Starring: Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette, Bill Murray
From cross-dressing to epically cheap productions employing bad actors and inexpensive props, Tim Burton’s Ed Wood traces the life of Hollywood’s famously awful director. It’s a beautiful black-and-white homage to the legend of Ed Wood told in late-night horror television style. At its heart, Ed Wood is a love-story between two misfits, Ed Wood (Johnny Depp) and Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau in an Oscar winning role) who, at the time this story was told was an out-of-work actor hooked on drugs and recently released from a mental hospital. It’s their devotion to filmmaking that fuels the passion to create and is what makes Ed Wood one of Burton’s absolute best. Ironically, Ed Wood and his films such as Planet 9 from Outer Space are so well known and studied now that we need to re-think their “badness.”
A Goya painting, mind games, and money violently collide in Danny Boyle’s new psychological thriller, Trance.
“No piece of art is worth a human life.”
Simon (James McAvoy) is a fine art auctioneer who teams up with a criminal gang to steal a Goya painting worth millions of dollars. But after suffering a blow to the head during the heist, he awakens to discover he has no memory of where he hid the painting. After physical threats and torture fail to produce answers, the gang’s leader Frank (Vincent Cassel) hires hypnotherapist Elizabeth Lamb (Rosario Dawson) to delve into the darkest recesses of Simon’s psyche. As Elizabeth begins to unravel Simon’s broken subconscious, the lines between truth, suggestion, and deceit begin to blur.
Starring: Michael Douglas, Sharon Stone, George Dzundza, Jeanne Tripplehorn
Who could ever forget the sexual explosion Paul Verhoeven ignited with the early 1990s classic Basic Instinct? Michael Douglas is the alcoholic/trouble cop, Detective Nick Curran, hot on the trail of wild woman mystery writer Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) after authorities suspect she murdered a man after a climatic roll in the hay. Brilliant in her role of seduction, Stone toys and taunts with every man and woman she meets (including the police in the now-legendary, and often spoofed, leg-uncrossing interrogation scene) but we never quite know if she’s the one. So, if you like your murders with a side of sex, this film is one naughty with a sharp edge.
Love and dreams of stardom in 1930s Hollywood come crashing down in this sensational film adaptation of the Nathanael West novel. Part of our mini-retrospective series, THE WORKS: KAREN BLACK.
The Day of the Locust uses Hollywood and its locusts (aka the mass of people who arrive to make it big, the sycophants) as a metaphor for 1930s America as it moved out of the depression-era into war-time. Focusing on a love-triangle between three people: Tod Hackett as the east-coast transplant looking to become a screenwriter who becomes obsessed with Faye Greener, an aspiring actress played by Karen Black who is incapable of true feelings but interested in using the dopey Homer Simpson (yes, that’s where the name came from) for money. Add in aspiring child actors and waning vaudeville stars, and The Day of the Locust becomes a surrealist vision of the apocalypse. In the end, things come crashing down in one of the more violent, bizarre, and over-the-top scenes in film history.
In the role of Faye, Karen Black takes the emotionally unavailable, fame hungry, dreamy aspiring actress into The Day of the Locusts’ realm of insanity at the highest level.
The Friday, May 31st screening includes a special introduction by Alan Cumming!
The unthinkable happens when a small plane collides into a 747 and a flight attendant has to take captain’s seat. Luckily, Karen Black and Charlton Heston are there to save the day!
Bound for Los Angeles, the Columbia Airlines’ Flight 409 is full of interesting passengers (you’ll can see them parodied in the 1980 spoof Airplane!) including an aging film star, a sick little girl, and a guitar-singing nun. Things take off fine at first but when a man has a heart attack while flying his small plane and then crashing into Flight 409, things take a disastrous turn. After all pilots are either sucked out or dying, flight attendant Nancy Pryor played by Karen Black takes charge of the plane that is miraculously still in the air but the only problem is that she can’t land it. Enter – literally onto the plane via helicopter – Nancy’s man-friend Captain Murdock (Charlton Heston, naturally) to help get everyone back down safely on the ground.
Part of The Works: Karen Black retrospective series.
A brilliant film about escaping your past, hating your present, and being fearful of the future while attempting to embrace life to the fullest.
Introduction for the Friday night screening by artist and filmmaker, Aïda Ruilova.
Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of Robert in Five Easy Pieces, an upper class man who has left it all behind for a working class existence, is uncomfortable, riveting, and a bit devastating. His constant struggle to distract himself with who he is and where he might be going (whether with girls, booze, or working in an oil field) makes him one mean fellow. Scenes such as the infamous diner order or the intimate conversation with his father make him relatable but that all comes crashing down at the end.
Stand by your man. Karen Black plays Robert’s beautiful but overly eager girlfriend Rayette, an aspiring singer who begs her man to love her when she probably shouldn’t.
Part of The Works: Karen Black retrospective series.
Friday night introduction by Sean Young! Both Easy Rider screenings include a very special pre-taped introduction and Q&A with Karen Black about the film and her role!
Easy Rider is a landmark American film about the encroaching disillusionment of the country’s counter culture movement in the late 1960s.
They’re not scared of you. They’re scared of what you represent…Freedom.
Directed by Dennis Hopper, Easy Rider shows the real and metaphorical journey of two bikers Captain America and Billy (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper) as they travel from New Orleans to Los Angeles. Along the way they realize the fabric of American culture is so fundamentally flawed that the promise of change invoked by the counter culture in the early 1960s seems to fade away. And although the tagline says that it’s about “a man who went looking for American…but couldn’t find it”, it seems more dangerous to suggest that perhaps he did.
In one of her first film roles, Karen Black (along with dance legend Toni Basil) plays one of the New Orleans prostitutes who takes up with Billy and Captain America during Mardi Gras and ends up in the Big Easy graveyard doing LSD, amongst other naughty deeds.
Part of The Works: Karen Black retrospective series.
Starring: Karen Black, Oliver Reed, Bette Davis, Burgess Meredith, Eileen Heckart
Desperate to escape the city, Ben and Marion Rolf along with their son David, take over a dilapidated house for the summer to get some much needed family time. The house super affordable but there’s a catch – they have to take care of the old recluse “Mrs. Allardyce” during their stay.
Burnt Offerings tackles domesticity in a very frightful way. The house has a mysterious life force of its own, one that slowly absorbs Marion into the honorable role of its “mother” while killing the others in order to complete its ritualistic rejuvenation. Hazy shots and slow narrative build only compound the eery realization that something is changing the Rolfs. The breakdown of the family is scary enough but it’s the dream-induced chauffeur character who has been the stuff of nightmares ever since the film’s release.
In the role of Marion Rolf, Karen Black plays a woman who becomes obsessed, and possessed, by a house; leaving her family behind for a new role as “mother.” Burnt Offerings is also packed with incredible performances by Oliver Reed, Burgess Meredith, Eileen Heckart, and Bette Davis, no less.
Spend 420 with us by taking a psychedelic journey into the heart of Las Vegas with a goofy journalist and his questionable lawyer.
“The possibility of physical and mental collapse is now very real. No sympathy for the Devil, keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride.”
Things start of weird and only get weirder when Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp doing a spot-on impression of Hunter S. Thompson) and Dr. Gonzo (Benicio de Toro at his heavyweight best) take a mescaline-fulled road trip to Las Vegas. Copious amounts of illegal drugs are consumed, hallucinations projected, and a sequence of oddballs met, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas brings Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo journalism onto the big screen (it is based, after all, off his culture defining novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream). While Raoul and Dr. Gonzo languish in their drug-induced haze they do have philosophical musings about chasing the American dream and questioning the failure of the counter-culture revolution.
OPENS APRIL 12TH. A standing couples brunch goes from dealing with each other’s personal dramas to dealing with the sudden possibility that the world is ending.
If there’s one thing that The Twilight Zone taught us it’s that people’s true nature tends to come out during the pending apocalypse, and it isn’t always pretty. It’s a Disaster embraces this idea with a more comedic tone as eight couples meet for their monthly brunch that goes from personal therapy session to coping with the word’s end in a matter of hours. What emerges through this often hilarious process between friends is revealing. I mean, what would you do if the end came knocking at your door?
