Roundup: Pop Culture & the Arts ...
Movies, Documentaries and Museum Exhibits
This page features links to reviews of movies, documentaries and exhibits with a historical theme. Listings are in reverse chronological order. Descriptions are taken directly from the linked publication. If you have articles you think should be listed on the Pop Culture page, please send them to the editor editor@historynewsnetwork.org.
SOURCE: John Dickerson in Slate (12-4-08)
How alike are Richard Nixon and George Bush? This was the question debated at the screening of the movie Frost/Nixon in Washington this week. Director Ron Howard, historian Robert Dallek, and author James Reston, who was a researcher for Frost at the time he taped the debates, all thought the movie was very relevant to the present-day occupant of the Oval Office. Fox News' Chris Wallace objected. During the question-and-answer period, he argued that Bush was not like Nixon because even if you accept the notion that they abused their power in similar ways, Bush did so to defend the country. Nixon was only trying to save his own skin.
This is a fascinating discussion and one worth pondering—but it's beside the point. Or, more accurately, it's beside the point of the film. Nixon/Frost is not really about Nixon's abuses of power. It's about a superstar interviewer and a tortured ex-president. If there's any message in this great movie for President Bush, it's that he should...
This is a fascinating discussion and one worth pondering—but it's beside the point. Or, more accurately, it's beside the point of the film. Nixon/Frost is not really about Nixon's abuses of power. It's about a superstar interviewer and a tortured ex-president. If there's any message in this great movie for President Bush, it's that he should...
Thursday, December 4, 2008 - 20:07
Comments
SOURCE: Salon (12-4-08)
Several years ago, Jessica Helfand wandered into the scrapbooking area of a crafts store and stumbled upon a multibillion-dollar industry. An alternative universe of visual accessories greeted her: flair and foil, lace wraps and eyelets, glitter and "word fetti." An eloquent design critic and graphic designer who teaches at Yale, Helfand was flummoxed by this close encounter with the scrapbooking community and decided to write about her ambivalence for Design Observer, the Web site she co-founded.
"It's at once horrifying and fascinating to witness the degree to which design is being discussed online by people whose concept of innovation is measured by novel ways to tie bows," Helfand confessed. Unable to resist a further jab, she continued: "I could write an entire post just on the scrapbooker's predisposition toward fonts like 'Whimsy Joggle' and 'Pool Noodle Outline' but I will try and restrain myself."
Helfand couldn't dismiss...
"It's at once horrifying and fascinating to witness the degree to which design is being discussed online by people whose concept of innovation is measured by novel ways to tie bows," Helfand confessed. Unable to resist a further jab, she continued: "I could write an entire post just on the scrapbooker's predisposition toward fonts like 'Whimsy Joggle' and 'Pool Noodle Outline' but I will try and restrain myself."
Helfand couldn't dismiss...
Thursday, December 4, 2008 - 20:04
SOURCE: BBC (12-3-08)
The Austrian city of Salzburg has blocked plans to turn the former home of
the von Trapp family, immortalised in The Sound of Music, into a hotel.
The"Villa Trapp" had been expected to open this year. But the city's planning council blocked the move after protests from residents in the upmarket neighbourhood.
The von Trapps were made famous in the 1965 film The Sound of Music, starring Julie Andrews as a nun-turned-nanny who cares for a widower's seven children.
Himmler used villa
According to tourism officials, 40% of overnight stays in Salzburg - also famous as the birthplace of the composer Mozart - are from fans of the Sound of Music film.
Thursday, December 4, 2008 - 19:13
SOURCE: Spiegel Online (12-4-08)
Next year marks two decades since the crumbling of the Berlin Wall -- and the landmark date will not pass unnoticed by the Berlin International Film Festival. A series entitled "After Winter Comes Spring" will showcase a series of feature films and documentaries created during the last decade of the Cold War.
During the Cold War, the 59-year-old Berlinale festival found an audience for Eastern European filmmakers trying to present their ideas without censorship. And this history will be dusted off in this year's gathering of international film stars, makers and fans.
"The works formulate the hope of a political or economic opening and, above all, artistic freedom," festival organizers said. "They pushed boundaries in both form and content, while boldly articulating the need for reform."
The series, which takes its name from an award-winning 1988 documentary by Germany's Helke Misselwitz, will show films from both the...
During the Cold War, the 59-year-old Berlinale festival found an audience for Eastern European filmmakers trying to present their ideas without censorship. And this history will be dusted off in this year's gathering of international film stars, makers and fans.
"The works formulate the hope of a political or economic opening and, above all, artistic freedom," festival organizers said. "They pushed boundaries in both form and content, while boldly articulating the need for reform."
The series, which takes its name from an award-winning 1988 documentary by Germany's Helke Misselwitz, will show films from both the...
Thursday, December 4, 2008 - 19:01
SOURCE: Historian Paul Boyer in the AHA's Perspectives (11-1-08)
... I soon realized that nuclear-age movies were not mere visual window-dressing. They influenced how Americans thought about nuclear issues, and they help one map the larger cultural and political trajectory of the nation’s nuclear history. MGM’s The Beginning or the End (1947), made with the Truman administration’s blessing, introduced egregious factual distortions to justify the atomic bombing of Japan.4 The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), released as the early postwar movement for the international control of atomic energy gave way to cold-war imperatives, can be read as both an idealistic call for international control and a coercive insistence on America’s global hegemony.
Subsequent films both reflected and intensified successive waves of nuclear awareness and activism. The years from the mid-1950s through 1963 (when the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed) saw a surge of activism triggered not only by nuclear-war fears but also by the deadly radioactive...
Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - 23:25
SOURCE: Guardian (UK) (12-3-08)
The original manuscript of one of the most important American novels of the last century, Jack Kerouac's On the Road, went on display in the UK for the first time yesterday.
Kerouac wrote it in just three weeks, furiously tapping away on his typewriter on 3.6-metre (12ft) reels of paper.
The scroll, of eight reels taped together, was unfurled at the Barber Institute in Birmingham, 50 years after the novel was published in Britain.
"We're very excited," said the exhibition's curator Dick Ellis. He said there had been a lot of competition to get the scroll, which is on something of a world tour. "This is an iconic manuscript. It is a record of the huge effort Kerouac put into composing it."
About six metres of the scroll will be on display in a cabinet and while visitors will have to tilt their heads, Ellis believes they will get a much deeper knowledge of Kerouac...
Kerouac wrote it in just three weeks, furiously tapping away on his typewriter on 3.6-metre (12ft) reels of paper.
The scroll, of eight reels taped together, was unfurled at the Barber Institute in Birmingham, 50 years after the novel was published in Britain.
"We're very excited," said the exhibition's curator Dick Ellis. He said there had been a lot of competition to get the scroll, which is on something of a world tour. "This is an iconic manuscript. It is a record of the huge effort Kerouac put into composing it."
About six metres of the scroll will be on display in a cabinet and while visitors will have to tilt their heads, Ellis believes they will get a much deeper knowledge of Kerouac...
Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - 06:56
SOURCE: BBC (12-3-08)
The skull of concert pianist and Holocaust survivor Andrew Tchaikowsky has appeared in the Stratford production, starring David Tennant.
It was his dying wish to have his skull used in Hamlet and he bequeathed it to the RSC.
But the company says a fake skull will be used when it transfers to London.
Tennant was the first actor to use Mr Tchaikowsky's skull during Hamlet's famous grave-digger scene.
Audiences in Stratford were unaware the skull belonged to the Oxford pianist, but the secret was revealed by Tennant.
The RSC told Channel 4 News that now the secret was out, it would be "too distracting for the audience" if the skull was used...
It was his dying wish to have his skull used in Hamlet and he bequeathed it to the RSC.
But the company says a fake skull will be used when it transfers to London.
Tennant was the first actor to use Mr Tchaikowsky's skull during Hamlet's famous grave-digger scene.
Audiences in Stratford were unaware the skull belonged to the Oxford pianist, but the secret was revealed by Tennant.
The RSC told Channel 4 News that now the secret was out, it would be "too distracting for the audience" if the skull was used...
Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - 06:33
SOURCE: NYT (12-3-08)
Odetta, the singer whose deep voice wove together the strongest songs of American folk music and the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She was 77.
The cause was heart disease, said her manager, Doug Yeager. He added that she had been hoping to sing at Barack Obama’s inauguration.
Odetta sang at coffeehouses and at Carnegie Hall, made highly influential recordings of blues and ballads, and became one of the most widely known folk-music artists of the 1950s and ’60s. She was a formative influence on dozens of artists, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Janis Joplin.
Her voice was an accompaniment to the black-and-white images of the freedom marchers who walked the roads of Alabama and Mississippi and the boulevards of Washington in the quest to end racial discrimination.
The cause was heart disease, said her manager, Doug Yeager. He added that she had been hoping to sing at Barack Obama’s inauguration.
Odetta sang at coffeehouses and at Carnegie Hall, made highly influential recordings of blues and ballads, and became one of the most widely known folk-music artists of the 1950s and ’60s. She was a formative influence on dozens of artists, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Janis Joplin.
Her voice was an accompaniment to the black-and-white images of the freedom marchers who walked the roads of Alabama and Mississippi and the boulevards of Washington in the quest to end racial discrimination.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - 03:26
SOURCE: US News & World Report (12-2-08)
No wonder British screenwriter Peter Morgan said he was nervous to have his new flick Frost/Nixon debut in front of a D.C. crowd. He realized that with a house packed full of Washington journos, the audience surely knew more about former President Nixon than he did. And the discussion could get heated. That's why he mainly stuck to dissing the British half of the Frost/Nixon duo: "I still think I wasn't tough enough on Frost," he says. Morgan wrote a play, and then the film, shown at a Washington screening last night, which dramatizes the 1977 interviews between British talk show host David Frost and former American prez Richard Nixon. When reading Frost's "extraordinary self-aggrandizing lopsided version of events," Morgan almost shied away from writing Frost/Nixon. And he found it particularly in bad taste that Frost had paid Nixon for the sit-down. "I can't apologize for David Frost—I think it's contemptible," Morgan said at a panel discussion after...
Tuesday, December 2, 2008 - 21:11
SOURCE: Reuters (12-1-08)
The creator of CBS' red-hot police procedural "The Mentalist" has unfinished business in Italy.
Bruno Heller says he wants to produce a theatrical wrap-up to his critically beloved and prematurely canceled HBO drama "Rome."
"There is talk of doing a movie version," he said. "It's moving along. It's not there until it is there. I would love to round that show off."
The lavish period drama ran for two seasons on HBO, which co-produced the series with the BBC. With the final season of "The Sopranos" as its lead-in, the first season was solidly rated, but high production costs presented the network with a tough call on the pickup. HBO opted for a second season to help get more value from its initial investment but not a third, effectively canceling the show in summer 2006 before the second season debuted the following January. The "Rome" sets were destroyed, and the actors were released from...
Bruno Heller says he wants to produce a theatrical wrap-up to his critically beloved and prematurely canceled HBO drama "Rome."
"There is talk of doing a movie version," he said. "It's moving along. It's not there until it is there. I would love to round that show off."
The lavish period drama ran for two seasons on HBO, which co-produced the series with the BBC. With the final season of "The Sopranos" as its lead-in, the first season was solidly rated, but high production costs presented the network with a tough call on the pickup. HBO opted for a second season to help get more value from its initial investment but not a third, effectively canceling the show in summer 2006 before the second season debuted the following January. The "Rome" sets were destroyed, and the actors were released from...
Tuesday, December 2, 2008 - 20:57
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (12-2-08)
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which hands out the film industry's most prestigious awards, has gone to court in a bid to stop the sale of the golden statuette which, according to a handwritten will, was to be auctioned off for charity.
The Academy, however, argues that under a long-held policy, it has the right to buy back any Oscar which is put up for sale for a fee of $10 and that Pickford herself signed away the right to sell the statuette.
Pickford, who helped establish United Artists Pictures and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, was awarded the Oscar for her performance in 1929's Coquette. It was the first non-silent role for the star, dubbed "America's Sweetheart", and the first time the best actress Oscar was awarded for a role in a "talkie".
At the time Pickford was married to Douglas Fairbanks. But after their divorce the actress married Charles "Buddy" Rogers and was with...
The Academy, however, argues that under a long-held policy, it has the right to buy back any Oscar which is put up for sale for a fee of $10 and that Pickford herself signed away the right to sell the statuette.
Pickford, who helped establish United Artists Pictures and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, was awarded the Oscar for her performance in 1929's Coquette. It was the first non-silent role for the star, dubbed "America's Sweetheart", and the first time the best actress Oscar was awarded for a role in a "talkie".
At the time Pickford was married to Douglas Fairbanks. But after their divorce the actress married Charles "Buddy" Rogers and was with...
Tuesday, December 2, 2008 - 15:04
SOURCE: CNN (12-1-08)
They share a deep sorrow: an idealistic American who tried to protect the Kurds of Iraq, a Canadian general who refused to follow orders in Rwanda, a French priest who fought for the soul of Cambodia.
Each one tried to focus the world's attention on the world's most heinous crime: genocide. Each time, they were shunned, ignored or told it was someone else's problem.
To understand why, CNN's Christiane Amanpour traveled to the killing fields of Europe, Africa and Asia for a two-hour documentary, "Scream Bloody Murder."
Having reported on mass atrocities around the world, this time Amanpour traced the personal accounts of those who tried to stop the slaughter.
The yearlong CNN investigation found that instead of using a U.N. treaty outlawing genocide as a springboard to action, political leaders have invoked reason after reason to make intervention seem unnecessary, pointless and even counter-productive.
Each one tried to focus the world's attention on the world's most heinous crime: genocide. Each time, they were shunned, ignored or told it was someone else's problem.
To understand why, CNN's Christiane Amanpour traveled to the killing fields of Europe, Africa and Asia for a two-hour documentary, "Scream Bloody Murder."
Having reported on mass atrocities around the world, this time Amanpour traced the personal accounts of those who tried to stop the slaughter.
The yearlong CNN investigation found that instead of using a U.N. treaty outlawing genocide as a springboard to action, political leaders have invoked reason after reason to make intervention seem unnecessary, pointless and even counter-productive.
Monday, December 1, 2008 - 23:41
SOURCE: Sharon Waxman in the NYT (12-1-08)
THE imminent arrival of Thomas Campbell as the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is much more than a simple changing of the guard after the long tenure of his predecessor, Philippe de Montebello. Mr. Campbell, who will take over one month from today, is a 46-year-old curator from the Met’s department of European sculpture and decorative arts, and he has a unique opportunity to shift the tone of an enduring and increasingly hostile debate in the world of art and museums: Who should own the treasures of antiquity?
Up to now, the parties on either side of this dispute have stood in opposing corners with their fingers in their ears. The governments of Italy and Turkey have filed lawsuits to force the return of plundered and looted artworks. Egypt has threatened to suspend excavation permits if iconic artifacts are not repatriated. Greece has built a new museum in Athens in large part to justify its renewed demands for the return of the Elgin Marbles from Britain....
Up to now, the parties on either side of this dispute have stood in opposing corners with their fingers in their ears. The governments of Italy and Turkey have filed lawsuits to force the return of plundered and looted artworks. Egypt has threatened to suspend excavation permits if iconic artifacts are not repatriated. Greece has built a new museum in Athens in large part to justify its renewed demands for the return of the Elgin Marbles from Britain....
Monday, December 1, 2008 - 23:31
SOURCE: Slate (11-26-08)
Harvey Milk was gunned down on Nov. 27, 1978, three weeks after his biggest political victory. The San Francisco city supervisor, the first openly gay man elected to a major public position in this country, had been in office less than a year when he spearheaded a statewide campaign to defeat Proposition 6, a ballot initiative that called for the mandatory firing of gay teachers in California. Milk, Gus Van Sant's film about this unlikely politician's brief but brilliant career, marks the 30th anniversary of its subject's death. But it also arrives three weeks after the biggest political setback the American gay rights movement has suffered in years: the passage of Proposition 8, which reversed the California Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage.
In ways its makers could not have expected, Milk is very much a movie of its moment—it now seems like more than just a movie. It has sparked copious pre-release commentary—not many films occasion three New York...
In ways its makers could not have expected, Milk is very much a movie of its moment—it now seems like more than just a movie. It has sparked copious pre-release commentary—not many films occasion three New York...
Monday, December 1, 2008 - 20:12
