Silly, unrealistic, and bad character development.

Rating: 3/10 (16 June 2005)

This film is all about its main characters getting themselves confused between sexual attraction and love. Love in such relationships obviously involves sexual attraction, but what this film doesn't do well is to portray these characters as human beings who can, for one day, just understand love without having to talk about sex at *all* times. Everything they do and talk about in this movie about sex. That's not a bad thing in itself, but this movie addresses boy-girl relationships in a very narrow way. These characters just can't wait to jump each other, and then later torment each other with endless interrogation made up of repetitive boring unrealistic questions about what they experienced during their sex acts while cheating on each other. I say the word "unrealistic" here a lot, because half the time I was amazed (in a bad way) at how silly the way these characters talk to each other. I mean, come on. Who talks and asks each other such endless repetitive boring meaningless questions day in, day out anyway? I say "meaningless" because these questions are often in the form of "Did you cum?", "Was he a good f***?", "Now that you've f**ked him/her, who do you love more??" LOVE?? Since when did real love have to be judged on the basis of one's sexual performance during a romping session?? I don't know. It just seems like a pretty shallow movie to me. Perhaps that's what the director wanted to portray : shallow human beings who dominate our current world, where good looks and a cunning ability to manipulate and control other people makes all the difference between a "loser" and a "winner". However, the poor character development fails to redeem this movie. The juxtaposition of time in this movie doesn't help either. Basically every other element in the movie helps reduce these main characters to mere pretty but bland creatures with a very one-dimensional quality to their personas. We are not told anything more about what these characters do outside of their bedroom affairs and their non-stop meaningless chitchat about their sexual preferences. BORING. Considering they have quite a strong cast in this movie, the director could have made more use out of them by tweaking the movie script a little, focusing on more things in life and not simply the one-dimensional focus on sex and chitchat about sexual preference. Its simply not realistic at all. Okay, movies are allowed to be fantasies, they are allowed to be non-realistic, and they can still be good (Look at "Amelie", for example!) But this show is NOT fantasy at all. It can be real, if you live in such a narrow world where you spend all your time manipulating 2 different girl/boyfriends, jilting one for the other periodically, and then getting angry when they do the same to you, and then endlessly bombarding them with boring repetitive questions like a pseudo-psychiatrist. But I don't live in such a world. So I can't empathise.
Not only that, people who want to see this movie thinking its a sexy film with pretty nude bodies may be disappointed to realise after watching this, that the closest thing to sexiness in this movie is seeing Natalie Portman prance around as a stripper in the strip club towards the end (and don't get your hopes too high either. She never really strips, not even reveal her bosom, LOL!) Basically just a really pointless silly movie. After I watched it, I felt disappointed. Yet because I remembered seeing so many glowing reviews everywhere raving about this movie, I thought I must have missed out something great about the movie, so I tried to rehash the movie in my head, trying to see some hidden great meaning, some hidden gem of a great truth that I failed to see whilst watching the movie. Yet hours have passed by, and nope. I still fail to see what's so good, "intelligent", or "real" about the movie.
I will give this movie 3 points out of 10. One point for Natalie Portman's performance. She can easily be touted the best actress in this whole movie, especially considering how young she is, her performance is spectacular. One more point, this time for the somewhat unpredictable ending. I like unpredictable endings in movies. Unfortunately this is probably the only thing that kept me watching this movie all the way through, because the movie simply sucks in most other respects. One more point, this time for the great soundtrack. You know, there's not one single song I heard in the movie that I disliked. In fact, most every song I heard, I wanted to hear it a second time, a third time, etc... In fact, I think the soundtrack for this movie is so good, it actually helps (alongside the unpredictable ending) to pull the whole movie together, to make the movie more tolerable.
If I want a dose of reality, I take a walk outside of my house and interact with people. Depressive as reality may sometimes seem, its still nothing as bleak as the reality which this movie portrays and would have us believe. People sleep around, yeah but not to the extent of living like the sick unlikeable people that this movie is all about. Overall, a movie which is not that likable, yet not that unlikeable, but I tend a bit more towards it being unlikeable.