A film featuring Olivia Wilde as a domme who pegs, spanks and bullies her junior assistant sounds like a winner. That’s the premise of the erotic comedy ‘I Want Your Sex’ which recently premiered at the Sundance festival. Unfortunately, the reviews so far (Daily Beast here and Guardian here) are mid to poor, which is a shame. Still, any movie that features Wilde as a sociopath in revealing outfits of leather, latex, high heels and chainmail (as the Daily Beast puts it) can’t be all bad. Maybe worth a stream once it makes it to a wider distribution.
This is Olivia Wilde attending the Sundance Premier.
It might be bad, but the director, Gregg Araki, has made good films that got bad reviews before. He was associated with the New Queer Cinema movement.
He made films in the 90s that were aimed at gay kids, and which portrayed being queer as impossibly glamorous and rebellious, films about outsiders who were glad that they were. They were teen movies, and so they were kind of over the top in some ways, simultaneously cynical and earnest in a sense, and definitely not to everyone’s taste. Some people found them really annoying. But they weren’t bad, at least not in the sense of being hacky, poorly made films that use sex to recoup the budget. They had a style, a point of view, something to say. And they were definitely young people’s films, which often didn’t sit well with established critics.
So I am optimistic about this new film. It’s been a long time since the 90s and maybe he’s lost his fastball, but I’m not going to be deterred by bad reviews from august film critics.
All three of his Teenage Apocalypse films are streaming on the Criterion Channel.
Interesting context. I vaguely knew of him but I’ve not seen any of films. I always enjoy a movie with a sense of style, even if the rest of it has some issues. Will look out for this and his earlier work. Thanks for taking time to comment and share that background.
-paltego