{"id":427027,"date":"2026-01-24T12:34:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-24T12:34:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/427027\/"},"modified":"2026-01-24T12:34:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-24T12:34:08","slug":"olivia-wilde-and-cooper-hoffman-dominate-the-screen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/427027\/","title":{"rendered":"Olivia Wilde And Cooper Hoffman Dominate The Screen"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tSex, money and murder: Gregg Araki<\/a> knows what people want, and it\u2019s been a long time since he last gave it to them, in 2015\u2019s racy doomsday cult comedy Kaboom. Premiering at Sundance<\/a> for the 11th time, Araki used his pulpit there to pay tribute to the late Robert Redford for his foresight in establishing a creative outlet for minorities and outsider artists, a safe space that established him as cinema\u2019s punk poet laureate of Generation X. By contrast, I Want Your Sex<\/a>, in no way connected to the George Michael song of the same name, is his outreach to Generation Z, a campy, ridiculous, raunchy comedy that riffs on the age gap, and wonderful odd-couple chemistry, between his two leads. Imagine if Babygirl had been fun and \u2014 assuming you have a high tolerance for smut \u2014 this one\u2019s for you.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn some ways, it is Araki\u2019s gender-reversed Sunset Boulevard; in the opening scenes, a scantily clad young man named Elliot (Cooper Hoffman<\/a>) finds his lover Erika (Olivia Wilde<\/a>) floating upside down, naked, in her pool. Elliot has a bloody nose, a mouth smeared with lipstick and is wearing a frilly pink bra and pants. How did he get there? Araki flashes back a tongue-in-cheek nine-and-a-half weeks to show us, alternating key moments from Elliot\u2019s life with deadpan police interrogation scenes, where Elliot is questioned by officers played, with Araki\u2019s undeniable casting brilliance, by Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville.<\/p>\n

\n\tErika, we learn, is a provocative artist whose sexually explicit work lines her gallery, a place staffed by pretentious freaks and fashion casualties who make Elliot stand out a mile with his quite astonishingly style-averse attitude to clothing. By contrast, Erika is a vamp, a woman whose wardrobe encompasses high fashion and BDSM \u2014 maybe this is what makes Erika choose him to be her assistant, just as her icy, dominatrix cool appeals to the refreshingly artless Elliot. <\/p>\n

\n\tWilde nails Erika\u2019s appeal from her first introduction, a smart, beautiful woman who knows exactly what she\u2019s doing (\u201cYou know I hate criticism,\u201d she tells her office manager, \u201cespecially when it\u2019s accurate\u201d). Elliot, meanwhile, is in awe of her rep, telling his best friend Apple (Chase Sui Wonders<\/a>), in hushed tones, that Erika was rumored to have \u201cf*cked Vincent Gallo at the New York premiere of The Brown Bunny when she was 18,\u201d one of many good jokes aimed at Araki\u2019s peers.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cDo you have a girlfriend?\u201d Erika asks Elliot, knowing that she shouldn\u2019t ask, and guaranteeing that she would \u201cnever say anything that inappropriate,\u201d directly after saying it. Elliot sees the way this is going and immediately signs up for a strings-free sexual affair in which she never misses a chance to mock and humiliate this zillennial\u2019s contemporaries as \u201cwhiney, repressed weaklings\u201d. To add to Elliot\u2019s woes, he feels his prudish girlfriend Minerva (Charlie XCX, cast amusingly against type), is forcing him to cheat, and her feeble faked orgasms suggest the singer has an untapped talent for comedy.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe art world is an easy target for satire, but Araki doesn\u2019t seem too bothered by that and neither should he, since sexually explicit art has never really gone out of style, and neither has the argument about style over content ever been won \u2014 \u201cContemporary art is a scam, you know that, right?\u201d Erika lectures Elliot, right before she spends $20k on a painting shows the word \u201cF*ck\u201d scrawled in white on a black background. In Araki\u2019s film, art isn\u2019t something to be taken seriously, and something that\u2019s been wonderful to see in his films over the years is the way he takes a similar approach to sexuality, making films that are a broad church in terms of straight, gay and the fluidity in between.<\/p>\n

\n\tThough vanilla sex is the bogeyman here, I Want Your Sex does \u2014 surprisingly \u2014 stand more than a cat in hell\u2019s chance of crossing over to discerning straight audiences, especially as Elliot\u2019s adventures in S&M take him into increasingly surreal, Candide-like scenarios, like his encounter with a Frenchwoman that Erika sends him to seduce, and the cringe-inducing attempt at a threesome that nails the awkwardness that must often happen when people try to make their fantasies become real life. Forget the ball-gags, the dildos, and the vagina made of bubblegum, I Want Your Sex is surprisingly relatable at its core: Ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn\u2019t have fallen in love with?<\/p>\n

\n\tTitle: I Want Your Sex
Festival: Sundance (Premieres)
Sales: Black Bear Pictures
Director: Gregg Araki
Screenwriters: Karley Sciortino, Gregg Araki
Cast: Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman, Mason Gooding<\/a>, Chase Sui Wonders, Daveed Diggs<\/a>, Charli XCX<\/a>
Running time: 1 hr 30 mins<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sex, money and murder: Gregg Araki knows what people want, and it\u2019s been a long time since he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":427028,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[19905,24423,27730,174649,88,171447,171516,140881,206,139162,899,98560],"class_list":["post-427027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-charli-xcx","tag-chase-sui-wonders","tag-cooper-hoffman","tag-daveed-diggs","tag-entertainment","tag-gregg-araki","tag-i-want-your-sex","tag-mason-gooding","tag-movies","tag-olivia-wilde","tag-review","tag-sundance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=427027"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427027\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/427028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=427027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=427027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=427027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}