Studio Movie Grill, once the innovator of the dine-in movie-watching experience, is attempting to reassert its dominance in Dallas-Fort Worth with the introduction of two new theaters in the suburbs and new upscale food options.
Studio Movie Grill Colleyville is scheduled to open in April 2014, boasting eight screens and more than 1,000 seats. It will be followed later this year by a location in The Colony that will have 10 screens and around 1,300 seats.
For starters, you can reserve your seat ahead of time at any location. No longer do you just have to hope you'll find your preferred spot — for me, dead center, four rows up from the bottom. Now you can just order your tickets online and choose exactly where you want to be.
Although you can still get your standard popcorn, nachos and sodas, Studio Movie Grill is also trying to appeal to foodies with options like hummus, tenderloin Cobb salad and carne pomodoro pasta. Starting in May, the theater takes it a step further with a new menu options such as sage-dusted pork chops and pork belly macaroni and cheese.
The two new area theaters (plus one in Tyler, Texas, and another in Chatham, Illinois) will make 19 Studio Movie Grills total, including eight in Dallas-Fort Worth.
Studio Movie Grill will soon add two new DFW locations, bringing the local total to eight.
Photo courtesy of Studio Movie Grill
Studio Movie Grill will soon add two new DFW locations, bringing the local total to eight.
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.
