A film with too much sex on the brain

I thought The Invite (Olivia Wilde) might be an update on Mike Nichols’s 1966 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf with Richard Burton & Elizabeth Taylor. Not really. Though the premise is two couples getting together for an evening’s gathering at one couple’s home. It’s a film based on the Spanish flick The People Upstairs (Cesc Gay) in turn based on his stage play. I generally liked it. Here you have two fashionable millennial couples meeting for the first time, though they had previously bumped into each other in their apartment building. The inviting couple – Wilde as Angela and Seth Rogen as Joe – are a quarrelling neurotic twosome, so disconnected one doesn’t know what the other explicitly told them that morning. The other – Hawk (Ed Norton) and Pina (Penélope Cruz) - seem more together and appear the dominant of the two. He’s a retired firefighter (dubious to Angela because of his fay ways) and she a sexologist with searing insights into the opposite couple’s behaviour. Hawk turns out to be a psychobabbling New Ager. Meanwhile Angela is the most insecure of the foursome, aiming to please with her charcuterie board and nervous tics. The damper is Joe, who’s not into it from the start. The film moves at a pleasingly quick pace and is abundant with close ups – even facial – of our characters, Wilde’s in particular with her excited eyes and scrunchy cheeks and goofy movements, reminiscent of Diane Keaton (to whom the film is dedicated). I enjoy seeing Rogen in anything and he’s perfect as the modern curmudgeon here. As the evening progresses there is some stripping down of defenses (like in Virginia Woolf) but we’re really on track for something else, which I don’t know if I was crazy about (reminding me a bit too much of the 1970s). One thing’s for sure: if this is similar to the Spanish flick, which I’d like to see (of course it's not on Netflix), the people who made these films have too much sex on the brain. I also found the ending - how to say - a bit schmaltzy. Besides the absorbing close-ups the film also featured a type of device I hadn’t seen in movies for some time, heavy violin chords to punctuate the storyline. That was brilliant. 

It was Tuesday (cheap night) at the movies and a light bulb had gone off in my head. Book online, damnit, and avoid the line-up at the theatre. Sure enough when I arrived the lobby was congestingly full of people. I simply wandered in and just showed my phone ticket code. Surprised more people aren't doing this…..Speaking of theatre-going, on the hottest day this year the cineplex offered welcoming AC and I had thrown on a long sleeved shirt for warmth. But when in Florida earlier this year I noticed moviegoers coming to the cinema with blankets. Well, it is Florida. It also reminded me of the old Mad magazine cartoon about people coming out of the theatre hating the movie but saying it saw was worth it because of the air conditioning!

The Windsor International Film Festival’s (WIFF) tickets go on sale Sept. 22. I can’t wait. This year, with a slightly later October festival start, I’ll be able attend the full 11 days of the magnificent little festival that grew into probably Canada’s best regional fest and is now rivalling many big cities’.