Tall, dreamy, and possessing a sultry voice and serious guitar chops, John Mayer has been a pop culture force since he exploded on the scene with his quintuple-platinum 2001 debut album Room For Squares (who can forget the singalong chorus of “Why Georgia?”).
Since then, he’s managed to concoct perfect grooves, chart-topping hits, a global legion of swooning female fans — and abject jealousy and FOMO in male fans (we kid… a little).
Mayer, who boasts seven Grammys (including Song of the Year for the fan favorite, “Daughters”), heads to Houston next year for his just-announced “Sob Rock” Tour, in support of his new Sob Rock album — his eighth studio work and first solo release since 2017.
He’ll play Toyota Center on April 23, 2022; tickets go on sale Friday, July 23 at online at the Toyota Center site. The tour kicks off Thursday, February 17, in Albany, New York.
Local fans who can’t get enough can also catch the singer/songwriter in Austin on April 20 at the Moody Center, and in Dallas on April 24 at American Airlines Center.
Fans can look forward to a slew of hits from his triple-platinum Heavier Things (2003), double-platinum Battle Studies (2009), and gold Born and Raised (2012). He may also tease tunes from his group Dead & Company, in which he sings and plays lead guitar. Mayer and the band have played to more than 3.4 million fans in major stadiums.
Expect to see much of Mayer as he makes the publicity rounds (he’ll be on the Today show on July 20); his first single from the new album — “Last Train Home” — has just dropped.
And expect screams, selfies, and more when the dashing Mayer hits the Bayou City.
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.
