Yesterday THR critic David Rooney called Gregg Araki‘s I Want Your Sex “a blast.”
I for one am highly suspicious of Rooney’s review for three reasons. One, he’s often generous to a fault. Two, I stopped trusting Rooney when he raved about The Secret Agent, a “good” but somewhat scattered and underwhelming film, during last May’s Cannes Film Festival. And three, I Want Your Sex was turned down last year by the Cannes and Venice film festivals. What does that tell you?
As Araki’s film has recently premiered at Sundance, it is fair to repeat HE’s fundamental opposition to watching Cooper Hoffman simulating the performance of sexual acts. Nobody wants to see any freckly-faced, doughy-bod, tiny-eyed ginger guy with his shirt or, God forbid, his pants off.
There’s a reason why John Wayne, Paul Newman, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn used to get the girl but Walter Brennan, Andy Devine, Edgar Buchanan, Donald Meek, Ernest Borgnine and Rupert Grint didn’t.
In fact Paddy Chayefsky wrote a teleplay (and then a movie version of the same script) about a homely Brooklyn butcher (a guy roughly in Cooper Hoffman’s league) who had such bad luck with girls that we was on the verge of giving up. It was sad but 1955 audiences understood his predicament because the actor who played the butcher was Ernest Borgnine.
Things are different these days. Now it’s “whoa, Marty the Butcher totally deserves to not only find love but great, Last Tango-level sex in his lonely-ass life, and here’s hoping he finds both, and that Delbert Mann will allow us to share in Marty’s orgasmic satisfactions.”
