Variety‘s Alex Hitman is reporting that Cooper Hoffman (Saturday Night, Licorice Pizza) will play a would-be “sexual muse” to an artist played by Olivia Wilde in Gregg Araki‘s I Want Your Sex.
Written by Araki and Karley Sciortino, pic is described as a “provocative thriller” that “blithely explores desire, domination and fantasy.”
I’m sorry but nobody wants to see a film in which Cooper (son of “Philly” Hoffman**) performs sexually in any way, shape or form. Nobody wants to see any freckly-faced, doughy-bod, tiny-eyed ginger guy with his shirt or, God forbid, his pants off. He’s just not sexy or good-looking enough….sorry.
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.
** I’ll allow that the late, great Phillip Seymour Hoffman was briefly shown slamming ham with Marisa Tomei in Sidney Lumet‘s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, but that was a very fast and quick one-off.
“Schlumpies & Dumpies,” posted on 2.11.15:
“Put simply, guys who got the girl used to look like guys who got the girl. And girls who attracted a lot of guys used to look like girls who attracted a lot of guys. But no longer. By today’s standards any homely or marginal or bearded, overfed, gross-looking guy or girl can hook up with good-looking types and nobody bats an eyelash.
“Blubbery Seth Rogen getting lucky with and impregnating Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up…uh-huh. Rogen married to and boinking Rose Byrne every which way in Neighbors…if you say so. Mark Duplass making sensitive-guy moves on Melissa McCarthy in Tammy…really? The bulky, nearly bald Steve Zissis connecting with Amanda Peet on HBO’s Togetherness…right. Anne Hathaway being sufficiently taken with Rafe Spall to move in with him in One Day…remarkable. The obviously desirable Anna Kendrick and Keira Knightley finding dweeby twee-male Mark Webber attractive and beddable in Lynn Shelton‘s Laggies and Joe Swanberg‘s Happy Christmas, respectively. Complete bullshit in a sense but Apatow’s rules of attraction have been sinking in for years and so we’re all buying it.
“Movies have been a thriving industry for a little over a century now, and for most of this period romantic male leads were cut from a certain cloth. There are two categories, of course — studly, straight-arrow romantic leads (everyone from Cary Grant to Van Johnson to William Holden to Steve McQueen to Ben Affleck to Brenton Thwaites) to less studly, mostly pleasing but less-than-drop-dead sexy romantic male also-rans or “best friends” (i.e., Ralph Bellamy back in the ’30s, Wendell Corey in the ’50s).
“Romantic male leads used to be guys whom (a) women could pleasurably imagine going to bed with and/or marrying, and (b) straight guys recognized as superior alpha males with excellent genes. But Apatow has stepped in and said ‘fuck all that superior genes stuff….schlubby genes are actually pretty nice.’
“What’s changed is not only the quality of the alphas but the romantic also-rans — i.e., the guys who never got the girl. Over the last decade or so the rise of cheap digital cinema and…whatever, the Sundance Film Festival aesthetic plus downswirling GenY-ish attitudes plus a few Apatow-perpetrated scenarios have ushered in a politically correct notion that dweeby, dorky-looking guys or less-than-drop-dead-knockout girls (i.e., Lena Dunham being the standard-bearer) are just as acceptable in a romantic context as anyone else.”
