The festival will include 12 feature films and over 50 short films, starting with the opening night film, Johan von Sydow's Tiny Tim: King For a Day, a documentary about the eccentric musician/performer.
Other feature films will include the documentary Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It; Dream Horse, starring Toni Collette and Homeland's Damian Lewis; Riders of Justice starring Mads Mikkelsen; the stranger-than-fiction cyber-thriller documentary Enemies of the State; and more.
“We are so glad to be able to celebrate Dallas Arts Month and bring our program to the community.” USAFF Managing Director Ann Alexander said in a statement. “With support from our Sponsors, this year’s program will be presented as all-free-admission. We know that a lot of people are experiencing financial challenges and that people have missed being able to get out to a theater and see a movie. We wanted to present a diverse and accessible program.”
One of the oldest festivals in the U.S., the USA Film Festival celebrates its 51st anniversary this year. The festival presents over 50 days of diverse programs every year.
The festival will have all safety measures in place, with masks being required and social distancing seating protocols observed. Tickets are free but must be reserved in advance by calling the festival office at 214-821-6300 beginning April 16. No walk-up tickets will be available.
Cooper Hoffman and Olivia Wilde in I Want Your Sex.
Writer/director Gregg Araki has been making provocative movies for nearly 40 years, releasing his debut - Three Bewildered People in the Night - in 1987. Most of them have had plotlines that revolved around sex in one way or another, and for his latest - his first film in 12 years - he’s putting it right there in the title, I Want Your Sex.
Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) is an aimless twenty-something who can’t even afford the rent for his apartment with best friend, Apple (Chase Sui Wonders). Thankfully, he finds a job at the gallery of artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), who is open with her sexuality both in her artwork and in her day-to-day life. That soon includes Elliot, whom she convinces to enter into a dominant-submissive relationship with her, with sessions taking place both at work and her home.
Elliot, who’s in a going-nowhere coupling with Minerva (Charli XCX), is more than willing to participate, both because it lets him feel something he doesn’t get normally and because Erika offers a perspective on sex that’s much different from people of his generation. But as he gets in deeper with her, he starts to lose a sense of himself, going down a path in which he finds himself talking to police detectives Zem (Johnny Knoxville) and Zola (Margaret Cho).
Araki does his level best to make I Want Your Sex into a broad comedy, and early on it seems as if he might succeed. The deadpan way that sexual objects appear in the film (a penis-shaped rug in Elliot and Apple’s apartment, a vagina artwork with chewed gum as the medium) make for amusing sight gags. He also makes Elliot the bewildered other in multiple twosomes, with Minerva being the funniest, as she’s way more interested in studying than his ham-fisted attempts at sex.
It’s clear that Araki wants the film to be a commentary on the generational differences about sex, but he fumbles his own idea. It starts with an on-the-nose conversation between Erika and Elliot, and continues with the various dalliances, which seem to be more about making Elliot look and feel ridiculous than giving true insight. Their encounters certainly open his mind about what sex can be, but their one-note nature makes them repetitive and frankly boring, odd considering the acts in which the two engage.
The uninspired storytelling makes the 90-minute film drag way more than it should. Araki includes a few other characters to try to vary the tone of the film, including gallery workers Zap (Mason Gooding) and Vikktor (Daveed Diggs), but their early promise yields little results. The framing device of Elliot’s interview with the detectives never works, especially because Araki completely neuters the personalities of Cho and Knoxville for seemingly no good reason.
The cast as a whole goes to waste. Hoffman is showing the promise of his late father (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and even though he’s appealing here, the material pulls him down. Wilde just made her own provocative movie about sex (The Invite), and this one pales in comparison despite her heightened performance. Wonders, Charli XCX, and Gooding are all young stars who deserve to be showcased much better than they are in this film.
A film called I Want Your Sex is announcing itself as daring and alluring, but this film contains almost none of those qualities. Instead, it’s a slog that only occasionally has something interesting to show or say, mostly relying on the power of its actors to hold viewers’ attention - and failing at even that.
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I Want Your Sex is now playing in select theaters.
