Consequently, looking forward to the fall movie releases, just isn’t the same. Usually fall is the season of Oscar hopefuls and quality movies for grownups, but this year, though there are a few handfuls of movies to eagerly anticipate, there is still a backlog of movies that were hustled into production and made with even less attention to quality than Hollywood already only selectively lavishes on what we call movies and they call “product.” So if it feels like a forgettable summer movie season is turning into a lackluster fall, just give it a few more weeks.

This past weekend I was really looking forward to the perverse pleasure of a really bad movie, Glitter, Mariah Carey’s star turn on the big screen. I confess I occasionally enjoy just going to see something hilariously bad. The trailer for Glitter is just jaw droppingly awful.

I first saw the preview many, many months ago, long before Carey’s breakdown. The release date for Glitter has been postponed several times. (“Mad TV” did a very funny spoof of Glitter on the season premiere last Saturday.) My own theory is that Carey’s breakdown was caused by seeing a rough cut of her film and realizing just how awful it is. Alas, it is so bad that it didn’t make it to our market opening weekend, though it is on dozens of screens in the New York metropolitan area. As if those poor people haven’t suffered enough.

The only other movie opening last week was Megiddo. Having been subjected to the insane ravings and destruction of one religious extremist perversion, I just couldn’t bring myself to contribute to the insane ravings of another religious extremist perversion, so the sequel to The Omega Code was simply out of the question.

All this, gentle readers, is my excuse for falling back on Bread and Roses, a moving, inspiring film that celebrates human dignity and just happens to be opening for a one-week engagement at Cinema Center. I do try

not to feature too many Cinema Center films in this space, and I promise to get back to Hollywood next week. But, this week I can’t muster the desire to write about any movie that doesn’t nourish the spirit and send you out of the theater feeling uplifted.

Bread and Roses takes its name from a workers strike about as far from the demands of Writers’ Guild in modern Hollywood as the American labor movement has ever produced. In 1912, textile workers in Lowell, Massachusetts marched for “bread and roses.” They wanted a livable wage (bread), but they also wanted the freedom to purse beauty also (the roses.)

Ken Loach has spent his career making movies about British working-class people and siding with the underdog in the struggles he portrays. In Bread and Roses he seems very much at home telling the story of janitorial workers in high-rise office buildings in Los Angeles, who successfully campaigned for a livable wage and a union. Bread and Roses is based on real events, but the struggles of the workers, though very convincingly told, is only a part of the story.

Bread and Roses focuses on one very idealistic, ambitious, and smart young woman named Maya played by the lovely, charismatic newcomer Pilar Padilla. When the film opens, Maya is being smuggled into the United States from Mexico. When she arrivers, her sister has not been able to raise the full amount to pay off the men who brought her in. The men flip a coin to see who gets to take Maya home and extort what they are owed from her flesh. Maya escapes this grim prospect with so much spunk, the audience I saw the film with (granted it was a film festival audience, and festival audiences are hoping to be delighted) laughed, whooped and applauded.

Newly arrived Maya begs her sister Rosa (Elpidia Carillo) to help her get a job working as a janitor in the enormous office building where Rosa works. Rosa tells Maya she has no idea how much she is asking. Yet, Rosa does get her in. Only much later does Maya learn the true price of her job. In the short term, her boss keeps her first month’s wage as a fee and treats her to plenty of humiliating lecturing because Maya is here illegally. Bread and Roses expresses with eloquence the idea that all workers deserve to be treated with basic respect. It also makes no apologies for advocating that all workers deserve a livable wage.

But Bread and Roses is not didactic. It is dramatic and often suspenseful, especially after Sam (Adrien Brody), a union organizer arrives, pulling and pushing the workers towards a union. Rosa is adamantly opposed to any union activity, fearing it will ruin the life she has struggled so hard to give her family. Maya, younger and more naïve, works for the

success of the union.

Bread and Roses shows us the kind of characters we don’t often see in movies, yet they feel like friends by the time the movie ends because they want a better world for themselves, their families and friends.

Bread and Roses is presented in Spanish and English, almost equally, and is subtitled throughout, in English when the characters speak Spanish and in Spanish when the characters speak English. Just another refreshing

way Bread and Roses bridges cultural gaps.