My Photoshop skills are poor

My first response to any case of two movies having the same premise and coming out at the same time is to want to strip the best parts out of each, much like how Spider-Man came about to finally resolve the eternal conflict between man and spider. Deep Armageddon could feature President Morgan Freeman giving a long speech about sending Bruce Willis to blow up an asteroid with oil drilling. Dante's Volcano could be a serial killer volcano that, after destroying a bucolic small town, sets its sights on L.A. And An Antz's Life could be over in a mere hour and thirty minutes, thus not forcing us to waste any more time on that crap.

Seriously, fucking bugs?

Thus, to take Friends With Benefits and No Strings Attached and turn them into one super movie, we would have to separate the wheat (the ladies) from the chaff (I'm just saying, if we keep pretending the likes of Justin Timberlake are even B-list actors, the day will come when Superman will have to be played by a Brit... TOO. LATE.). But how can you have a romantic comedy without men? It's be like a cosplayer without a Slave Leia outfit, or an MTV reality show without syphilis.


Game-changer.

Best friends Jamie (Mila Kunis) and Emma (Natalie Portman) are unlucky in love. Jamie’s had a dryspell that’s lasted since the last Harry Potter book came out, while Emma just found out that her boyfriend is cheating on her. Also, all guys are more attracted to bottle blondes of ample bosoms, and not Mila Kunis or Natalie Portman. We’ve got a movie coming out where the premise is a super-smart ape and it’s not a comedy, go with it.

Then, during a late night bestie date, they channel-surf across a rerun of The L Word and come up with a plan. To get their dream guys to give them the time of day, they’ll pretend to be lesbians, wait a few weeks for their schedules to be less hectic, then “break up” and score some dudes on the rebound. But over a crazy month of lesbian research, gay pride parades, and a transgendered relationship councilor (Nicolas Cage), they realize their perfect guy might just be a girl…

Included on DVD: Twenty minutes of Kunis and Portman ad-libbing mockery of the lesbian films they watch as research. “Why are we watching Lesbian Vampire Killers? Why are we watching Lesbian Vampire Killers?”

Alternate titles: LLBFFs, More Than Friends With Benefits, Tired Of Watching ‘Imagine Me & You’ Lesbians?

Don't think of me as a pervert, I'm really more interested now in Nicolas Cage's character. Is it too early to start talking spin-off?

Cowboys & Alien

So... this is a movie. It's not a great movie, and it doesn't really suck--you don't say "oh bru-ther" much, but you also don't say "this is awesome" much. It's as if they were so set on making this a real movie and not some cheesy fanboy thing, like this were the movie John Ford would make if he got a hard-on for aliens, that they forgot that John Ford would've gone "okay, cowboys and aliens... so what? How is this a good story?"

It's just that the conceit is that aliens show up in the middle of a cowboy movie, so what they should've done is made sure that they had a cowboy movie that would've been good even if aliens never showed up, and then aliens that would've been good even if they arrived in downtown L.A. or a bucolic small town. Instead, they kinda counted on the mix of cowboys and aliens being enough. What I'm saying is, sometimes you need to go the extra mile.

I'm going to have to get into spoiler territory to discuss this, since the first half of the movie is pretty solid. But one thing I think I can discuss is how really out of place Olivia Wilde's character of Ella is. She's kinda Daniel Craig's love interest and kinda not, which is fine, I'm always for female characters existing for a reason other than some lame love story. But... she really doesn't have anything to do. She just kinda hangs out and acts brooding and mysterious, and since Craig is doing that too, our two leads are the least relatable people in the movie. Everyone else is fun or witty or grouchy or something, but they're just kinda glowering and being pretty. That's fine for a GQ photo shoot, but for a movie, you should probably write them some lines.

There's also Harrison Ford, but he's a bit of an antagonist. Still, it's weird that the ruthless cattle baron is the guy with the most personality by a long shot.

And given what's revealed about her character, you'd think Ella would have a lot of juice to her and be really vindictive, or weird, or something. Nope, she just kinda hangs out and gives out exposition. Exposition which isn't really needed, since I thought it would've worked to have the aliens be here to do some incomprehensibly nasty thing a bunch of Wild West cowboys couldn't hope to understand.

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