man she meets will be the man she marries.  Then she gets drunk, sleeps with her awful former boss (Joel McHale) and comes to the conclusion that she must have met the right guy but she passed him by.  With the help of her womanizing neighbor Colin (Evans), she starts tracking down her past lovers in the hopes of finding Mr. Right, but then her relationship with Colin begins to “deepen” (read: he likes her sculptures, they have a couple of nice conversations, and go on a fun date).

I don’t necessarily mind that Ally wants to find a husband (although in the movie she’s working harder at finding the right guy than finding a new job).  What I mind is that she agrees with the “conventional” wisdom which says she’ll be undesirable if she’s been with “too many” guys.  In one of the movie’s many sad attempts at raunchy humor, one of Daisy’s friends comments that no man wants to go where fourteen other penises have been.  Only in the past century or so we finally got past the point where a woman could be married even if she wasn’t a virgin.  Before that time, men felt that wives were property, and they didn’t want to buy used goods.  In 2011, What’s Your Number? generously tells women, “You’re allowed up to 10.5 guys for your entire life.  Use them wisely.”  It’s the same paternalistic, antiquated belief but dressed in modern clothing.

What’s Your Number? doesn’t want to criticize or satirize this misogynistic philosophy.  It wants to celebrate it.  Ally’s emotional journey isn’t to say, “Hey! Wait a minute!  I’m a responsible adult who uses condoms and I don’t see why I should have to limit the amount of sex I have when my neighbor across the hall can happily bang every woman in Boston.”  No, instead Ally proclaims, “I’m a whore!  And I’m okay with that!”  That’s not me paraphrasing.  That’s her big revelation line in the movie.

The movie not only wastes its opportunity to thoughtfully critique modern American social mores, it wastes its lead actors.  Anna Faris and Chris Evans have been hilarious and charming before and I’m sure they will be again, but What’s Your Number? made me despise them for a solid 105 minutes.  The movie has about five or six really good jokes and none of them come from the lead actors (the best gag in the movie involves Andy Samberg’s character and a puppet).  Instead, Faris and Evans subscribe to the Brad Pitt “Always Be Eating” school of acting and struggle to find anything redeeming in their characters, which is like trying to find something redeeming in a gigantic pile of garbage.  Ally is neurotic and insecure, Colin is cowardly and childish, and they’re perfect for each other because I can’t think of anyone who could love these people.

I went into What’s Your Number? willing to give the movie the benefit of the doubt even though all the trailers strongly indicated I would find the premise disgusting.  I have to applaud 20th Century Fox for the truth in their advertising, although the final product is somehow worse than I imagined.  The movie feels like someone forgot to put in a laugh track, it squanders the comic talent and affability of its lead actors, but more than anything, it upholds a vile, mean-spirited message all the way down to its final, unfunny joke.

The Three Musketeers (2011)

“Guilty pleasure.” That’s a phrase that feels strangely appropriate when referring to Paul W.S. Anderson’s The Three Musketeers. It’s silly and daft, and has two fairly fundamental flaws, on top of the cheesiness that’s going to divide audiences straight down the middle. However, despite these fairly central and hard-to-avoid problems, it also features a knowing self-awareness, an appealingly straight-forward approach to the fact that is so very silly, a (mostly) great cast and some rather wonderful steam-punk production design. It’s not going to appeal to everybody, but I actually warmed quite a bit to it.

“You know what your problem is, boy?” Rochefort demands of D’Artagnan at one point. “You read too many books.” A cynical critic might suggest that the creative minds behind this adventure read too few. Somewhere, there’s a truly great adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ classic The Three Musketeers waiting to be brought to the screen in a respectful and considered manner. This is not that film. And, to be honest, there’s nothing to be ashamed of in that. “We’re obsolete,” an introspective Aramis confesses at one point, and I can’t help but feel the movie never rebukes that idea – it’s too busy overloading the core concept with “airships” and aerial warfare to really give us a sense of who these characters are, and why they aren’t outdated or obsolete. That said, if you can get past that fairly large initial hurdle, it’s good fun.

The movie opens with what’s effectively a nineteenth century James Bond cold open, with the three musketeers going on a mission for “king and country.” Asked what their brief is, one responds, “Whereever we’re sent. Whatever France needs.” They’re effectively an old-time black-ops team, tasked with infiltration missions and other dirty work. This isn’t the largest departure from Dumas’ text. However, it actually surprisingly well. At times, I’ve felt Paul W.S. Anderson is too light on substance, but here it works. You could almost imagine Roger Moore coming out with some of the stuff we see here. Ambushing a target and his companion in black robes, Aramis confesses after hauling the gentleman overboard, “I’m not really a priest.” The young woman responds, “I’m not really a lady.” And Aramis has ten minutes to fill in his top secret black-ops schedule, so we cut away discreetly.

It is the sort of camp we associate with the Roger Moore Bond films, but it works infinitely better here, if you ask me. Despite the prologue featuring a top secret mission, the team never seem like the sort of cold-blooded assassin that we were asked to accept Moore’s James Bond to be, and Anderson wisely increases the saturation to make sure that everything on screen seems the brightest possible shade of a primary colour. It’s a movie about people in funny clothes prancing around and waving swords at each other, after all, if that sort of set-up doesn’t lend itself better to camp than any other subject matter, I don’t know what does. As much as may appreciate serious period drama, there’s just something so theatrical and grand about that sort of design, one that doesn’t suffer if you refuse to take it too seriously.

Helping the matter along is the fact that the movie is very clearly in on the joke. Anderson doesn’t have an all-star cast, but he does have an incredible ensemble of quality character actors that any film fan will recognise. These are performers like Mads Mikkelsen, Christoph Waltz, Ray Stevenson, Matthew Macfadyen and Orlando Bloom, who are overtly aware of the fact that they aren’t making a serious piece of art – they’re wearing silly clothes and waving swords at one another, while chewing down on the scenery. Bloom has clearly been studying Johnny Depp, and seems to relish the opportunity to play a card-carrying evil-for-the-sake-of-being-evil cad with no motivation to speak of and a flying ship because… well, didn’t we all want a flying ship at some point? Waltz and Mikkelson are clearly the bad guys because they have funny accents. Mikkelson even has an eye-patch and dodgy goatee to boost his “bad guy” credentials.

And there’s never a sense that the movie is taking itself too seriously. Hell, Rochefort has the most effective means of ending a duel I’ve ever seen, in one brilliant moment. The Cardinal is well aware of the tropes and clichés of this kind of story, sarcastically wondering if his embarrassed guard brings good news. At one point, D’Artagnan gets a citation for allowing his horse to defecate in public, and he asks for clarification, “In French?” The female lead, played by Milla Jovovich, is actually identified via caption as “Milady.” Ray Stevenson, in his heavy and distinctly not-French accent, utters the line, “Vive la France.”

The film is clearly aware that it’s just popcorn entertainment, and never suffers from trying to convince us otherwise. It even features a climactic sword fight on top of Notre Dame, a scene that might as well have had “look! France!” superimposed over it – I’m surprised the didn’t just stick the Eiffel Tower in there, history be damned! After all, it isn’t like the British were flying airships designed by DiVinci, is it? It’s all very daft, but it knows this as well as we do, and everybody’s in on the joke.

Everybody, that is, except Logan Lerman, which brings me to the first major fault that film. I don’t know why, but it seems increasingly hard to find young actors who can act – I don’t know if it’s because casting directors are shallow or because of established fanbases or even just bad decision-making on the part of executives, but the movie is based around the young and plucky D’Artagnan, who is easily the weakest element of the whole film. I don’t know if it’s the script or the actor, to be entirely honest.

The script asks the young actor to deliver a variation on a classic scene from A Fistful of Dollars, one of the moments that even I (despite my phenomenal threshold for cheese) cringed in response to. But an equally young actor, Freddie Fox, does just as well in the awkwardly-written role of King Louis. I think it’s a combination of both, but the movie breaks down any moment Lerman is at the centre of the action. It really does feel like the movie would be a lot better if you simply cut D’Artagnan out of the film.

The second flaw, which is just as significant, is the ending. I don’t desire to spoil the film for those who haven’t seen it, so I’ll simply say that almost nothing is resolved. Virtually all the character dynamics and conflicts are left dangling, in hope of an inevitable sequel. The problem is that this doesn’t make for a very satisfying final act. I had expected what turns out to be the final set piece to be a prelude to a huge final confrontation, but it just sort of ends… with all the stuff hinted at and developed throughout the movie, and most of the villains, still in play. It just doesn’t work, and it retroactively weakens the entire movie.

It’s especially frustrating because Alexandre Dumas actually wrote a sequel to The Three Musketeers, one that the writers and director could easily stick some airships into to help them build a franchise. Imagine how incredibly camp a steam-punk The Man in the Iron Mask could be. I honestly would be disappointed if the mask didn’t breathe fire or acid or something. I’m not even being sarcastic. If Anderson can sell me on trip-wire-as-eighteenth-century-lasers, I can go along with anything. It just feels like a waste of a lot of set-up, on what ultimately feels hugely pointless. Surely they could fully handle this particular threatto the French monarchy without over-extending an already simple narrative across another film? But what do I know?

Still, it’s mostly quite enjoyable, if you can stomach the idea of flying ships and bright colours in your Dumas adaptations. Anderson is a director who handles style much better than substance, and the movie actually looks quite good. I normally scoff at slow motion and quick cuts, but Anderson knows what he’s doing with them. They’re still clichéd tools, but they’re at least applied well. There is a rather lovely scene early in the film where the musketeers take on forty of the Cardinal’s private guard, and it illustrates that Anderson knows his craft a lot better than most detractors would suggest.

It’s a diverting film, something that is like cinematic junk food – it’s something that doesn’t require too much engagement and won’t upset too many people on a family outing. The campy nature of the film is going to be divisive, but I think it fits well enough with the style of the movie. There are two huge flaws that hold the film back from an unqualified recommendation, but it’s an effective “silly action film.” Whether or not that’s the adaptation of The Three Musketeers that you’ve been waiting for, you’ll have to decide for yourself.

Jane Eyre (2011)

When I was at school, I had a lot of trouble with the classics. Not all of them though, Bram Stoker, Lovecraft and Mary Shelly weren’t a problem, but Daniel Defoe, Jane Austin and Charlotte Bronte I struggled with.

Why? I’m not quite sure, especially after seeing Cary Fukunaga’s adaptation. It’s given me an entirely different perspective on this 19th century novel, visualising it in such gothic splendour that there wasn’t a moment during the film’s 120 minutes that my heart simply didn’t skip a beat.

Jane Eyre

Mia Wasikowska plays the title role of Jane who flees Thornfield Hall, where she works as a governess for Edward Fairfax Rochester’s (Michael Fassbender) young daughter, Adèle Varens. Despite her reclusiveness and Rochester’s impulsive nature, the two fall in love, but unknown to her is the dark secret he has kept hidden. It’s inevitable revelation waiting to destroy them both.

Jane finds shelter in the home of a kind clergyman, St. John Rivers (Jamie Bell), and his family. There she takes on a new job while she recuperates, but knows only too well that one day she will have to face it all, including her beloved Rochester.

Told in flashbacks, Fukunaga pieces together a story I couldn’t tear my eyes away from, not even for a second. Although he moved the time period up by a few years to improve on the costumes, Jane Eyre emerges as the film I always wanted to see in my mind when reading the book.

It’s just so hard to contain the emotions as we see Jane making her way back to Thornfield Hall, only to discover the horror of what happened during her time away. It’s a breathtaking film, based on a story I am only now starting to understand and appreciate.

The performances are stunning; Wasikowska is everything you could ask for here and Fassbender is magnificent as the frighteningly charming Rochester. I was captivated by the cinematography and score as well. Never have the grey skies and wet fields looked as achingly beautiful as they have in Jane Eyre and as Dario Marianelli’s score worked its magic it was Jack Liebeck’s masterful violin playing that moved me quietly and peacefully to tears.

Needless to say, Jane Eyre has renewed my interest in classic literature and in no time at all I was thumbing through the fiction section at my local library under “B” to relieve those moments I had only just experienced on the screen.

Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011)

 “Crazy, Stupid, Love” is, on balance, remarkably sane and reasonably smart. Directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, this movie, packed with appealing stars, is a smooth blend of modern comic genres with a surprising undercurrent of dark, difficult emotion. Essentially a study in the varieties of masculine sexual confusion, it travels the circuit from bromance to a kind of Y-chromosome weepie that might be called male-odrama, with a detour into the briar patch of adolescent awkwardness.

Steve Carell, who on the big screen often impersonates sweet, anxious guys dutifully holding their inner Michael Scott firmly in check, plays Cal Weaver, an everyman with a family, a nice suburban house and an office job. He also has a bad haircut and terrible fashion sense, as he will be told by Jacob (Ryan Gosling), a pickup artist who volunteers his services as coach in the game of seduction.

Cal accepts the offer because his wife of more than two decades, Emily (Julianne Moore), has told him that she wants a divorce, and that she has cheated on him with a co-worker (Kevin Bacon) only slightly less nebbishy than Cal himself. Nursing his self-pity at a sleek local bar, Cal meets Jacob, who tries to do for him something like what Will Smith did for Kevin James in “Hitch.” (The movie analogy Jacob proposes is Mr. Miyagi in “The Karate Kid.”) In a determined, half-pathetic attempt to even the score with Emily, Cal sets out to score with as many women as he can.

Complications, as the saying goes, ensue, but they are not necessarily the ones you might expect. The script (by Dan Fogelman, whose other credits include “Bolt” and “Cars”) follows what seem to be tangential threads of plot. These are eventually spun together in a chaotic climax that manages to be astonishing without destroying the film’s hard-won credibility. (The superfluous tying up of loose ends that occupies the final 20 minutes or so does some damage, I’m afraid.) “Crazy, Stupid, Love” takes its time, understanding that digression can be more important, and more satisfying, than relentless forward momentum. The movie also prefers small improbabilities and minor-key incongruities to big, loud, naughty jokes.

And so we spend some time with Cal and Emily’s son, Robbie (Jonah Bobo), who has a crush on his baby sitter, Jessica (Analeigh Tipton), who has a crush on Cal. We also make the acquaintance of Hannah, a recent law school graduate with the bad luck to have a useless boyfriend (Josh Groban) and the splendid good fortune of being played by Emma Stone. An early encounter drops the hint that Hannah and Jacob will wind up together, but we don’t know quite how, or how that connection will intersect with Jacob’s mentor-protégé friendship with Cal.

On the way to finding out, we are treated to two supervised visits with Marisa Tomei; a man-on-man shopping-mall makeover-montage; a sweetly funny almost-hookup; and bumpy scenes from Cal and Emily’s marriage, which staggers and wheezes but will not quite die. With understated sympathy to match its sense of human ridiculousness, “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” when dealing with this weary, worried couple, navigates a zone of adult ambivalence and disappointment that most comedies are too timid to explore.

Mr. Ficarra and Mr. Requa showed an ability to mix pathos, whimsy and eccentricity in “I Love You Phillip Morris,” their debut feature. Here they balance respect for the romantic imperative that is part of the movie’s Hollywood DNA — there is lots of soapy, sincere talk of soul mates and endless love — with a sober acknowledgment of the limits of romanticism.

In part because of this attempt to balance skeptical wisdom with dreamy reassurance, the movie itself is far from perfect. Its missteps include an icky and uncharacteristically insensitive resolution of the Cal-Jessica-Robbie triangle and too little screen time for Ms. Moore and Ms. Stone. They are not badly treated — not shamed, slobbered over or idealized, as women often are in man-centric comedies — but you may wish that their own predicaments had as much weight as those of their former and potential mates.

But comedies don’t really work that way anymore. The old screwball idea of heterosexual courtship as a battle of equally matched, contending forces is close to extinct. Same-sex friendship — male in “The Hangover” and a hundred others like it; female pretty much only in “Bridesmaids” and the “Sex and the City” pictures — now provides both the machinery of humor and the scaffolding of sentiment that prevents the jokes from becoming too mean.

Mr. Gosling and Mr. Carell (whose production company is responsible for “Crazy, Stupid, Love”) make a pretty good couple. Both are nimble enough to sidestep egregious caricature, but neither is above a bit of obvious mugging when it serves the cause. So Jacob, a smooth, self-satisfied master of the game — you have the feeling that he has indeed memorized “The Game” and watched every episode of “Mad Men” and “Entourage” at least twice — is also a bit of a fool. (It takes Hannah to perceive this and to see it as his best trait). The logic of Cal’s character works in reverse: His wardrobe and manner are the butt of easy, foolproof jokes, but in time we discover that underneath his clumsiness lies an anxious commitment to his own battered dignity.

It is possible to wish that “Crazy, Stupid, Love” were sharper and also to admire its decency and its unshowy skill. “I know the PG-13 version of this night,” Hannah says during her second encounter with Jacob, insisting that what she wants is R all the way. The movie, true to its own PG-13 rating, opts for mildness, modesty and chastened optimism. At the same time, though, it seems to know that a crueler, more cynical rendering of its story — a “Bitter, Hopeless, Love” — lurks between the lines. What makes it worth watching, and worth liking, is the sense that it arrives at its warm and comforting view of things not by default but by choice.

“Crazy, Stupid, Love” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Naughty business is referred to more than it is shown, and the swearing does not get out of hand.

Prom (2011)

The universe that Disney’s Prom takes place in is not one that exists in the real world, and you can thank your messiah for it. It’s one of those fantasy-land high-school utopias where all the kids use Crest Whitestrips and McNuggets never go to their thighs. It’s multi-racial, but everyone is vanilla, and they all speak in the language of teenager platitudes. If such a world existed, Mitt Romney would send all of his children to high school there, and they’d never have to worry about drugs, or crime, or peer pressure, or bullying, or acne. It’s a world where Santa Claus exists, and where a poop fairy comes every night while you’re asleep and evacuates your bowels so you never have to bother yourselves with unpleasantries like dropping a deuce. Everyone in that world comes from Disney’s central casting, under the roles: “People who look like they’d be friends with that Bieber kid.”

It’s a fucked up place, and if Doctor Who were to land on such a planet, he’d probably discover the sinister machinations that might keep such a utopia running: Alien unicorns being probed and ground up into an energy source underneath the planet. If I had a 16-year-old daughter who wanted to see Prom, I’d wonder where I went wrong as a father, and then I’d send her to some hippie socialist gay camp to get her head on straight. Nobody should grow up in a JCPenney’s catalog. The world of Prom makes the world of “Saved by the Bell” look like a goddamn crack den with methed-out prosties rubbing up against each other for contact highs. There, there, Jesse. A.C. Slater will make everything OK for a dimebag and a handjob.

Aimee Teegarden (“Friday Night Lights”) is at the center of Prom, one of those whitebread class president types with glimmering teeth, a perfect SAT score, and a scholarship to Georgetown. She’s also organizing the prom, and it’s very important to her that she afford her classmates that one last “special night” (don’t fret, though; sex is not on anyone’s mind here; sex is messy, and these kids don’t get dirty). The problem is, her expected suitor, Mr. Practical Polo Shirt, has no sense of romance, and instead of asking Nova (that’s her name) to Prom, he suggests that they carpool together (*swoon*). Things fall apart, however, when Nice Black Guy uses the storage shed to light candles and ask Nice Black Girl to Prom, inadvertently setting all the prom decorations ablaze only three weeks before the glittery hoe-down.

Enter Mr. Dark and Brooding, but only in the Disney sense of the word. He rides a motorcycle. He has long hair. His mom works at a 50’s diner that serves milkshakes, but because his Dad left his family, he’s “troubled.” He has to skip class every Monday to pick his little brother up because his Mom has to take an extra shift to ensure that the kids can continue eating Frosted Mini Wheats for breakfast. Scowling Principal punishes Mr. Dark and Brooding by making him help Nova re-organize the prom. Naturally, Nova dislikes Mr. Dark and Brooding. But once she gets to know him, and once her Dad calls him a “loser” (the meanest word uttered in the entire film), she gravitates toward him. Because somewhere deep, deep down beneath the gated-community, Disney mind control, her panties are ablaze. Her inner Eva Mendes wants out, and it wants to fuck Mr. Dark and Brooding against a wall.

There are an array of minor characters, too, all white teeth and perfect hair and meticulously crafted stammers. There’s Sophomore Kid who is in love with Sophomore Girl, but she’s kind of hung up on Nice Black Guy, who isn’t all that nice, because he’s stringing along Nice Black Girl, until Nice Black Girl finds out Nice Black Guy has been holding hands with Sophomore Girl and dumps him. Nice Black Girl is without a date to Prom, but fortunately, there’s a mawfucking Cusack-looking idgit who wonders around the high school making grand romantic gestures (all various forms of cheesy signage) in order to land a date. Clearly, they’re the only two seniors left in high school without a date, so they are meant to be. Meanwhile, Ginger Best Friend is jealous that Sophomore Kid is more concerned with dating Sophomore Girl than their shared interests in the greatest band in all the land, Stick Hippo. There’s also Bland Brunette, who is smitten with Computer Geek, and Asian Girl who hasn’t told Glasses that she’s going to New York City for college, where she’ll last exactly two weeks before she realizes that living in NYC is nothing like the movie Enchanted after she runs into strung out Zach Morris, who her offers her a taste for a taste.

There must be an audience for Prom, though I am at a loss to describe it. Even the lifeless and maudlin Twilight series is miles better, what with the vampires and the werewolves and the promise of Edward tearing open Bella’s uterus with his teeth. Prom is a movie that evangelical soccer moms might send their daughters to because The Princess Diaries is too subversive, what with that harlot who stars in it later showing her tits in that gay movie. I suppose it’s also the sort of movie that Goth Girls could dress down for to take their Grandmothers in order to afford their Nanas the impression that Goth Girl is all freckles and smiles and no premarital sex. But I’m guessing that even most Nanas would scoff, wondering how their daugthers managed to raise such lame kids. Nana wanted shirtless boys and prom-night orgies, and all she got was this lame fucking film.

Friends with Benefits (2011)

 “Friends With Benefits,” a breezy, speedy and (no kidding) funny comedy with a nicely matched Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis that is about love and sex in the age of social networking, gets some of its juice and tang partly by trash-talking its own genre. The setup is familiar, as are the essential elements: a single man and a single woman, two battered hearts yet a pair of resilient, eager, pretty bodies. But Ms. Kunis’s character is dark and savvy, not blond and dippy, and when she comically rails against an unseen Katherine Heigl you may sigh with relief (fingers crossed) that you’re watching the “Scream” of romantic comedies.

Much as the first “Scream” movie gave horror cinema a jolt with self-consciously knowing characters who knew the bloody ins and outs of the genre — and were sadistically subjected to those clichés firsthand — “Friends With Benefits” starts from the premise that its characters, and you, are sick of the romantic comedy clichés they may secretly, or not so secretly, adore. In other words, the director Will Gluck, who wrote the script with Keith Merryman and David A. Newman, doesn’t just want to have his romantic comedy cake and eat it too, he also wants to throw it in your face and make you laugh as you lick the icing off your lips. The results are about as naughty as that sounds (not very), but it also makes for a fairly giggling good time.

A corporate headhunter but, you know, cool, Jamie (Ms. Kunis) meets Dylan, a Web site art director (Mr. Timberlake) , when she lures him to New York to interview for a spot at a men’s magazine. They meet cute — she’s scrambling atop an airport baggage carousel and he’s wide-eyed and willing —and they’re soon off and running, or really walking and talking, mostly talking. She needs him to take the job to earn her bonus and so sweetens the deal by showing him around what she calls the real New York. That this tour includes a flash mob shouldn’t be held against Jamie, not least because Ms. Kunis is fast proving that she’s a gift that keeps giving to mainstream romantic comedy.

One reason is that she doesn’t play the stock girl, teary and needy or plucky and needy, but rather a woman who can go joking round for round against men. Ms. Kunis looks itty-bitty enough to hang on a charm bracelet, but her energy is so invigorating and expansive and her presence so vibrant that she fills the screen. If she continues to score roles like this, she might even be able to break out of the genre. Of course she’ll probably be forced to compete with the equally appealing and tiny — if paler and pinker — Emma Stone, who, with several other name actors, makes the most of a tiny role. Mr. Gluck directed Ms. Stone in “Easy A,” a lightly (very lightly) self-aware flick about a high-schooler play-acting as Hester Prynne.

The genre self-consciousness in “Friends With Benefits” extends from the throwaway “Pretty Woman” nods to a goofy (and entertainingly bogus) romantic movie within a movie that Jamie and Dylan watch after their initial business relationship turns into something a bit more touchy-feely and squealy. Having both been dumped, they decide that an occasional quickie with a friend is a perfect post-romance pick-me-up. Much like the recent similarly themed if less satisfying and cruder “No Strings Attached,” “Friends With Benefits” uses sex and bared skin to get at questions about the possibility of romantic love between true male and female equals. After all, without Mommy and Daddy, religion, community or a ticking clock forcing the issue, what’s the point of settling down (or just settling)?

Mr. Gluck largely distinguishes himself in this movie by the casting (Woody Harrelson plays a randy gay colleague of Dylan’s, and Patricia Clarkson shows up as Jamie’s mom) and by directing the actors to talk at warp speed. Jamie and Dylan do more than trade teasing laughs, they slam their lines like Chinese Ping-Pong champs, hurling the quips so fast at times that it’s a wonder they don’t gaspingly reach for the oxygen. That speed makes the duds easier to miss and the dreary heavy stuff easier to ignore, and may of course also remind you of the screwball comedies of the 1930s and ’40s, a comparison that Mr. Gluck hopefully flags with a conspicuous poster for “It Happened One Night.”

Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert kept their distance with a blanket in that 1934 gem, whereas only their Calvins usually get between Jamie and Dylan, and rarely for long. That said, despite the sex and chatter, which includes some amusing bossy instruction, it’s the sentiment that keeps you hooked.

Too bad the whole thing is so very hard on the eyes: “Friends With Benefits” is certainly likable, but it may be the ugliest digitally shot movie ever released by a major studio. The problem isn’t the serviceable shooting, the camera setups and the like, but the poor digital quality that makes New York look like a blurred Xerox copy and puts so much yellow in the actors’ faces, especially Ms. Kunis’s, you may think it’s their livers that are giving them trouble instead of their hearts.

“Friends With Benefits” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). There’s enough simulated sex and nearly full nudity that if you see this with your parents you will be embarrassed.

MONTE CARLO (2011)

We see a shot of the Eiffel Tower.  The tour guide says, "Welcome to Paris."  A title appears on screen, telling us this is indeed Paris.  Subtlety is not one of Monte Carlo's strengths.

Neither is presenting characters whose arcs are not preordained from the first time they appear on screen, creating a scenario in which the protagonists are particularly sympathetic, nor building momentum to a farce of a finale of that depends upon people entering and exiting doors at the worst time possible.  On the other hand, though, it does have characters who do—predictable as it may be—undergo change, a prince-and-the-pauper situation that has a minor rebellious spirit by eliminating the willing participation of its wealthier half, and a understanding of basic farce's use of scattering people to generate chaos amid a traditionally classy event.  So it's not all a waste.

It begins in a small town in Texas, where Grace (Selena Gomez) works as a waitress at a local diner with her best friend Emma (Katie Cassidy) and is about to graduate from high school.  The two have planned a weeklong excursion to the City of Lights as a celebration for Grace, and a wrench is thrown into the works when Grace's mother and stepfather (Andie MacDowell and Brett Cullen, who end up as wholly unconcerned parental figures, considering how, due to the eventual series of complications, none of the girls are able to be contacted) decide that Grace's stepsister Meg (Leighton Meester) should accompany them.

The characterization is established immediately without any fuss.  Grace blends in perhaps a bit too much to her surroundings.  She encounters a group of her fellow students at the restaurant, and they immediately shoo her away.  Emma is the relative wild-child of the town, a fact established by her status as a high-school dropout, her determination to have a good time on her holiday, and the existence of steady boyfriend Owen (Cory Monteith), who gets jealous when she keeps referring to Paris as the City of Love.  Meg does not get along with either Grace or Emma, because she's the worrywart, the snob, the downer, and, perhaps worst of all, the stepsister they don't want with them while they explore Paris because she'll ruin all the fun.

Co-writer/director Thomas Bezucha twists expectations early on in their arrival (after the unnecessarily repetitive declaration of their arrival) by turning the travelogue aspect into a whirlwind tour from a sightseer's worst nightmare.  Passing up Notre Dame (with an announcement of its appearance given too late), breezing through the Louvre, and staying in a hotel where the room is small and the window has a view of a man in the tub, the tension between the three builds.  The last straw is when their tour bus leaves them behind at the Eiffel Tower (where it's revealed that Emma has a case of acrophobia, which is only referenced one other time, as the trio shambles across the ledge of a hotel, and to no effect).

While walking back to their lodgings, the group stops into a fancy hotel to get out of the rain, and there, Meg and Emma learn that Grace has a doppelganger: a rich brat of an heiress named Cordelia Winthrop Scott (also Gomez).  Soon enough, after some mistaken identity, the three young ladies are off to Monte Carlo in a private jet to attend a fundraiser for a philanthropist and his son Theo (Pierre Boulanger) under the guise of Cordelia.
 

It will come as no surprise to learn that Grace and Theo hit it off (as she tries to maintain a British accent and appear that she knows how to play polo), and that Meg and Emma meet their own men who challenge their natures (respectively, backpacking Australian (Luke Bracey), whose nonchalant attitude plays quite well against the craziness of the climax, and a prince (Giulio Berruti)).  The fantasy here is not that a girl can travel to an exotic place and wear expensive clothes and jewelry while staying in a luxurious hotel room but that somewhere there's a man who will complete her.  In that way, the movie bypasses one stereotype to move straight to another.
The fantasy goes too far elsewhere, as well, especially when Grace twice makes the "think of the children" argument with success and how simply everything is resolved.  Happiness in Monte Carlo is just a scream, a whistle, or a dimmer switch away.