Natalie Portman hates cliche romantic comedies, except her own

Like many of you, I was surprised to see an actress like Natalie Portman go from potential Oscar frontrunner for BLACK SWAN to starring in a romantic comedy with Ashton Kutcher as her next career move.

She’s always steered away from the genre, and explains why in an interview with EW.

“But the girls are always in fashion, and it’s always about their clothes. They always want to get married at the end. There’s some kind of makeover scene. That stuff offends me.”

So uh, what exactly are you doing in NO STRINGS ATTACHED then?

“My character is a woman who’s working, who’s trying to create her own construct for relationships, who’s funny herself — and isn’t just the girlfriend of a funny guy.”

Correct, she’s the girlfriend of Ashton Kutcher. BA-ZING!

But seriously, from the trailer and poster, this movie looks like one of the most cliché rom coms that’s been released in some time, even if the roles are reversed and it’s the girl who wants to bang and the guy who wants a relationship. Perhaps there’s some twist ending where they DON’T end up together and realize they work as a couple, but that would greatly disappoint the kind of audience actually attracted to a movie like this.

Portman usually picks her projects carefully, so perhaps there’s more to this movie than meets the eye, but we’ll have to wait a few days to find that out. If it does end up being worthwhile, it was marketed horribly, because as initially tempting as it is to sell your film on a sexually aggressive Natalie Portman, when put into practice with a trailer that says “sex” every other word to hammer to the point home, it comes across as desperate.