Movie Review: Your Place Or Mine (2023)

Genre: Romantic Comedy  

Director: Aline Brosh McKenna  

Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Ashton Kutcher, Zoë Chao 

Running Time: 111 minutes  

Synopsis: Debbie (Reese Witherspoon) and Peter (Ashton Kutcher) had a one-night fling 20 years ago, and remained close friends and confidants ever since. She married someone else, divorced, and is now raising 13-year-old Jack in Los Angeles. Peter moved to New York, remained single, and became a successful corporate management consultant. When Debbie has to travel to New York to attend a course, she stays at Peter's apartment while he offers to care for Jack back in LA. They both discover secrets about each other.

What Works Well: Director Aline Brosh McKenna deploys dynamic split screens to compensate for the central couple being separated by a continent. Zoë Chao as millennial Minka (Peter's neighbour and ex-girlfriend) gets the best lines as she bonds with Debbie in a friendly barrage of inter-generational barbs. The Cars contribute the soundtrack music.

What Does Not Work As Well: Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher are both in their mid-forties and well past the age of partaking in the immature behaviour on display here. In wanting to be a cool male role model, Peter blatantly ignores Debbie's wishes (related to Jack's hockey ambitions), while Debbie stumbles upon Peter's manuscript and promptly rushes off to a book publisher without consulting with her supposed best friend. It's all listless and contrived, and lives down to the genre's grating attributes on the way to the inevitable conclusion.

Conclusion: Neither here nor there.



All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: The Butterfly Effect (2004)

Genre: Fantasy Drama

Directors: Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber

Starring: Ashton Kutcher, Amy Smart, Eric Stoltz

Running Time: 113 minutes

Synopsis: At seven-years-old, Evan learns that his incarcerated father possesses special powers. Evan then starts suffering blackouts, including during an episode of child abuse instigated by the father (Eric Stoltz) of his friend Kayleigh and her brother Tommy. At 13, blackouts accompany a prank that goes tragically wrong and a violent incident involving a dog. As a 20-year-old college student, Evan (Ashton Kutcher) reunites with an unhappy Kayleigh (Amy Smart), and realizes that through his journals he may hold the power to alter destiny's trajectory.

What Works Well: Co-directors and co-writers Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber craft an intricate, elaborate, and brilliantly thoughtful drama about little actions making a big difference. As Evan experiments with destiny's alternatives, the certainty of finding no easy pathways and always stumbling on unintended consequences plays out with magnificent suddenness, life's violence and humour often rubbing shoulders. With confident execution, Bress and Gruber maintain a strong hold on the intellectually sprawling material, allowing Ashton Kutcher to find a career highlight in an unlikely role.

What Does Not Work As Well: As a minor quibble, Evan's mother Andrea (Melora Walters) has a strong initial influence, but fades in the second half.

Conclusion: The vagaries of fate revealed with wicked cleverness.



All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: No Strings Attached (2011)

A clunky romantic comedy, No Strings Attached combines a clumsy premise with cursory characters and a cluttered cast.

Friends since childhood, Emma (Natalie Portman) and Adam (Ashton Kutcher) meet again in their twenties. She is a medical student and not interested in a relationship. He is a television show production assistant. They agree to be sex friends with no commitments.

But Adam does care for Emma and develops an emotional attachment. He is also dealing with the awkward complication of his father Alvin (Kevin Kline), a famous television personality, now dating Adam's ex-girlfriend Vanessa (Ophelia Lovibond). When Emma's sister Katie (Olivia Thirlby) announces her wedding plans, the sex-only deal between Emma and Adam is tested. 

A tin-eared rom-com trying hard to be hip and failing miserably, No Strings Attached offers no redeeming qualities. Star Portman and director Ivan Reitman multiply their embarrassment with producer credits for a feeble, dead-on-arrival effort, sunk by an Elizabeth Meriwether script stocked with plastic characters, fabricated emotions, and not a hint of genuine comedy, romance, or authenticity.

Emma and Adam litter their dialogue with vulgarity in the script's misguided over-reach for raunchiness, all the cringey juvenile antics landing awkwardly in the laps of characters who ought to know better. Emma is supposed to be a medical student but never acts or talks in a manner consistent with her chosen profession. Meriwether can hardly be bothered to even explain the single obstacle placed in front of the lovers-to-be: Emma does not like commitments. Just because.

Portman is orders of magnitude better than the material, but even her spirited performance is consumed by the dross. She gets no help from a messy collection of supporting characters and side-plots, too many friends, roommates, and family members failing to obscure a lack of substance. The likes of Cary Elwes, Greta Gerwig, Lake Bell, Olivia Thirlby, and Mindy Kaling drift through the background to little effect.

The 108 minutes feel twice as long, as Reitman agonizingly trudges towards the pre-determined conclusion. No Strings Attached should have been cut adrift at the first draft.



All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: What Happens In Vegas (2008)

A miserable non-romantic comedy, What Happen In Vegas chokes on a contrived premise laced by a nasty streak of mean behaviour.

In New York City, meticulous planner and stock trader Joy (Cameron Diaz) is dumped by her boyfriend Mason (Jason Sudeikis). Separately, super slob Jack (Ashton Kutcher) is fired from his woodworking job by his own father (Treat Williams). Joy and Jack head to Las Vegas, where a booking mix-up results in them sharing first a hotel room, then a wild and drunken night of partying. They wake up married to each other.

The two realize they have nothing in common and actually cannot stand to be together. But before they separate he uses her quarter in a slot machine and wins $3 million. Back in New York, a judge (Dennis Miller) gives them six months to make their marriage work before he decides on the fate of the money. They spend most of that time making each other miserable between visits to marriage counsellor Dr. Twitchell (Queen Latifa).

Stretching for rom-com originality, What Happens In Vegas loses sight of its own purpose. Writer Dana Fox creates rough sketches of two unlikeable characters, labels them "perfectionist" and "boor", and throws them together. It's no surprise Joy and Jack share no chemistry, and director Tom Vaughan clutters most of the film with juvenile shenanigans as the unwilling couple try to wind each other up.

Other than a couple of laughs, most of the attempted jokes plumb the deep depths of cliche land, resorting to the most tired of toilet seat and dirty laundry gender conflicts. Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher go through the motions stuck in overacting mode, and never come close to convincing. The requisite relationship u-turn demanding they start to perhaps care for each other arrives late and is based on nothing.

The best friends supporting roles are occupied by Lake Bell and Rob Corddry, and they mostly fill the background with forgettable presence.

What Happens In Vegas should never have happened.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

Movie Review: Valentine's Day (2010)

A collection of intermingled short stories so lightweight they are blown away by the February winds into instantly forgettable lands, despite the massive ensemble cast.

With too many loosely connected stories, too many characters, and hardly enough time dedicated to anything or anyone, Valentine's Day degenerates into a brisk but irrelevant game of "spot the star". Although almost every role is played by a recognizable face, director Garry Marshall fails miserably to inject soul into any of them.

The events take place during the course of a single Valentine's Day in Los Angeles, as lovers and wannabe lovers navigate their way through the day of supposed romance. The most developed relationships revolve around florist Ashton Kutcher proposing to girlfriend Jessica Alba, who first says yes then says no, while Kutcher's best friend and school teacher Jennifer Garner thinks she's in love with doctor Patrick Dempsey, who hasn't told her that he's actually married. One of Garner's students, a young boy, is using hard-earned dollars to send flowers to his mystery Valentine using Kutcher's florist services, but everything goes wrong with the delivery.

Receptionist Anne Hathaway is dating mailroom clerk Topher Grace while she also moonlights as a phone-sex operator. Hathaway works for sports agent Queen Latifa, who represents football quarterback Eric Dane, who is contemplating retirement with the help of his publicist Jessica Biel, who is maybe interested in television sports reporter Jaime Foxx, who is annoyed that his producer Kathy Bates has sent him to the street to capture inane on-camera opinions about Valentine's Day.

Meanwhile Julia Roberts is a soldier on a short leave, traveling on a plane heading for a rendezvous with a person only revealed in the final scene. During her long flight she befriends Bradley Cooper, also on his way to meet a lover that we will only meet late.

Unbelievably, there are more characters and more stories nipping in and out of the movie, including teenage lovers, long-married grandparents, and Taylor Swift, who appears from nowhere, for no good reason, and does nothing. It's impossible to keep up, or to care.

It's also difficult to fathom what the purpose of the exercise is, other than for every star to work for a couple of days in-between other projects, and cash a juicy cheque at the expense of bewildered moviegoers.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.