Charm City Cinema screens Barry Levinson's Diner Oct. 25

Loyola College's 2006-07 Humanities Symposium, "Urban Spaces, Urban Voices," in conjunction with The Year of the City, is presenting the Charm City Cinema, a series of Baltimore-based films. The series will feature Baltimore native Barry Levinson's 1982 film Diner on Wednesday, Oct. 25 at 9 p.m.

Set in Baltimore in 1959, Levinson's film focuses on a group of pals coping with life post high school--each of whom seems to have trouble with women, from the womanizer with a gambling problem (Mickey Rourke) to the guy who torments his wife with his carefully catalogued record collection (Daniel Stern). The only time these guys seem like they have it together is when they gather at the local diner. In addition to Rourke and Stern, the cast includes Ellen Barkin, Timothy Daly, Paul Reiser, and Kevin Bacon, each of whom appears in a breakthrough role.

The Humanities Symposium, an annual program designed to draw students and professors of many disciplines together in examining a single text, will this year consider Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities. This 1961 work discusses how cities function, what makes them safe and why so many attempts at saving them have failed. The book is considered by many to have transformed the fields of urban planning and city architecture.

The screening takes place in the Reading Room on the third floor of the College's Andrew White Student Center.