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However, this rule doesn’t really apply when it comes to gay men.  A greater percentage of male/male relationships (compared to male/female or female/female) can be purely sexual without any “strings attached,” and, to the filmmakers’ credit, that nuance is not lost in “Friends with Benefits.”  Woody Harrelson, who is very funny as an over-the-top gay character, offers this wisdom.  But the ideas that “monogamy is against our nature” and casual sex comes with negligible emotional and physical baggage–particularly when there’s a woman in the equation–has been roundly rebuked in recent years and Hollywood romantic comedies deserve a lot of the credit.

There are even a few jokes that specifically target liberals: Kunis refers to hybrid cars and local/organic/sustainable food as “bullshit” on separate occasions and Harrelson says that “no one wants to fuck Obama” because his ears are too big.  For years romantic comedies have been a haven for conservative moviegoers because they tend to glorify monogamy as opposed to loveless sex.  But now they’re also subjecting liberals to the types of barbs right-of-center folk have endured for decades!? Could Hollywood finally be turning a corner?  With the advent of new media, conservatives finally have had a megaphone to complain about these digs that typically only go in one direction (ours).  Maybe it’s having an effect!

Yet, “FWB” is merely a partial victory, and that should come as no surprise given the fact that the movie was written and directed by Will Gluck.  Up until this point, Gluck’s biggest accomplishment has been “Easy-A,” the most anti-Christian movie I’ve seen in recent memory.  Pathological anti-religious h8, affected dialogue heavy on attitude but light on depth, and an extremely high opinion of itself made “Easy-A” my most painful movie-going experience of 2010. (On the bright side, it inspired one of my favorite John Nolte blog posts of the year, “All Christians are Bad, All Gays are Good, and John Hughes Really Is Dead”).

Gluck managed to slip in one solid anti-God sucker punch this time around, which came fumbling out of left-field in the second act. This is rough transcript of a date scene with Mila Kunis’s character, Jaime, and Parker, a handsome child oncologist:

Jaime: It’s amazing that you cure kids with cancer.

Parker: Well… me and God.

[Long awkward pause…]

Jaime: You’re kidding, right?

Parker: Yes.  [Chuckles.] But could you imagine if I actually thought that?

Jaime: I’ve dated a lot of assholes who would say something like that.

Parker: I work with a lot of those assholes.

[Both laugh.]

So, if you believe God plays any role in curing disease, you must be an asshole…  Right… This dialogue did not play well with the audience at the sold-out Hollywood screening I attended, but I happened to be sitting with an Atheist friend of mine who was grinning ear to ear.

A pattern I’ve noticed with romantic comedies is that the advertising does not always reflect the values of the movie.  With “No Strings Attached,” the iconic moment of the teaser trailer is Natalie Portman jumping onto Ashton Kutcher’s back and yelling, “Why can’t we just have sex!?!”  An interesting quote to highlight considering the movie itself was all but a 90-minute PSA for monogamous relationships.  Same thing goes for the “Friends with Benefits” business team, which marketed the flick by waging a campaign to add a “friends with benefits” relationship status to facebook.  I wonder if the genius who came up with this idea had actually seen the movie, which largely dismisses the notion that “friends with benefits” is even possible. The facebook campaign has thus far failed.

Values aside, “Friends with Benefits” is a good time at the theatre.  Alas, romantic movies with complex characters that capture the subtleties of relationships and life are few and far between, and “FWB” certainly isn’t one of them.  I suppose we can’t expect an “Annie Hall” or a “When Harry Met Sally” every decade, much less every year (and 2009’s “500 Days of Summer” may be as close as Hollywood is going to get anytime soon).  No, we live in the age where all leads are super-hip and witty with perfect jobs and apartments but are just-a-little-bit-fucked-up; we’re in a cinematic era where the supporting cast is primarily made up of goof-balls alternating between chewing-up scenery like a puppy with a fresh bone and offering bumper-sticker wisdom.  And in that sense, “Friends with Benefits” is standard Hollywood fare, but it’s still a lot of fun and it’s hard to ask for more than that from the rom-com genre.

And besides, when it comes to romantic comedies, standard Hollywood fare also implies values to which Big Hollywood readers can generally relate, so why miss out on a rare film made with conservative sensibilities in mind? Especially one starring Mila Kunis.

The first thing that grabbed me was the character work. The hero, Julia Powell (her real life blog is here) is a foodie blogger played by Amy Adams. I’m used to watching Amy Adams over my kid’s shoulder in “Enchanted,” which plays in our house on continual loop. I didn’t know Amy knew how to turn down the volume and play a “plain-Jane, yet interesting”… but she’s awesome. This isn’t her usual glowing, perky role where she turns it on like a fire-hose. And she doesn’t turn invisible like when she played a piece of cardboard in “Doubt.”

Back to the characters because “J and J” is a feast of interesting, appealing people I haven’t seen chew up the screen like this in a long time. The real Julia Child is already a great character, but Streep not only personifies this larger than life personality, she pulls off hilarious physical acting. She’s a comedic presence that had our audience laughing with every scene. And she looks huge, just like the real Julia Child. As a 6′8″ fellow, I appreciated the height jokes like when Streep reclines in a bed only to have her feet extend well beyond the mattress.

But Streep shows us sides of Child we probably hadn’t seen before: her sexuality, her competitive spirit, and the mourning for children. How painfully ironic that her name was Child.

I don’t know how Streep does it, but she makes her jowls look bigger. Her hands look big and mannish. Her shoulders rounded so that she looks like she’s playing a man in drag, which is kind of how Child came off to me. A refrigerator in a dress.

Stanley Tucci was in another favorite food movie of mine, “Big Night.” My friends told me to see Big Night then go out for Italian food. My Beloved and I saw “J and J” on date night then went out for dinner. It was one of our better date nights… much better than the time I made her see “Mimic.” But guys, don’t be fooled into thinking this is a chick flick. It’s a people flick. I’d take anybody to see this and if they didn’t like it, they’d need therapy. Yeah, this is the first sure fire Oscar contender I saw this year. At least this is the one I’ll be rooting for when they award it to some movie about a transvestite who marries a 12-year-old boy then murders him because Republican Christians fired him from his job.

Where was I? Oh yeah, Stanley Tucci. He plays the nicest guy in the world. He’s a great, understated character to provide contrast to Streep’s living cartoon. Hats off to Chris Messina as Julie Powell’s long-suffering husband and Jane Lynch who plays Julia Child’s sister.

This is for Nora Ephron: stop wasting your time at Huffington Post and make more movies. As a married man, you’re one of the few who seem to get marriage… even men in marriage. You seem to like men, which is rare among women writers. As someone who writes graphic novels, you’re one of the few who gets what it’s like to long for a significant project to find its way to publisher. You get the narcissism of working on one’s craft while someone else is in the house being neglected for some great piece of art. As someone who knows his way around the kitchen, you get the love of cooking, experimenting with recipes, even shopping for ingredients. Finally, you get Julia Child… including details like her love of sending post cards.

My wife went through a phase when she became an airplane pilot in the ’90s where she studied great women of the last century. She stumbled on the biography of Child Appetite for Life by Noel Riley Fitch. So inspired was my Beloved that she mailed Julia a birthday greeting for her 88th birthday. A few weeks later, she received a hand written post card from Julia herself! We were both so excited and my Beloved went into a cooking phase where I was the benefactor.

Man, this makes me wanna cook something. Maybe I’ll try making beef bourguignon.