I have to be attracted to them sexually. The movie fulfills its title, and does so amusingly. The ingredients are good; the chef is skilled; the recipe is off. But I can tell you this—when a man and a woman see each other, and like each other—they should come together—wham—like two taxis on Broadway. Not sit around studying each other like specimens in a bottle…. Once it was see somebody, get excited, get married. There, two casual friends Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher also decide to copulate unemotionally—though he has long admired her from afar and quickly develops romantic feelings for her.
The classical trope—of desire overcoming all obstacles, of the force of nature making culture conform to its imperatives—veers toward the practical view of life partners as caring, compassionate helpmeets rather than unreliable and flighty sources of perpetual excitement.
Interestingly, both movies pivot on the emotional damage that feckless, free-spirited parents inflict on their children, and that the now-adult children need to overcome in order to be able to love—in other words, they blame the sixties and seventies.
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