We're not "Blowin' Smoke." Kacey Musgraves is coming back to Austin.
Kacey Musgraves/Facebook
Kacey Musgraves may have left Austin for the honkier honky-tonks of Nashville, but the Capital City still likes to claim her as our own. The Golden, Texas-born Musgraves moved to Austin in 2006 after high school, but it wasn't until she moved to the land of the Grand Ole Opry that the singer-songwriter hit the big time.
And what a big time it's been. The country darling has had an unprecedented first half of 2018, including a smash hit album, Golden Hour; the March cover of Texas Monthly; a guest spot on Saturday Night Live; and a June taping of Austin City Limits. Musgraves is planning an equally ambitious second half of the year with her worldwide Oh, What a World Tour, which includes dates in Japan, Europe, and Canada.
On July 16, the musician announced dates for the tour's North American leg, which runs January through April 2019. Luckily, Austin's getting two dates: March 9 and 10 at Stubb's Waller Creek Amphitheater. Musgraves' only other Texas show will be in Dallas on March 8 at the Bomb Factory. Sinclair is slated as the opening act in both cities.
Musgraves' Austin dates coincide with the beginning of SXSW 2019 and are followed by a 10-day break in her tour. While no official SX performance has been announced (and likely won't be for a while), fans can do with that information what they will.
Tickets are currently on sale now through a special artist pre-order and will go on sale to the public on July 20 at 10 am.
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.
