Posts with the tag film

Clarendon Ballroom

WhoKnew... — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 22:49:17 EDT

It was my last Saturday night in DC and I wanted to make it a fun one. Somewhat surprisingly, an obscure establishment known for it's dancing exceeded my expectations and made me feel good about feeling silly.

Review: The Last Mistress

WhoKnew... — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:40:41 EDT

On Saturday night, I ventured over to Bethesda to see Une Vieille Maitresse (The Last Mistress) at the Landmark theater. After paying 4 dollars for a bottle of water, I was primed to have a horrible time. Lucky for me, Director Catherine Breillat's portrayal of the conflict between love and passion, mind and body made even the over-priced, environmentally harmful bottle of Dasani worth it.

My Plans for the Week Pt. 1: Silverdocs

WhoKnew... — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:01:53 EDT

Ok. So DC is no New York. And yes. I should be going to lectures at Brookings or Capitol Hill hearings in my free time. That's what interns do during the summer, isn't it?

Not this week. Much to my surprise and glee, the Silverdocs Film Festival is invading Silver Spring and for the next 8 days, 122 of the most innovative and striking international documentaries will be ripe for the viewing. These are the films I'm ~~wasting~~ spending my pennies on...

Jesus Like You've Never Seen Him Before

Ali M Latifi — Thu, 01 May 2008 10:18:11 EDT

According to a recent LA Times article, the story of Jesus a billion people have heard all their lives will finally receive a cinematic treatment courtesy of an Iranian director.

Planet of the Arabs : Fear and Loathing in America

Ali M Latifi — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:13:25 EDT

Screened at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival Jackie Salloum's 9 minute short, "Planet of the Arabs" is a montage of the dehumanizing and vilifying depictions of Arabs in contemporary American film.

Planet of the Arabs

one step forward, two steps back : are the Academy Awards truly progressive?

Ali M Latifi — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 21:44:12 EST

Though some people may think focusing on moments like this are just a litany of redundancy, they are actually quite momentous and powerful given the cultural power of the media and the notoriously conservative Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: best film of 2007 you didn't see

Saxon Baird — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 16:15:22 EST

Somebody once told me that Michel Gondry had no guts. It was in relation to his last film "The Science of Sleep." I was having a discussion trying to determine the reasons why I left the theater pleased but with a feeling of emptiness-like something was missing from the film. Gondry's films are good but I came to realization that his characters only contain a certain amount of depth. Gondry chooses to utilize his kitschy surrealism and fantasy rather than ever explore the complexity of human emotion and memory. It is what Gondry does best, but it can leave the more skeptical viewer (as in my case) with a desire for a more involved exploration of the psyche that is only lightly touched upon in his films.

What Charlie Wilson's War Says About America

Ali M Latifi — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 14:15:55 EST

Though it may not be much of a cinematic accomplishment (considering it was directed by Mike Nichols and features Philip Seymour Hoffman in a prominent role) Charlie Wilson's War makes a much needed statement about American foreign policy.

Names in Lights Don't Always Break Barriers

Ali M Latifi — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 13:32:35 EST

This week the screen adaptation of Pulitzer Prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake is released on DVD. The novel and film follow Gogol Ganguli, the American born son of Indian immigrants as he struggles with and rejects his Indian culture.

In light of the recent Blog entry by Erica Williams questioning the social and cultural progress of the characters portrayed in American Gangster, I decided to explore similar questions about Kal Penn's first starring role prior to the Namesake in the poorly received "National Lampoon's Van Wilder Rise of the Taj."

Something Free...You know you wanna check it out!

SoCapAlex — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 08:55:49 EDT

A Reel Progress Screening

Featured Panelists:
Denise Rolark Barnes, Publisher, The Washington Informer
Joe Madison, Radio Personality, Radio-One WOL-AM and XM Satellite Radio channel 169
Mark Lloyd, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress

Moderated by:
Melody Barnes, Executive Vice President for Policy, Center for American Progress

Focus Features and the Center for American Progress are pleased to present TALK TO ME. Academy Award nominee Don Cheadle portrays the one and only Ralph Waldo "Petey" Greene Jr. In the mid-to-late 1960s, in Washington, D.C., vibrant soul music and exploding social consciousness were combining to unique and powerful effect. It was the place and time for Petey to fully express himself - sometimes to outrageous effect - and "tell it like it is." With the support of his irrepressible and tempestuous girlfriend Vernell (Taraji P. Henson), the newly minted ex-con talks his way into an on-air radio gig. As Petey's voice, humor, and spirit surge across the airwaves with the vitality of the era, listeners tune in to hear not only incredible music but also a man speaking directly to them about race and power in America like few people ever have.
Please join us for a provocative panel discussion and Q&A session immediately following the film.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Program: 7:00pm to 9:30pm
Admission is free.

Doors open at 6:30 PM. Screening starts at 7:00 PM sharp.

SPACE IS EXTREMELY LIMITED RSVP Required. First come, first served.

Please let us know in advance if you have any needs for special accessibility so that we can be sure to accommodate you.

E Street Cinema
555 11th Street NW
Washington, DC 20004
Map & Directions

Nearest Metro: Accessible from the Blue, Green, Orange, Red and Yellow lines at the Metro Center and/or Gallery Place/Chinatown metro stops

For more information, please call 202.741.6246.

Biographies

Denise Rolark Barnes is the publisher of The Washington Informer, the leading community newspaper serving the African American community in Washington, D.C.
Rolark Barnes became publisher of The Washington Informer in 1994 where she is continuing the legacy of her father, Dr. Calvin W. Rolark, who established The Washington Informer in 1964.

In addition to her work at the Informer, Rolark-Barnes maintains The Washington Informer Charities, a non-profit organization that promotes literacy and sponsors internship opportunities and writing competitions for students interested in pursuing careers in journalism. The Washington Informer Charities also partners with local schools to assist their efforts to publish student-run newspapers.

She hosts "Reporter's Roundtable," a local municipal cable television show aired twice daily featuring local reporters who discuss civic and social issues affecting D.C. residents, and she has also appeared as a guest on the nationally syndicated Tavis Smiley Show, Tony Brown?s Journal, NBC4's Reporter's Notebook and several local radio and television programs.

Rolark Barnes board memberships include United Black Fund, Inc., the AARP District of Columbia Executive Council, the Historical Society of Washington D.C., and the advisory board of New Leaders for New Schools SHIRE Collaborative on the Prevention of Childhood Obesity. She is also a member of Leadership Greater Washington.

Rolark Barnes lives in the District of Columbia with her husband, Lafayette Barnes. They have two sons, Lafayette (21) a student at Howard University School of Business; and Desmond (19) a freshman at Morgan State University.

Joe Madison, also known as "The Black Eagle" by his Radio-One WOL-AM listeners in Washington D.C. and nationally on XM Satellite Radio channel 169, is one of America's top talk radio personalities. Born in Dayton, Ohio, Madison has been named one of Talker Magazine's 100 Most Important Radio Talk Show Hosts nine times. This recognition doesn't even begin to skim the surface of his extraordinary commitment to social justice at home and abroad. As comedian and human rights activist Dick Gregory once said, "you can't pigeon hole the Black Eagle. Madison is more than a radio talk show host. He is a radio activist." After graduating from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, Madison became Executive Director of the 10,000 member Detroit NAACP, the youngest person appointed to that position. Between 1984-1986, Madison led four separate voter registration marches called "The Overground Railroad". In 1986, the NAACP convention delegates elected him to the national board of directors and re-elected him for the next 14 years. In 1996, Madison accepted the challenge of restoring prominence to the NAACP Image Awards when he was appointed its chairman.

Directing a major civil rights organization, registering voters, marching in the streets, and giving lectures would be enough to demonstrate one's commitment to social justice, and rightly so. Yet, in the midst of his civil rights activism, Madison started another career as a socially conscious radio talk show personality in 1980 on Detroit's WXYZ-AM.

Madison not only uses his microphone to bring attention to social injustices here and abroad, he also challenges himself and his listeners to do something about it. For him this has meant going to jail for civil disobedience countless times, and going on hunger strikes in opposition to apartheid in South Africa, genocide and modern-day slavery in Sudan.

Madison has been relentless in his efforts to protect those who suffer at the hands of powerful interests. He led demonstrations and arrests in front of the Sudanese Embassy for 90 straight days to end the genocide in Darfur. Madison has traveled three times to the war zones in southern Sudan where he participated in the freeing of more than 7,000 slaves and delivering survival kits to refugees. He organized a "Sudan Campaign" to end slavery and raised thousands of dollars to free slaves, at a cost of $35 per slave. He participated in the victorious movement opposing the deportation of 15,000 Liberians from the United States in 2001.

Madison has won numerous awards including the National SCLC Presidential Award and has been listed in Ebony Magazine's 50 Leaders of the Future and Who?s Who in Black America. He and his wife Sharon have been married for more than 30 years and live in Washington, D.C.

Mark Lloyd is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and an affiliated professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute.

From the fall of 2002 until the summer of 2004, Mr. Lloyd was a Martin Luther King, Jr. visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught communications policy and wrote and conducted research on the relationship between communications policy and strong democratic communities. He also served as the executive director of the Civil Rights Forum on Communications Policy, a non-profit, non-partisan project he co-founded in 1997 to bring civil rights principles and advocacy to the communications policy debate.

Previously, Mr. Lloyd worked as general counsel to the Benton Foundation, and as a communications attorney at Dow, Lohnes & Albertson in Washington, D.C., representing both commercial and non-commercial companies. He also has over a dozen years of experience as a broadcast journalist including work as a reporter and producer at NBC and CNN.

A widely-published author in both popular and academic publications, his book "Prologue to a Farce: Communication and Democracy in America" was released by the University of Illinois Press in 2007.

Melody Barnes is the Executive Vice President for Policy at the Center for American Progress, where she coordinates and helps to integrate all of the Center's policy work from the policy departments, fellows, and the Center's network of outside policy experts.

From December 1995 until March 2003, Barnes served as chief counsel to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) on the Senate Judiciary Committee. As Kennedy's chief counsel, she shaped civil rights, women's health and reproductive rights, commercial law, and religious liberties laws, as well as executive branch and judicial appointments. Barnes' experience also includes an appointment as Director of Legislative Affairs for the U. S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and serving as assistant counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights. During her tenure with the Subcommittee, she worked closely with members of Congress and their staffs to pass the Voting Rights Improvement Act of 1992, which was signed into law.

Barnes began her career as an attorney with Shearman & Sterling in New York City and is a member of both the New York State Bar Association and the District of Columbia Bar Association. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of The Constitution Project, EMILY's List, and The Maya Angelou Public Charter School. She received her law degree from the University of Michigan and her bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she graduated with honors in history.

The Center for American Progress is a nonpartisan research and educational institute dedicated to promoting a strong, just and free America that ensures opportunity for all. We believe that Americans are bound together by a common commitment to these values and we aspire to ensure that our national policies reflect these values. We work to find progressive and pragmatic solutions to significant domestic and international problems and develop policy proposals that foster a government that is "of the people, by the people, and for the people."

A Penchant for Movies, Whores, & Killin'

SoCapJohn — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 13:42:29 EDT

(Warning - contains spoilers! Not that it really matters anyway.)

Like all bad movies that end with an anti-climactic plot twist, Paris Hilton has once again been unleashed on the world after serving only half of her 45-day prison sentence. Who would have known that she'd escape the full punishment of the law?

Yet with uncanny timing, tonight's installment of the Washington Psychotronic Film Society at Dr. Dremo's will reveal what might have been if Paris had been imprisoned in a futuristic dystopian B-movie. The '80s film Turkey Shoot (aka Escape 2000) by Australian director Brian Trenchard-Smith chronicles a time in the not-so-distant future when social deviants are locked up for rehabilitation. The worst of the prisoners are selected for a survival contest, where they are hunted down like animals - a la The Most Dangerous Game except campier. Overall, you may think that the movie's terrible, but don't forget that it includes plenty of comic book-style violence and co-stars an imprisoned prostitute named Rita.

Check out the trailer here:

And if that doesn't fill your appetite for bad movies, the Clint Eastwood Summer Film Festival Series will be screening Two Mules for Sister Sara this Friday in Rosslyn. For the record, I'm a huge fan of Eastwood's spaghetti westerns, but this has to be one of his weakest. The movie focuses too much on the unimpressive sexual tension and petty struggles between Eastwood and Shirley MacLaine (Sister Sara). And lo and behold, by the end of the film, we're told that Sister Sara wasn't quite the nun that we were initially made to believe. In fact, she's just a prostitute. Who could have possibly anticipated that turn of events?

In the final count though, despite all of our collective loathing for the likes of Paris Hilton and all of our incessant criticisms of terrible movies, there's something there that still keeps us watching. On the basest of levels, nothing titillates American audiences more than gratuitous violence and a good whore, even if we already know how the whole thing's going to end. So sit back and enjoy the ride.

2,700

Dana Goldstein — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 14:48:08 EDT

That's the number of women who died annually from botched abortions in the 1930s, when birth control and abortion were both illegal.

I'm still here in Cambridge at the Women, Action, Media! conference, and I'm watching a screening of "I Had an Abortion," a documentary that features 10 women, 21 to 85, who've had an abortion. The first woman to tell her story in the film had an underground abortion in 1938. When she contracted an infection in the following days and sought care at a hospital, the nurses shunned her because she refused to reveal who had performed her abortion.

Another woman was hauled in front of a New York City grand jury in the 1950s and asked to testify against the kind doctor who had performed her abortion.

Never forget.

Peace Takes Courage

Dana Goldstein — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 12:15:49 EDT

Have you heard about Ava Lowery? She's the Alabama home-schooled teenager whose antiwar videos at www.peacetakescourage.com have attracted 30,000 fans (and wingnut detractors) each day. I think Ava is an awesome example of what young people can do on a shoestring budget to influence the public debate, using passion, information, and digital media skills. I highly recommend Ava's videos "California Dreaming" (a riff on Ann Coulter's statement that Iraq is "just like California, with Baghdad as L.A."), "Mission Forgotten," "Support our Troops and Veterans," and "3,000 Too Many."

Ava's work is amazing, isn't it? If you want to use film to educate your community about this disasterous war, head on over to our new Iraq Campaign homepage. And stay tuned to Campus Progress for more Iraq coverage as we approach the fourth anniversary of the war.

"LIFE SUPPORT": Advanced Screening and Panel Discussion

PreparationG — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 18:28:19 EST

Last night, Tuesday February 27, Campus Progress and HBO hosted an advanced screening of "Life Support," a new HBO film about the daily struggle of a woman who has the HIV/AIDS virus. The film stars Queen Latifah and Gloria Reuben, and the screening drew an engaged crowd of over 225 to Washington's E Street Cinema.

The audience was treated to introductory remarks by Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), and a compelling panel discussion featuring Ms. Waters, Nelson George, the director of the film, actress Gloria Reuben (also of "ER" fame), and William Brawner, an AIDS activist and educator.

The panel praised the film for its humanistic treatment of people who live with the virus as one of many problems they deal with everyday. It was truly refreshing to see a film that presented an African-American woman who was a human being first, one with strengths and flaws like anyone else, whose victimhood was almost besides the point. Unlike dry, fact-based documentaries and overambitious non-fiction films that unintentionally give the virus a more detached treatment in their attempt to give a comprehensive education about it, "Life Support" is a warm-hearted testament to how one woman gets by.

The audience reflected these sentiments in the Q&A session afterwards, and each panelist offered his or her own insight into the AIDS crisis. Nelson George filled out the picture of the woman in the film with anecdotes about his own sister, who was the basis for Latifah's character. Maxine Waters articulated what legislative battles must be waged to get AIDS support centers more funding, and contemplated the potentially helpful role of the church in educating people about the virus. William Brawley discussed how AIDS issues intersect and relate to other issues in the African-American community.

The night was a resounding success, and Campus Progress was lucky to work with HBO in showing their inspiring film to an enthusiastic audience. Thanks to everyone who made this evening happen!

Chick Flick?

Dana Goldstein — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 12:35:13 EST

Via Jason Zengerle at The Plank: a list of some 08 candidates' favorite movies. Hillary loves my own personal favorite, "Casablanca."

But don't read too much into that.

TONIGHT: Hip Hop, Beyond Beats and Rhymes on PBS

ashwini — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 12:07:44 EST

I wanted to give everyone a heads-up and a STRONG encouragement to watch Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes tonight. The documentary is making its TV premiere on the PBS Independent Lens series. You can find what time it's on in your area here.

For those who aren't familiar with the documentary, Byron Hurt, a self-professed hip-hop head, explores the themes of hyper-masculinity, homophobia, misogyny and materialism in hip-hop music and culture as it exists today. In my opinion, Mr. Hurt challenges the viewer, the listener and the consumer to critically analyze the intersections of creativity with capitalism, manifesting in some of the destructive/oppressive overtones of commercialized hip-hop today.

I have had the opportunity to watch this film twice now, and in the way I believe it was meant to be seen--once during a free screening organized by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (where the director and Toni Blackman, one of the emcees featured in the film, appeared on a panel) in Bedstuy, and once during a meeting of a radical artists' collective I am a part of here in NYC. I know that Campus Progress had a glitzy event in L.A. recently, with a screening and a star-studded panel discussion, which is wonderful--but I think Mr. Hurt's intention was to spark discussion in the community on a much more grounded level, beginning with people talking about these issues in their living rooms and in basements of community centers (if you want to hold a screening for your school or organization, go here). But in the end, it's just important that people see it. I hope you all will tonight.