Starting with the fashion stuff, since that’s ostensibly our reason for being here: Elizabeth Olsen is intriguing to me because I can’t put my finger on what her style actually is. She’s run a very wide gamut in that respect, and part of that could well be because she is still trying to figure that out, while also grappling with the spectre of her twin sisters and their tendency to dress like they are encircling a cauldron and yet cannot get warm. This has a tough of their signature shapelessness, but only a touch; while I can’t rightly say I LIKE it, the print and thick, undone braid give this a folksy Princess of the Hayride vibe that surprisingly suits her. She looks like a person who’d work the room with her wide bright smile, then kick off her shoes later in the night and sip a bourbon neat with her feet up on the bar, not caring whether they’ve got dirt on them, and crack peanut shells with her teeth. All of those are compliments.
Jeremy Renner, though.
Here’s the thing: I’m not saying he’s being skeevy with her. Just that Jeremy Renner gives off a vibe at pressers like he has no idea how to touch another person casually. Remember when he was doing all that press with Amy Adams for Arrival? She’d smile brightly — but, unless I’m imagining it, with a shade of tension in her mouth — as he clutched her tightly to him in a way that sincerely just looks like he’s mimicking something he saw in a movie and that nobody ever told him that he could release and relax.
He also does that thing — which is not exclusive to him at all; he’s just the lucky winner today — where he puts his hand high up on people’s torsos and then really wraps it around them. Am I crazy for always side-eyeing that? I just imagine how I’d feel if a dude who was not intimately involved with me posed for a photo with his hand basically cupping my side RIGHT under my boob, rather than resting on my back or on my waist. Again, I don’t think Jeremy Renner is copping a feel. More like he’s just weirdly overenthusiastic and unmodulated and… seriously, it reminds me faintly of in Short Circuit when Number 5 learns everything about human interaction from watching a shitload of TV and then tries to parrot it all back. Jeremy Renner might just be the Johnny Five of press junket actors.
[Photos: Backgrid, Getty]