Diversity Cafe 2007 "Exploring Diversity Through Cinema"
 Now Showing: The Boynton Beach Club [ December 2007 ]Event Details: Thursday December 20th in the Building 549 Auditorium & Friday December 21st in Conference Room “B” Time: 12:00 p.m. Starring:Sally Kellerman, Joseph Bologna, Len Cariou, Brenda Vaccaro A romantic comedy about our amazing capacity to rebound and fall in love at any age. Lois, Harry, Marilyn ,Sandy and Jack live in an "Active Adult" community in Boynton Beach, Florida. Their lives intersect when they meet at a local Bereavement Club where they go to find emotional support after the loss of a loved one. For anyone who thinks that new love and romance ends long before retirement, they're in for a reality check. No one sees themselves as becoming old, and the residents of Boynton Beach aren't about to start. But sometimes we all need a little reminder that life is worth living and sharing. |
| Try a FREE Diversity Cafe movie. |
 |
 Now Showing: Edge of America [ November 2007 ]Event Details: Thursday November 29th in the Building 549 Auditorium & Friday November 30th in Conference Room “B” Time: 12:00 p.m. Starring:Tim Daly, Geraldine Keams, James McDaniel, Wes Studi, Michael Flynn Actor James McDaniel ("NYPD Blue") is Kenny Williams, a high school English teacher who leaves his Texas home to teach at a public high school on Three Nations Consolidated Reservation in Utah. He bumps into kids with more than a chip on their shoulders -- and who are racist to say the least. After Williams takes on the underachieving girls' basketball team and tries to turn it around, all involved learn about tolerance in a big way. Directed by American Indian filmmaker Chris Eyre, the teleplay was inspired by actual events. |
|
 Now Showing: Longtime Companion [ October 2007 ]Event Details: Thursday October 25th in the Building 549 Auditorium & Friday October 26th in Conference Room “B” Time: 12:00 p.m. Starring: Bruce Davison, Campbell Scott, Stephen Caffrey, Mark Lamos, Patrick Cassidy At the time of Longtime Companion's release in 1990, the devastating disease of AIDS was seen as a mysterious and deadly scourge, replete with rumors, lies, and panic. As the first narrative film to examine the AIDS epidemic, screenwriter Craig Lucas and director Norman René place the disease in an historical context, dramatizing the impact of the disease through time in a series of vignettes involving seven gay men. AIDS first made its presence felt surreptitiously, as an article in The New York Times reported on a rare cancer attacking gay men called Karposi's syndrome. Then the Village Voice began a series of in-depth articles concerning a "gay plague" which later became known as AIDS. The film follows the AIDS crisis through the lives of the seven main characters so that they are only aware of AIDS in the historical framework of each episode. The characters include former gay couple Willy (Campbell Scott) and John (Dermot Mulroney), first seen partying at a Fire Island club, who don't pay much attention to the mysterious article in The New York Times but become intimately effected by the disease. There is also Sean (Mark Lamos), a soap opera writer whose mind is slowly deteriorating because of the disease, and his supportive friend David (Bruce Davidson). ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide |
|
 Now Showing: Raising Victor Vargas [ September 2007 ]Starring: Victor Rasuk, Judy Marte, Sylvestre Rasuk, Krystal Rodriguez, Melonie Diaz Manhattan’s gritty, majestic Lower East Side is the sweltering romantic playground for Victor Vargas, a self-styled teenaged Casanova who, despite his adolescent hubris, has a lot to learn about love. Eager to protect his street-cred after his friends discover he’s been sleeping with upstairs neighbor “Fat Donna", Victor sets out to nab a new girl. Much to her annoyance, popular “Juicy Judy” Ramirez finds herself the object of Victor’s relentless attention. After a humiliating series of public rejections, Victor strikes a bargain with Judy’s younger brother Carlos. In exchange for a date with Victor’s younger sister, Vicky, Carlos will help Victor win Judy’s affections. His plan proves successful and Judy agrees to tolerate him as "her new man,” securing Victor’s place high atop the neighborhoods’ social pecking order. Unfortunately, his cantankerous old-school grandmother, with whom he and his siblings live, is convinced that Victor’s teen-age sexual antics make him a bad kid. Caught between regaining his grandmother’s trust and helping his kid brother and sister negotiate the oft-baffling ways of the world, Victor discover that there’s a difference between acting like a man and becoming one. |
|
 Now Showing: Divine Intervention [ August 2007 ]Starring: Elia Suleiman, Manal Khader Palestinian director and performer Elia Suleiman delivers a darkly comic masterpiece. Suleiman utilizes irreverence, wit, mysticism and insight to craft an intense, hallucinogenic and extremely adept exploration of the dreams and nightmares of ES, a character played by and clearly based upon the filmmaker himself, is burdened with a sick father, a stalled screenplay and an unrequited love affair with a beautiful Palestinian woman (Manal Khader) living in Ramallah. An Israeli checkpoint on the Nazareth-Ramallah road forces the couple to rendezvous in an adjacent parking lot. Their relationship and the absurd situations around them serve as metaphors for the lunacy of larger cultural problems, and the result is palpable, bottled personal and political rage. Suleiman's wry chronicle sketches his hometown of Nazareth as a place consumed by ferocious absurdity, where residents harbor feuds, dump garbage into neighbors' yards, and surreptitiously block access roads. Characters transgress rules with abandon - stealing forbidden cigarette breaks in a hospital corridor, for example. Yet the film's acerbic, absurdist sense of humor (earning comparisons to Jacques Tati and Nanni Moretti), in a situation where death seems to lurk at every corner, and Suleiman's own eye-popping directorial interventions, are what earned him the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. |
|
 Now Showing: Something New [ July 2007 ]Starring: Sanaa Lathan, Fuzzy Fantabulous, Katharine Towne, Stanley DeSantis Kenya McQueen is a successful African-American CPA, working her way to the top of the corporate ladder -- but her life has become all work and no play. Urged on by her friends to try something new and to let go of her dream of the "ideal black man," she accepts a blind date with an architectural landscaper named Brian, only to cut the date short upon first sight, because Brian is white. The two meet again at a party, and Kenya hires Brian to landscape her new home. Over time, they hit it off, but Kenya's reservations about the acceptance their romance will find among her friends and family threatens everything. An intelligent romantic comedy that chooses to deal with issues of race and perception in a straight-forward way, from a point of view not often seen: that of a successful, upper-class black woman. |
|
 Needing You [ June 2007 ]Starring: Andy Lau, Sammy Cheng, Ruby Wong Wah and Kinki both work at the same department of a computer company. Both of them are not getting on very well initially, but friendship develops when they get to know each other after a while. When Wah starts to realize his emergent fondness for Kinki, his ex-girlfriend reappears and plans to gain back his affection. In addition, he notices that his ex-girlfriend arranges a guy to pair up with Kinki. At the same time, his supervisor would like to lay him off at work... Written by L.H. Wong |
|
 Wondrous Oblivion [ April 2007 ]Starring: Emily Woof, Stanley Townsend, Sam Smith (III), Delroy Lindo, Leonie Elliot Living in South London in 1960 is 11-year-old David Wiseman, the son of Jewish wartime refugees, who is passionate about cricket but no good at it. David is wondrously oblivious to his complete lack of skill and he’s the laughing stock of the school team. When an exuberant Caribbean family become the Wiseman’s new neighbors not everyone is as welcoming as David, for they set up cricket nets in their back yard and before long, David is joining them and learning about cricket. The West Indian father, Dennis, starts to coach David and they form a friendship that spills over into David’s family and creates racial tension within the neighborhood. An ensemble cast serve the story well, featuring Delroy Lindo (The Cider House Rules, Malcolm X), Emily Woof (The Full Monty), Stanley Townsend (In The Name Of The Father) and introducing Sam Smith as David. |
|
 American Wake [ March 2007 ]Starring: Billy Smith, Elaine Qualter, Sam Amidon, Brian Delate, Anastasia Barnes A film about finding the path that sets you free, Maureen Foley's delicately nuanced AMERICAN WAKE tells the parallel stories of a fireman and a musician, both discovering the difference between what's expected of them and the men they really are. Jack (Billy Smith) has fulfilled the dream of his late father, a Boston cop, by becoming a distinguished firefighter and a hero. But now, in the aftermath of a blaze in which he saved two people but lost his best friend in the department, he is struggling to make sense of his life. Then he meets Noy (Elaine Qualter), a Thai girl who wants to break free from her repressive family, and his feelings for her ignite in him the courage to lay claim to his own future. Then there is Niall (Sam Amidon), a stunningly talented young fiddler. His father (Brian Delate) harbors the hope that his son will accompany him back to Ireland -- a homeland Niall barely remembers -- to claim his place in a long line of elite Irish musicians. But their close relationship is threatened by Niall's secret pursuit of a new musical path with his own kind of music, his own band (portrayed by the acclaimed quartet Assembly), and a bumpy relationship with Ava (Anastasia Barnes), an artist with a propensity to party. For both Jack and Niall to change their lives, they must choose what to keep and what to leave behind, and learn that with every leap of faith comes both sorrow and joy. |
|
 The Rosa Parks Story [ February 2007 ]Starring: Angela Bassett, Peter Francis James, Tonea Stewart, Von Coulter, Dexter King Angela Bassett plays the title role in this meticulously detailed biography of pioneering civil rights activist Rosa McCauley Parks. Even as a child, Rosa stands separate from her fellow African-Americans; instead of being shipped off to a shabby public school, she is enrolled in a private classroom run by Quakers, who encourage the girl to transcend the severe limitations of legalized segregation in her home state of Alabama. In her late teens, Rosa marries barber Raymond Parks (Peter Francis James), a politically savvy and outspoken proponent of equal rights for all. For many years suffering in silence as the iniquities of the South's Jim Crow laws consign her to second-class-citizen status, Rosa finally joins the local branch of the NAACP with the encouragement of her childhood friend Rebecca "Johnnie" Carr (Tonea Stewart) -- much to the dismay of husband Raymond, who feels that the organization is ineffective in its ongoing battle against the white power structure. Rosa's personal struggle against institutionalized racism reaches its zenith on the night of December 1, 1955, when, bone-weary after a long day's work as a seamstress at a Montgomery department store, she refuses to give up her seat on a bus to a white man -- and is promptly arrested. Thus are the wheels set in motion for the first major Civil Rights demonstration of the 1950s, with Rosa rising to heroic status in the eyes of her people, an event that also profoundly alters the life of local religious leader Martin Luther King Jr. (played by the Reverend's son, Dexter Scott King). Mostly filmed on location in Alabama, The Rosa Parks Story features Cicely Tyson as Rosa's strong-willed mother Leona and Mrs. Parks' longtime friend Rebecca Daniels Carr in a cameo role. The film was shown as part of CBS' celebration of Black History Month on February 24, 2002. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide |
|
 Little Miss Sunshine [ February 2007 ]Starring: Steve Carell, Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Alan Arkin, Paul Dano The Hoover family treks from Albuquerque to the Little Miss Sunshine pageant in Redondo Beach, California, to fulfill the deepest wish of 7-year-old Olive, an ordinary little girl with big dreams. Along the way the family must deal with crushed dreams, heartbreaks, and a broken-down VW bus, leading up to the surreal Little Miss Sunshine competition itself. On their travels through this bizarre landscape, the Hoovers learn to trust and support each other along the path of life, no matter what the challenge. |
|
|
2006 Diversity Cafe Movies |
