Locations and plot descriptions after the jump!

NoMa Summer Screen - "Music in Pictures"

Date and Time: Tonight, June 17th, from 7 to 11 p.m.

Playing This Week: Buena Vista Social Club, the documentary about aging Cuban musicians brought together to record a CD with Ry Cooder, who traveled to Havana to meet them.  The group tours around the world performing the music of pre-Castro Cuba and reflecting on their earlier musical careers.

Location: L Street, between 2nd and 3rd, NE.  New York Avenue station on Metro's Red Line.

Frequency: Every Wednesday between now and July 29th.

SilverDocs Outdoor Screening

Date and Time: Friday, June 19, at 9 p.m.

Playing: For All Mankind, a documentary about the Apollo 11 crew that coincides with the 40th anniversary of the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.  Current interviews with the 24 crew members are combined with archival footage to capture the scope and emotion of the experience.

Location: Silver Plaza, on Ellsworth Drive between Georgia Avenue and Fenton Street, Silver Spring.  Silver Spring station on Metro's Red Line.

Stead Park Summer Movie Mania

Date and Time: Wednesday, June 24, at 8:30 p.m.

Playing This Week: Top Gun.  A pre-Scientology Tom Cruise and a pre-ER Anthony Edwards feel the need for speed as students at Top Gun Naval Flying School in this '80s classic.  Singing along to the power ballads is optional.

Location: Stead Park, on P Street between 16th and 17th.  Dupont Circle on Metro's Red Line.

Frequency: The last Wednesday of the month, through August 26.  Rain dates are July 2, August 5, and September 2.

Did anybody tell Abe Pollin?

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Lebron's come and gone. But we only have to wait a week for the next celeb sports doc extravaganza: Luis Tiant will be at the E Street Cinema downtown on June 22 for red-carpet screening of "The Lost Son of Havana," a film about the ex-Indian- Twin-Red Sock-Yankee-Pirate-Angel's trip back to the Cuban capital, which is his Akron.

After the screening the movie's producers will throw a bash across the street from the theater at the ESPN Zone. But don't expect much. In the invitation the party's organizers just sent out, they're promising that: "Light refreshments will be served in accordance with House Ethics rules."

House ethics used to lead to the wildest parties in town. Jack Abramoff mussed up everything.

***

Sign of the times or the Times? Despite a big write-up in Sunday's Washington Times, the Hoop Dreams Scholarship fund had to cancel its next big fundraising event for lack of interest.

Hoop Dreams has been a powerhouse on the DC charity and social scene for more than a decade. The organization was started in 1996 by former H.D. Woodson teacher and sleepless superhero Susie Kay, who began holding an annual outdoor basketball tournament to help her students get money for college.

Her cause took off, and before long, Kay, backed by Ted Leonsis, Ari Fleischer and scads of local pro athletes and federal lawmakers (including John McCain and Barack Obama), was divvying out grants to kids from schools all over the city. (Leonsis threw more than checks at the group, serving for years as a mentor to Kay's kids.)

The organization now claims to have funded continuing education for more than 1,000 DC students.

The plan was to celebrate that milestone on June 25, with a soiree at the Historical Society of Washington, DC, called "1,000 Strong."

But this morning Hoop Dreams sent out a brief, terse announcement that the event was canceled "due to lack of ticket sales."

"For the few people who purchased tickets online you will receive a full refund," read the cancellation notice.

Hoop Dreams' cause remains righteous. This party might be canceled, but the party can't be over for this bunch.

Other hoops-related charities are claiming big doings around here: The group Nothing But Nets, also known for raising funds through basketball tournaments, is holding a series of local events this week with the Mystics, DC United, the Bayhawks and Michelle Obama and Jack Evans, and says it will use the proceeds to send 10,000 malaria nets to various refugee camps in Africa.

***

Good golly, did David Letterman look like a coward and a buffoon last night, caving in and bumbling through a fake apology for his lazy line about Sarah Palin's daughter getting "knocked up" by Alex Rodriguez.

Yeah, talk about an athlete impregnating a Palin daughter really isn't fit for a late-night monologue. It's ok to use that material in a campaign press release, however.

Guess it's all been said. But let's take another look at Palin with her daughters at the Flyers game during the campaign, one of many appearances at sporting events where she's used her kids as human shields.

What network fool told Letterman to crater?

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Story tips? Wanna Play the Feud? Tube amps for sale? Send to: cheapseats@washingtoncitypaper.com

Add to this two dimensional T-shirt portrait yet another flat depiction of the face of the Cuban revolution—Steven Soderbergh's epic, two-part, 4-hour-and-23-minute biopic Che.

Soderbergh does get a few things right: the film is shot in Spanish, provides English subtitles and stars Benicio del Toro (who won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in Soderbergh's 2000 film Traffic) as the Argentine medical student-turned demonstrator-turned exile Ernesto Che Guevara. Casting is one of the few areas in which the film excels, but even that is limited by Peter Buchman's (heretofore the brilliant mind behind dragon tales like Jurassic Park III and Eragon) and Benjamin A. van der Veen's script.

While sure to please the pants off history buffs for its stringent accuracy and adherence to Che's memoir "Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War," fans of Che's ideology will find gaffes and gaps of character development in the script. The film should have opened not with the 3-minute, '50s-filmstrip geography lesson but with Ernesto in Argentina, a young middle class collegian participating in student protests, organizing against the government--the reason he meets Fidel Castro in Mexico City and gets involved in the whole Cuban thing (and the fire behind his desire to bring revolution to all of Latin America, a.ka. foregrounding all of Part 2). And none of Che's post-Jan. 1, 1959 operations in Cuba make the cut. Soderbergh only alludes to the role Che plays in Cuba's ailing economy in a series of poorly sown black and white flash-forwards to his UN visit. Including at the very least a montage of his hands-on approach to sugar cane cropping and government would have begun to flesh out and highlight the fundamental differences between Che and Fidel's political ideology (del Toro's insistence that his cadres learn to read and write during the revolution's downtime manages to scratch the surface) and the real reason Che leaves for Africa and Bolivia--to escape his entrapment in Castro's Cult of Personality.

What's more, even in the midst of the Maestra, Che was a ladies man, as aware of his looks and charm as he was of his thin-mountain-air-addled asthma. A brief consult of one of the hundreds of biographies written about the man would have told Buchman that. But watching march after march, skirmish after skirmish, and toothless campesino after barefoot child as the revolutionary ants go marching on in Part 1(as for Part 2, it's basically Part 1 but set in Bolivia, a dead horse whose flogging is truncated by the emotionally sterile treatment of Guevara's 1967 execution), it seems as though the writers used an equation to crank out the script: 100 frames x 12 beseechments of troops to quit/study/leave campesinos alone ÷ 3 asthma attacks = 1 page of Che's memoir sloppily slapped on paper for the silver screen. What happened to interviews with family members, Che's infamous motorcycle diaries. What happened to multiple sources?

If Soderbergh et al wanted to make a film about guerilla warfare a la Che Guevara, they succeeded. To be sure, the battles are bloody and the film is beautiful--the tight, grainy, black and white auteur-shots of del Toro's unshaven lips wrapped around a Cuban cigar were much appreciated. But to give the name "Che" to a film mostly about battle tactics is misleading; this war film has little to do with unpacking the character of the revolutionary whose egalitarian ideology was--at least to Che--bigger than life itself.

Now playing in D.C. at Landmark E Street Cinema, "Che" is set for wide release Jan. 24