One of the most under-seen and under-appreciated works of satire in our time, Sex House is a hidden masterpiece. In 2012, the year of the Mayan apocalypse, The Onion’s digital studios released Sex House, a web-exclusive pitch-black satire of the hungry, incompetent void that is America’s reality-show driven culture in the 21st century. We’ll be screening a never-before-seen unified cut of the whole series and then speaking with the writers and director whom society must hold responsible. Look upon my webseries, ye mighty. And despair.
Wild, Aggressive Dog is a writing collective that formed while at The Onion in NYC where they created video products such as Sex House, Porkin’ Across America, Lake Dredge Appraisal, Dr. Good, and Onion Talks. After The Onion, W,AD teamed up with producer Becca Kinskey and Abominable Pictures to created for Adult Swim the infomercials For Profit Online University, Smart Pipe, Book of Christ and the unaired pilot Dumb American Family. They are Sam West, Chris Sartinsky, Matt Klinman, Geoff Haggerty, Mike Pielocik and Dan Klein. They are all presently in good health.
Convinced that hosting a lavish charity fundraiser will improve the public image of their unpopular restaurant, two women hire an intern to help them plan and execute a neighborhood food drive. Despite their somewhat good intentions, the team quickly succumbs to petulance and laziness. They make repeat attempts—trying to maintain positive attitudes—but cosmic maladies cripple their efforts and they soon find themselves doomed.
When Alan’s wife flakes on a last-ditch effort to save their marriage, he’s joined by his all too eager brother-in-law Mike on a trip to Nicaragua’s ‘Mercado Village,’ a hipster resort for American tourists. As the two settle in, they meet Barbara, an American ex-pat who co-founded Mercado Village years earlier as a utopian haven for artists and free spirits. As Alan’s relationship with Barbara evolves, his friendship with Mike takes an unexpected turn.
This blissfully bonkers whatzit from unclassifiable dance-comedy trio Cocoon Central Dance Team is part psychotropic performance art spectacle, part absurdist sketch show. The three Bing Bongs—Tallie Medel, Sunita Mani & Eleanore Pienta—lounge about, pass gas, and periodically break into wondrously strange dance routines, with outer space interludes, a serious consideration of doctor boners, and a 90s-style girl group meltdown along the way. It all plays like a live action cartoon piped in from a cotton-candy-colored alternate universe.
In one of the best performances of his legendary career, Robert Mitchum plays small-time gunrunner Eddie “Fingers” Coyle in an adaptation by Peter Yates of George V. Higgins’s acclaimed novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle. World-weary and living hand to mouth, Coyle works on the sidelines of the seedy Boston underworld just to make ends meet. But when he finds himself facing a second stretch of hard time, he’s forced to weigh loyalty to his criminal colleagues against snitching to stay free. Directed with a sharp eye for its gritty locales and an open heart for its less-than-heroic characters, this is one of the true treasures of 1970s Hollywood filmmaking—a suspenseful crime drama in stark, unforgiving daylight.
Starring: Tilda Swinton, Billy Zane, Lothaire Bluteau, John Wood, Charlotte Valandrey
In 1600, nobleman Orlando (Tilda Swinton) inherits his parents’ house, thanks to Queen Elizabeth I, who commands the young man to never change. After a disastrous affair with Russian princess Sasha, Orlando looks for solace in the arts before being appointed ambassador to Constantinople in 1700, where war is raging. One morning, Orlando is shocked to wake up as a woman and returns home, struggling as a female to retain her property as the centuries roll by.
This behind-the-scenes documentary takes a lighthearted look at the fashion industry through the launch of New York City designer Isaac Mizrahi’s 1994 fall collection. The film explores the inspirations Mizrahi drew from to create the line — which include Eskimos and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” — while revealing the harried reality of mounting a major fashion show. Along the way, a number of bold-faced fashion icons and actors crop up, including John Galliano to Richard Gere.
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Matt Dillon, Joaquin Phoenix, Casey Affleck, Illeana Douglas
Suzanne Stone (Nicole Kidman) is a weather reporter at her small-town cable station, but she dreams of being a big-time news anchor. However, she feels that her middle-class husband (Matt Dillon) is holding her back, so she decides to have him murdered. For this, she enlists Jimmy (Joaquin Phoenix), a high school boy who is enamored with her. The plan doesn’t work exactly as she intended, though, and her husband’s family starts to suspect that she was involved in his death.
VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS is a strange, beautiful, and surreal exploration of a young woman coming of age.
Valerie, a Czechoslovakian teenager living with her grandmother, is blossoming into womanhood, but that transformation proves secondary to the effects she experiences when she puts on a pair of magic earrings. Now seeing the world around her in a different light, Valerie must endure her sexual awakening while attempting to discern reality from fantasy as she encounters lecherous priest Gracian, a vampire-like stranger and otherworldly carnival folk.
A law firm brings in its “fixer” to remedy the situation after a lawyer has a breakdown while representing a chemical company that he knows is guilty in a multi-billion dollar class action suit.
