Monday/Hump Day Movies:
Sweet Movie

Monday ad Wednesday, June 22 and 24
Admission: Free, $5 minimum
Showtime: 11pm

Vincent Canby's New York Times review of Dusan Makavejev's 1974 cult classic, Sweet Movie, derisively termed it "decadent".

Roger Ebert commented in his review:

When one of the characters is first made love to in sugar, then stabbed to death so his blood stains the sugar and makes it sticky, we're shocked and disquieted: Makavejev has made the movie violence more real, drawn our attention to the way we're experiencing it, by presenting it in such an unexpected context. This is a movie we can't be passive about. And although we can hate it, we can't walk out of it.

To explain the plot is almost pointless but here's a decent rundown:

The intercut story of two women: a nearly-mute beauty queen who descends into withdrawal and madness, and another who captains a ship laden with candy and sugar, luring men and boys aboard for sex, death, and revolutionary talk. The beauty queen passes from a wealthy husband whose honeymoon delight is to urinate on her, to a muscular keeper who punches her, stows her in a suitcase, and ships her to Paris, to a lip-synching rock idol with whom she has a love spasm, to an Austrian commune complete with a banquet of vomit, urine, feces, chopped dildos, and wet nurses. By then she's in a fetal position, until everyone's rescued by reminders that "it's just a movie."

Rest assured, this IS decadent, but not without introspection and critique. What might have seemed simply provocative in 1974, now seems like glam-Goddard, where the radicals are presented and exposed with both empathy and dismay; but always in a visually tempting tableaux.