Sitting through Gregg Araki‘s I Want Your Sex (Manolia, 7.31) is going to send me into convulsions…it’s going to drain my soul, make me quiver with discomfort.
Nobody wants to see any freckly-faced, doughy-bod, tiny-eyed ginger guy with his shirt or, God forbid, his pants off. Nobody wants to watch a nude, vaguely chubby guy with skin the color of Elmer’s Glue All wearing a leather gay-bar harness…sweating and hyperventilating while a 40ish dominatrix rides him like a bucking bronco.
Posted on 1.24.26: With I Want Your Sex having recently premiered at Sundance, it is completely fair to repeat HE’s fundamental opposition to watching Cooper Hoffman simulating the performance of sexual acts.
There’s a reason why John Wayne, Paul Newman, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn used to get the girl but Walter Brennan, Andy Devine, Wallace Ford, Edgar Buchanan, Donald Meek, Ernest Borgnine and Rupert Grint didn’t.
In response to this rule-of-thumb Paddy Chayefsky wrote Marty, a teleplay (and then a movie version of same) about a homely Brooklyn butcher (a guy roughly in Cooper Hoffman’s league) who had such bad luck with girls that he was on the verge of giving up.
It was sad but 1955 audiences understood the poor guy’s predicament because the actor who played Marty was Ernest Borgnine.
Things are different these days. Now it’s “whoa, Marty the Butcher totally deserves to not only find love but experience great, Last Tango-level sex in his lonely-ass life, and here’s hoping he finds both, and — this is even better — that Delbert Mann will allow us to share in Marty’s orgasmic satisfactions.”
