NO ONE GETS LAID UNTIL WE FINISH OUR MOVIE: LATE ERA JOHN WATERS
"Contemporary art hates you." - John Waters
Films in this Program
John Waters
86 minutes
Few filmmakers have made themselves so synonymous with a city as Waters has with Baltimore, and with PECKER, he offers both a hysterical commentary on both the plight of the “regional” artist and the tension between America’s provinces and its taste-making cultural capitals. Art is everywhere! "To the end of irony!"
Pecker (Edward Furlong), an 18-year-old sandwich slinger and amateur street photographer, becomes the unlikely darling of the New York art world when a hotshot dealer discovers the grainy black-and-white photos he’s been taking of friends and neighbors around the working-class Hampden neighborhood. But in his meteoric rise he risks losing his soul, his naïve talent, and his girlfriend (Christina Ricci). A riotous defilement of NYC snobbery from the gutters of Charm City, PECKER is surprisingly warm and fuzzy while also being historically significant as the film that introduced the term “teabagging” into mainstream usage.
"Like if a Disney channel original was allowed to show bush." - Emily Dee
Pecker (Edward Furlong), an 18-year-old sandwich slinger and amateur street photographer, becomes the unlikely darling of the New York art world when a hotshot dealer discovers the grainy black-and-white photos he’s been taking of friends and neighbors around the working-class Hampden neighborhood. But in his meteoric rise he risks losing his soul, his naïve talent, and his girlfriend (Christina Ricci). A riotous defilement of NYC snobbery from the gutters of Charm City, PECKER is surprisingly warm and fuzzy while also being historically significant as the film that introduced the term “teabagging” into mainstream usage.
"Like if a Disney channel original was allowed to show bush." - Emily Dee
John Waters
88 minutes
Power to the people who punish bad cinema!
As with all of John Waters’s great films, CECIL B. DEMENTED pits a surrogate family of social outcasts against mainstream society. The outcasts this time are a gang of terrorist cinephiles who call themselves “the Sprocket Holes” and wage war against Hollywood mediocrity. Their leader is Cecil B. Demented (Stephen Dorff), a megalomaniacal wannabe-director. Together they kidnap Hollywood’s biggest star, Honey Whitlock (Melanie Griffith), and force her to act in their renegade movie, eventually converting her to their cause. (Incidentally, Patricia Hearst makes a good-natured cameo as a gang member’s mother.)
Waters excoriates all those who rob cinema of its sense of danger and excitement. To combat the malaise, he proposes a grassroots cinema that is personal, political, improvisatory, and interactive with the world around it. CECIL B. DEMENTED is also a fantasy movie where marginal and dying exhibition spaces like drive-ins, kung-fu grindhouses, and porno theatres are not only thriving, but also foster radical anti-mainstream cinephile communities. It's the closest Waters has come to self-parody while remaining utterly sincere. “There are no rules in underground cinema, only edges!”
As with all of John Waters’s great films, CECIL B. DEMENTED pits a surrogate family of social outcasts against mainstream society. The outcasts this time are a gang of terrorist cinephiles who call themselves “the Sprocket Holes” and wage war against Hollywood mediocrity. Their leader is Cecil B. Demented (Stephen Dorff), a megalomaniacal wannabe-director. Together they kidnap Hollywood’s biggest star, Honey Whitlock (Melanie Griffith), and force her to act in their renegade movie, eventually converting her to their cause. (Incidentally, Patricia Hearst makes a good-natured cameo as a gang member’s mother.)
Waters excoriates all those who rob cinema of its sense of danger and excitement. To combat the malaise, he proposes a grassroots cinema that is personal, political, improvisatory, and interactive with the world around it. CECIL B. DEMENTED is also a fantasy movie where marginal and dying exhibition spaces like drive-ins, kung-fu grindhouses, and porno theatres are not only thriving, but also foster radical anti-mainstream cinephile communities. It's the closest Waters has come to self-parody while remaining utterly sincere. “There are no rules in underground cinema, only edges!”
John Waters
89 minutes
After taking on the suburban melodrama, the message picture, and the rock ’n’ roll film, John Waters tried his hand at making an old-fashioned sexploitation movie (the kind, he recalled, that “all the nuns told him he would go to hell” for watching). A DIRTY SHAME is an encyclopedic bacchanalia of sexual experimentation covering everything from adult babies to Roman showers.
Tracey Ullman plays a frigid housewife who suffers a concussion that fills her with a sudden, extreme sexual appetite. The rest of her newly discovered sex-postive commuity—including her messianic sex-cult leader (Johnny Knoxville) and her go-go dancer daughter with breasts the size of life rafts (Selma Blair)—follows suit, each celebrating the liberation of their own special fetishes. But will the prudes and the “neuters” repressing this small town put a stop to the debauchery before the world's greatest orgasm is achieved?
“The film of a free man. This is the only film from the late-'90s/early-2000s ‘gross-out comedy’ boom that celebrates rather than stigmatizes sexual diversity, and posits sexual promiscuity as an emancipatory lifestyle choice. And so of course it was dismissed by the bourgeois critic class as a childish provocation and saddled with an NC-17 rating.” - Will Sloan
Tracey Ullman plays a frigid housewife who suffers a concussion that fills her with a sudden, extreme sexual appetite. The rest of her newly discovered sex-postive commuity—including her messianic sex-cult leader (Johnny Knoxville) and her go-go dancer daughter with breasts the size of life rafts (Selma Blair)—follows suit, each celebrating the liberation of their own special fetishes. But will the prudes and the “neuters” repressing this small town put a stop to the debauchery before the world's greatest orgasm is achieved?
“The film of a free man. This is the only film from the late-'90s/early-2000s ‘gross-out comedy’ boom that celebrates rather than stigmatizes sexual diversity, and posits sexual promiscuity as an emancipatory lifestyle choice. And so of course it was dismissed by the bourgeois critic class as a childish provocation and saddled with an NC-17 rating.” - Will Sloan
