A little more than five years ago I wrote a piece called “Gazelles & Beefalos,” which was about odd couplings between beefy, wildebeest-sized guys and slender, attractive hotties. I happened to notice such a couple while eating at West Hollywood’s Astroburger, and I was going “what’s going on here?”

I’m mentioning this because there’s a line in Red Sparrow that applies to this dichotomy. Mary Louise Parker, playing an alcoholic with Washington connections who’s making a sale of secrets to the Russian baddies, says something to the effect of “Russian women are always so hot-looking but the Russian guys often look like toads,” or something close to that.

And the beefalos and gazelles observation is still valid. I saw another disparate couple like this (i.e., clearly together in a hetero sense) on the A train a couple of years ago in Brooklyn, and I just couldn’t believe it. She was almost Cindy Crawford and he was Meat Loaf.