Beyond a certain age ass-cheeks tend to jiggle when jarred, shaken or slapped. I’m not sure when the jiggle propensity kicks in, but you’ll never see it among young kids or teenagers (unless they’re obese) or 20somethings who’ve kept themselves in shape. It generally tends to manifest in our mid to late 30s or certainly by our 40s.

I myself haven’t had rock-hard buns since my late teens or early 20s…something like that.

I’m talking jiggle cheeks because there’s a scene in Mickey 17 in which a nude Robert Pattinson falls off a platform of some kind, and when he hits the floor his ass briefly jiggles like a sonuvabitch. My immediate reaction was “oh, that’s unfortunate” because it makes RPatz look like a somewhat older dude, which he is, of course, being 38. (He’ll be 39 in May.) It wasn’t so long ago when RPatz was a trim hunk whose ass rarely if ever wiggled, jiggled or hubba-hubba’ed. Ahh, the old Twilight days.

I don’t know for a fact that Pattinson was unhappy with the afore-mentioned jiggle when he first saw Mickey 17, but I’ll bet he probably was. Actors are vain; they like to look good from all angles. I can tell you for sure that if I had been the director of Mickey 17, I would have given RPatz’s ass a nice CG smooth-over in post-production. I would have protected the poor guy from the snickers and carpings of people like myself.

Why didn’t Bong Joon-ho do the right thing? Probably because he personally related to the jiggling; he saw nothing wrong or compromising or distasteful about it. Primarily because Bong is a large, fleshy kind of dude who has that well-fed-and-then-some look. He’s not yet “fat” but is well on the way to Orson Welles-hood. If he’d been a tad more considerate Bong would’ve put himself into RPatz’s head or male ego and decided to spare him the embarassment. Alas, he couldn’t be bothered.