Monday, December 11th
7:30 pm James W. Foley University of Massachusetts Amherst Memorial Prize Benefit Reading
Join us while we listen from three local poets! Donations are greatly appreciated for this special event. Proceeds will go directly towards the James W. Foley memorial prize. The featured poets are: Andrea Lawlor, Pamela Ryder and Erin White. There will be light refreshments to follow. No reservations or tickets necessary to purchase.
Wednesday, December 13th
7pm Dinner and a Movie: It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)….sold out!!!
Three course meal, dessert, coffee and tea
It’s a Wonderful Life is a 1946 American Christmas fantasy comedy-drama film produced and directed by Frank Capra, based on the short story “The Greatest Gift”, which Philip Van Doren Stern wrote in 1939 and published privately in 1945. The film is considered one of the most loved films in American cinema and has become traditional viewing during the Christmas season.
The film stars James Stewart as George Bailey, a man who has given up his dreams in order to help others and whose imminent suicide on Christmas Eve brings about the intervention of his guardian angel, Clarence Odbody (Henry Travers). Clarence shows George all the lives he has touched and how different life in his community of Bedford Falls would be had he never been born.
Despite initially performing poorly at the box office because of high production costs and stiff competition at the time of its release, the film has come to be regarded as a classic and is a staple of Christmas television around the world. Theatrically, the film’s break-even point was $6.3 million, approximately twice the production cost, a figure it never came close to achieving in its initial release. An appraisal in 2006 reported: “Although it was not the complete box office failure that today everyone believes … it was initially a major disappointment and confirmed, at least to the studios, that Capra was no longer capable of turning out the populist features that made his films the must-see, money-making events they once were.”
Past Events
Wednesday, November 15th
7 pm: Movie & Dinner Night – A Face in the Crowd (1957)
Three course meal, dessert, coffee & tea
A Face in the Crowd is a 1957 American drama film starring Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal and Walter Matthau, directed by Elia Kazan. The screenplay was written by Budd Schulberg, based on his short story “Your Arkansas Traveler”, from the collection, Some Faces in the Crowd (1953).
The story centers on a drifter named Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes who is discovered by the producer (Neal) of a small-market radio program in rural northeast Arkansas. Rhodes ultimately rises to great fame and influence on national television.
The film launched Griffith into stardom, but earned mixed reviews upon its original release. Later decades have seen reappraisals of the movie, and in 2008 it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.
Wednesday, November 1st:
7pm: Movie & Dinner Night – Blade Runner… The Original
Three course meal, dessert, coffee, tea.
In the futuristic year of 2019, Los Angeles has become a dark and depressing metropolis, filled with urban decay. Rick Deckard, an ex-cop, is a “Blade Runner”. Blade runners are people assigned to assassinate “replicants”. The replicants are androids that look like real human beings. When four replicants commit a bloody mutiny on the Off World colony, Deckard is called out of retirement to track down the androids. As he tracks the replicants, eliminating them one by one, he soon comes across another replicant, Rachel, who evokes human emotion, despite the fact that she’s a replicant herself. As Deckard closes in on the leader of the replicant group, his true hatred toward artificial intelligence makes him question his own identity in this future world, including what’s human and what’s not human. Written by blazesnakes9