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: LA Times (3-28-10)
Mummies and other artifacts found along the fabled route in China are the stars of a new exhibition at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana.
This weekend, the Bowers Museum opens an exhibition featuring about 150 artifacts from the area, "Secrets of the Silk Road: Mystery Mummies of China" (through July 25). The stars of the show are two mummies and the trappings of a third, already celebrities in the world of archaeology. Found in burial sites of different eras, they are Caucasoid -- a discovery that has been unsettling for Beijing, resulting in long-standing bans on their export.
The newest of the mummies -- or at least the trappings, since his body isn't coming to Santa Ana -- is Yingpan Man, dating to the 3rd to 4th century. His face was covered with a mask with a gold band across the forehead, and he wore a wool robe bearing designs of animals, trees and muscular youths that reflect Western influences, says Elizabeth Barber, a prehistoric textile...
This weekend, the Bowers Museum opens an exhibition featuring about 150 artifacts from the area, "Secrets of the Silk Road: Mystery Mummies of China" (through July 25). The stars of the show are two mummies and the trappings of a third, already celebrities in the world of archaeology. Found in burial sites of different eras, they are Caucasoid -- a discovery that has been unsettling for Beijing, resulting in long-standing bans on their export.
The newest of the mummies -- or at least the trappings, since his body isn't coming to Santa Ana -- is Yingpan Man, dating to the 3rd to 4th century. His face was covered with a mask with a gold band across the forehead, and he wore a wool robe bearing designs of animals, trees and muscular youths that reflect Western influences, says Elizabeth Barber, a prehistoric textile...
Sunday, March 28, 2010 - 12:07
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SOURCE: Medieval News (3-24-10)
Television viewers who can't miss the latest episde of The Tudors or other historically-based fair will soon have a new program to watch - Camelot, which will be based on Thomas Malory’s 15th century book, Le Morte d’Arthur.
Starz Entertainment and GK Films will be producing the 10-episode series, which will debut in the first half of 2011. They describe Camelot as a modern telling of the Arthur legends that is relatable to contemporary audiences.
“The story of Arthur isn’t history, it’s mythology, and Camelot isn’t a place but an idea of hope that has resonated intensely at different times throughout history,” Starz, LLC, President and CEO Chris Albrecht said. “The creative team has envisioned a highly entertaining and distinctly original TV program that fits in perfectly with our lineup, coming on the heels of our successful original series Spartacus: Blood and Sand and the returning comedy Party Down, along with our recent acquisition of the event series...
Starz Entertainment and GK Films will be producing the 10-episode series, which will debut in the first half of 2011. They describe Camelot as a modern telling of the Arthur legends that is relatable to contemporary audiences.
“The story of Arthur isn’t history, it’s mythology, and Camelot isn’t a place but an idea of hope that has resonated intensely at different times throughout history,” Starz, LLC, President and CEO Chris Albrecht said. “The creative team has envisioned a highly entertaining and distinctly original TV program that fits in perfectly with our lineup, coming on the heels of our successful original series Spartacus: Blood and Sand and the returning comedy Party Down, along with our recent acquisition of the event series...
Thursday, March 25, 2010 - 18:09
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (3-22-10)
"It's about everyone, about who we are as a species," said Rick Potts, director of the human origins program and curator of anthropology at the museum, standing next to a life-size bronze statue of a Homo sapiens holding a piece of meat.
The museum's new $20.7 million (£13.8) exhibition hall, dubbed the Hall of Human Origins, provides visitors an "opportunity to connect their personal life to the evidence that human species evolves over million of years," museum director Cristian Samper said as he unveiled the wing on Wednesday.
Visitors can gaze into the eyes of reproductions of Homo erectus and Australopithecus who populated the planet for millennia. A photo booth transforms a curious onlooker's traits into those of a Homo floresiensis (or "hobbit") or Cro-Magnon.
Among the 300 or so objects, including more than 75 exact replicas of skulls, are two important guests loaned for three months by the Museum of Man in...
The museum's new $20.7 million (£13.8) exhibition hall, dubbed the Hall of Human Origins, provides visitors an "opportunity to connect their personal life to the evidence that human species evolves over million of years," museum director Cristian Samper said as he unveiled the wing on Wednesday.
Visitors can gaze into the eyes of reproductions of Homo erectus and Australopithecus who populated the planet for millennia. A photo booth transforms a curious onlooker's traits into those of a Homo floresiensis (or "hobbit") or Cro-Magnon.
Among the 300 or so objects, including more than 75 exact replicas of skulls, are two important guests loaned for three months by the Museum of Man in...
Monday, March 22, 2010 - 11:44
SOURCE: Independent (UK) (3-19-10)
[Andreas Whittam Smith is a columnist for the Independent (UK).]
The memory of France's most shameful wartime episode, buried deep for 30 years and then only grudgingly recognised, has finally come fully to the surface. For the appalling fate that the French state inflicted on thousands of its Jewish people one morning in July 1942 has become the subject of a film made with serious and respectful intent, a sort of documentary with actors. It is titled La Rafle (The Round-up). It opened last week in 775 cinemas throughout France. The telling is vivid and leaves one shaken....
By 1942 the victorious German army had been occupying northern France and the coastal districts for two years. Marshal Pétain, who had negotiated a deal under which central and southern France would be administered along Nazi lines, governed from Vichy in the centre. The "rafle" was conceived and planned by the secretary-general of the French national police and other Vichy...
The memory of France's most shameful wartime episode, buried deep for 30 years and then only grudgingly recognised, has finally come fully to the surface. For the appalling fate that the French state inflicted on thousands of its Jewish people one morning in July 1942 has become the subject of a film made with serious and respectful intent, a sort of documentary with actors. It is titled La Rafle (The Round-up). It opened last week in 775 cinemas throughout France. The telling is vivid and leaves one shaken....
By 1942 the victorious German army had been occupying northern France and the coastal districts for two years. Marshal Pétain, who had negotiated a deal under which central and southern France would be administered along Nazi lines, governed from Vichy in the centre. The "rafle" was conceived and planned by the secretary-general of the French national police and other Vichy...
Friday, March 19, 2010 - 17:19
SOURCE: International Herald Tribune (3-15-10)
[Istvan Rev is a professor of history at Central European University, Budapest.]
Charles T. Pinck, president of the O.S.S. Society, an organization of veterans of the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II predecessor of the C.I.A., argued in the Washington Times that the film “Inglorious Basterds” loses its pretense as a fantasy when it attaches a fictional group of Jewish commandos to the real O.S.S., thereby giving the viewer the impression that this story is true.
“The fictional ‘Basterds’ may serve the film’s purpose,” Mr. Pinck asserts, “but they do disservice to the history of the O.S.S.”
Mr. Pinck would be surprised to learn that certain episodes of the film are in fact closer to the history of the O.S.S. than they appear, closer perhaps than even the film’s director, Quentin Tarantino, would admit.
Mr. Tarantino reportedly struggled with the ending of the film, until he found a solution that mirrors obscure events in the...
Charles T. Pinck, president of the O.S.S. Society, an organization of veterans of the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II predecessor of the C.I.A., argued in the Washington Times that the film “Inglorious Basterds” loses its pretense as a fantasy when it attaches a fictional group of Jewish commandos to the real O.S.S., thereby giving the viewer the impression that this story is true.
“The fictional ‘Basterds’ may serve the film’s purpose,” Mr. Pinck asserts, “but they do disservice to the history of the O.S.S.”
Mr. Pinck would be surprised to learn that certain episodes of the film are in fact closer to the history of the O.S.S. than they appear, closer perhaps than even the film’s director, Quentin Tarantino, would admit.
Mr. Tarantino reportedly struggled with the ending of the film, until he found a solution that mirrors obscure events in the...
Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 21:51
SOURCE: American Heritage (3-14-10)
[Jennifer J. Rodibaugh is the Assistant Editor of American Heritage Magazine.]
As I write, tens of thousands of American soldiers are scraping out a life of tedium, punctuated by moments of terrible violence, in a rocky landscape of scorched earth far to the east. They seek an enemy that slips effortlessly through the terrain, is incomprehensible in its motives, and which attacked us first. Sound familiar?
With this in mind, it is difficult not to question Steven Spielberg’s motives in producing his latest and most unabashedly patriotic war flick, The Pacific, HBO’s 10-hour miniseries debuting March 14, 2010, in which men who fight are lauded, and men who don’t are disappointments. As a male Navy nurse wipes a bloody nose, he laments to a veteran of Guadalcanal that, “This is as bad as my war gets.” Longing to join his best friend, PFC Sidney Phillips, who enlisted while the wreckage of Pearl Harbor was still smoking, Eugene Sledge of Mobile, Alabama writes, “...
As I write, tens of thousands of American soldiers are scraping out a life of tedium, punctuated by moments of terrible violence, in a rocky landscape of scorched earth far to the east. They seek an enemy that slips effortlessly through the terrain, is incomprehensible in its motives, and which attacked us first. Sound familiar?
With this in mind, it is difficult not to question Steven Spielberg’s motives in producing his latest and most unabashedly patriotic war flick, The Pacific, HBO’s 10-hour miniseries debuting March 14, 2010, in which men who fight are lauded, and men who don’t are disappointments. As a male Navy nurse wipes a bloody nose, he laments to a veteran of Guadalcanal that, “This is as bad as my war gets.” Longing to join his best friend, PFC Sidney Phillips, who enlisted while the wreckage of Pearl Harbor was still smoking, Eugene Sledge of Mobile, Alabama writes, “...
Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 13:26
SOURCE: NYT (3-16-10)
One of the first objects you see in the newly expanded Jewish Museum London, which opens on Wednesday, is also one of the museum’s oldest: the remains of a 13th-century Jewish ritual bath (a mikvah) uncovered during a 2001 construction project in the City of London. As seen here, it is a bit too robustly reconstructed, its age and fragmentary character mollified with the use of modern materials and mirrors mounted like rays above its well.
But it offers testimony to a long history in which England and the Jews were locked in a complicated embrace, mixing tension and sympathy, conflict and allegiance. This relic from a Jewish home in one of London’s medieval neighborhoods offers evidence of some stability and prosperity. Yet it also provides a reminder of the community’s ruin: at the end of the 12th century, the Jews of York were horrifically massacred; at the end of the 13th, Jews were expelled from the country.
How could such an object not be in ruins?
...
But it offers testimony to a long history in which England and the Jews were locked in a complicated embrace, mixing tension and sympathy, conflict and allegiance. This relic from a Jewish home in one of London’s medieval neighborhoods offers evidence of some stability and prosperity. Yet it also provides a reminder of the community’s ruin: at the end of the 12th century, the Jews of York were horrifically massacred; at the end of the 13th, Jews were expelled from the country.
How could such an object not be in ruins?
...
Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 09:47
SOURCE: TomDispatch (3-15-10)
[Lewis H. Lapham is Editor of Lapham’s Quarterly.]
[This essay appears in the March 2010 issue of Lapham's Quarterly and is posted at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of that magazine.]
Art as a medium of exchange is the gift in the hand of its creator, alive in the mind of its beholder, converting the private to a public good, and thereby adding it to the common store of human energy and hope. It’s the embodiment of the spirit in the flesh to which Leo Tolstoy refers as “a means of communion among people… the capacity of people to be infected by the feelings of other people,” by “feelings, the most diverse, very strong and very weak, very significant and very worthless, very bad and very good.”
The supposition that art is...
Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - 21:30
SOURCE: Artdaily.org (3-14-10)
This exhibition is the first ever to focus on Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s shared enthusiasm for art. Bringing together more than 400 items from the Royal Collection, it celebrates the royal couple’s mutual delight in collecting and displaying works of art, from the time of their engagement in 1839 to the Prince’s untimely death in 1861. The exhibition also challenges the popular image of Victoria – the melancholy widow of 40 years – and reveals her as a passionate and open-minded young woman.
For Victoria and Albert, art was an important part of everyday life and a way they expressed their love for each other. Around a third of the objects in the exhibition were exchanged as gifts between the couple to mark special occasions. They range from the simple and sentimental, such as a set of jewellery in the form of orange blossom, to superb examples of early Italian painting, including Bernardo Daddi’s The Marriage of the Virgin and Perugino’s Saint Jerome in Penitence...
For Victoria and Albert, art was an important part of everyday life and a way they expressed their love for each other. Around a third of the objects in the exhibition were exchanged as gifts between the couple to mark special occasions. They range from the simple and sentimental, such as a set of jewellery in the form of orange blossom, to superb examples of early Italian painting, including Bernardo Daddi’s The Marriage of the Virgin and Perugino’s Saint Jerome in Penitence...
Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - 09:05
SOURCE: Lee P Ruddin (3-15-10)
Some say it is too soon for a movie on Iraq; others say it is too late. Given what we know about weapons of mass destruction (WMD), though, most would probably agree that Green Zone (Universal) is nothing other than two hours of anticlimax.
Granted, it may be SO 2003 to ask that very inconvenient question of why coalition forces invaded Iraq. Yet Paul Greengrass’s film – much like The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatium (2007) – remains thrilling till the very end, since, lest we forget, it is a work of fiction. On that very point, however, it must be said that viewers would be forgiven for forgetting it is fictitious. (Not least because cinematographer Barry Ackroyd’s startling vistas of Baghdad under fire take you closer to the action than anything previously captured in a fiction film.)
Still, those hoping to see ‘The Bourne Discovery’ will be disappointed. Jason Bourne getting his butt kicked will only compound the misery of Bourne fans not wishing...
Monday, March 15, 2010 - 14:48
SOURCE: LA Times (3-15-10)
Forget Indiana Jones. If you're making a period-piece adventure these days, you might want to consider putting the whip, wooden stake or pistol in the hand of a long-gone world leader or esteemed author.
It may sound a bit strange, but that's the message coming back from pop culture at the moment. Consider the fact that, at bookstores right now, Abe Lincoln and Queen Victoria are each taking on dark supernatural threats and that Hollywood has plans to turn Charles Dickens, H.P. Lovecraft and Leonardo da Vinci into on-screen action heroes.
The new novel "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" by Seth Grahame-Smith (who also brought the world "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies") is getting enthusiastic reviews, as is "Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter," which Los Angeles Times book reviewer Nick Owchar called "wildly entertaining."...
There may be one upside to this scramble to find a future blockbuster in the pages of the...
It may sound a bit strange, but that's the message coming back from pop culture at the moment. Consider the fact that, at bookstores right now, Abe Lincoln and Queen Victoria are each taking on dark supernatural threats and that Hollywood has plans to turn Charles Dickens, H.P. Lovecraft and Leonardo da Vinci into on-screen action heroes.
The new novel "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" by Seth Grahame-Smith (who also brought the world "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies") is getting enthusiastic reviews, as is "Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter," which Los Angeles Times book reviewer Nick Owchar called "wildly entertaining."...
There may be one upside to this scramble to find a future blockbuster in the pages of the...
Monday, March 15, 2010 - 11:16
SOURCE: Artdaily.org (3-10-10)
An important exhibition telling the story of the Indian portrait over three centuries will open at the National Portrait Gallery on 11 March 2010. Bringing together 60 works from international public and private collections, The Indian Portrait 1560-1860 will celebrate the beauty, power and humanity of these works of art. The exhibition sets out to show that Indian portraiture - an area of artistic achievement overlooked in Britain - should be seen alongside other outstanding portraits from around the world.
The works in the exhibition range from magnificent formal portraits of the Mughal emperors to penetrating studies of courtiers and holy men, as well as candid depictions by Indian artists of Europeans living in India. These paintings are a record of a rich and complex history, embracing influences from Iran and Europe as well as local Hindu and Muslim traditions. They not only show a growing self-awareness of how Indians saw themselves, but also how they wished to be...
The works in the exhibition range from magnificent formal portraits of the Mughal emperors to penetrating studies of courtiers and holy men, as well as candid depictions by Indian artists of Europeans living in India. These paintings are a record of a rich and complex history, embracing influences from Iran and Europe as well as local Hindu and Muslim traditions. They not only show a growing self-awareness of how Indians saw themselves, but also how they wished to be...
Wednesday, March 10, 2010 - 12:32
SOURCE: Artdaily.org (3-10-10)
The Centre Pompidou is to pay tribute to Lucian Freud, one of the greatest of contemporary painters. Now 88 years old, he is one of the world’s most important living artists. He has not shown in France since the Centre’s last major retrospective of his work nearly a quarter of a century ago, in 1987, though his fame has since then only grown and his place in the history of art become ever more assured.
The exhibition will present an outstanding selection of Freud’s work, consisting of some fifty large-format paintings, mostly from private collections, together with a number of prints and drawings, as well as photographs of the artist’s London studio.
The exhibition is organised around the theme of the studio, this enclosed space so essential to Freud’s paintings and to his practice as a painter. Occupying more than 900 square metres, it will bring together most of the painter’s Large Interiors, his variations on the Old Masters, his self-portraits, and more...
The exhibition will present an outstanding selection of Freud’s work, consisting of some fifty large-format paintings, mostly from private collections, together with a number of prints and drawings, as well as photographs of the artist’s London studio.
The exhibition is organised around the theme of the studio, this enclosed space so essential to Freud’s paintings and to his practice as a painter. Occupying more than 900 square metres, it will bring together most of the painter’s Large Interiors, his variations on the Old Masters, his self-portraits, and more...
Wednesday, March 10, 2010 - 12:30
SOURCE: Independent (UK) (3-8-10)
France likes to point the cinema camera on its own past, good and bad, but one of the darkest events in modern French history has been almost banished from the screen, until now. The movie Le Rafle, which opens in France on Wednesday, is the first to address head-on the most notorious episode in the persecution of French Jews during the Second World War.
The film, which has won glowing tributes from advance viewers, tells the story of the arrest of 13,000 Parisian Jews, including 4,000 children, by French police and gendarmes in July 1942. The Jews, mostly French-born and deeply integrated into Parisian life, were herded into a giant cycling stadium, the Vélodrome d'Hiver, or Vél d'Hiv, close to the Eiffel Tower. Almost all of them died in Nazi death or concentration camps.
The Rafle du Vél'd'Hiv has come to symbolise the enthusiastic participation of many – not all – French officials and police officers in the Holocaust. It has also come to represent the...
The film, which has won glowing tributes from advance viewers, tells the story of the arrest of 13,000 Parisian Jews, including 4,000 children, by French police and gendarmes in July 1942. The Jews, mostly French-born and deeply integrated into Parisian life, were herded into a giant cycling stadium, the Vélodrome d'Hiver, or Vél d'Hiv, close to the Eiffel Tower. Almost all of them died in Nazi death or concentration camps.
The Rafle du Vél'd'Hiv has come to symbolise the enthusiastic participation of many – not all – French officials and police officers in the Holocaust. It has also come to represent the...
Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 15:50
SOURCE: WaPo (3-9-10)
You could say that it was a hunting expedition that captured the whole world: In 1909, Theodore Roosevelt embarked on an East African safari, with financial help from the Smithsonian Institution, and ended up collecting more than a thousand specimens, including several hundred big game.
This hunting expedition would cause an uproar these days, but back in Roosevelt's time these trophies were objects of unabashed public curiosity. At about the same time, the Smithsonian was building a new museum to house its expanding collections. The Roosevelt bounty, including several Atlas lions, became one of the first exhibitions for the U.S. National Museum Building, now the National Museum of Natural History, when it opened in 1910.
Flash forward a hundred years, and it's now the most popular museum in the country, having hosted 7.4 million visitors in 2009 and passing the Air and Space Museum. Indeed, it was the second-most-visited museum in the world last year (after...
This hunting expedition would cause an uproar these days, but back in Roosevelt's time these trophies were objects of unabashed public curiosity. At about the same time, the Smithsonian was building a new museum to house its expanding collections. The Roosevelt bounty, including several Atlas lions, became one of the first exhibitions for the U.S. National Museum Building, now the National Museum of Natural History, when it opened in 1910.
Flash forward a hundred years, and it's now the most popular museum in the country, having hosted 7.4 million visitors in 2009 and passing the Air and Space Museum. Indeed, it was the second-most-visited museum in the world last year (after...
Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 15:50
SOURCE: The Atlantic (3-8-10)
[Ed Koch was mayor of NYC from 1978 to 1989. He's credited with restoring fiscal stability to the city and creating affordable housing. He's also a film buff.]
Before seeing Harlan: In the Shadow of 'Jew Sűss', I had never heard of Veit Harlan, who directed the 1940 movie Jew Sűss. While I don't know for certain, I assume he was responsible for the script in that film which the New York Times' Manohla Dargis described in her review of this picture as "one of the Nazis' most notorious anti-Semitic works." Dargis also stated in her review that when Harlan's film was shown at the 1940 Venice Film Festival, it was "excitedly received.
No surprise when you recall that the United States and most countries in Europe at the time were grossly anti-Semitic. No one rushed in to save the Jews from the assaults by Nazis and fascists which culminated in the Final Solution: death camps. Anti-Semitic acts and violence against Jews were...
Before seeing Harlan: In the Shadow of 'Jew Sűss', I had never heard of Veit Harlan, who directed the 1940 movie Jew Sűss. While I don't know for certain, I assume he was responsible for the script in that film which the New York Times' Manohla Dargis described in her review of this picture as "one of the Nazis' most notorious anti-Semitic works." Dargis also stated in her review that when Harlan's film was shown at the 1940 Venice Film Festival, it was "excitedly received.
No surprise when you recall that the United States and most countries in Europe at the time were grossly anti-Semitic. No one rushed in to save the Jews from the assaults by Nazis and fascists which culminated in the Final Solution: death camps. Anti-Semitic acts and violence against Jews were...
Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 13:23
SOURCE: Artdaily.org (3-9-10)
35 paintings will be seen alongside 31 full suits of armour and pieces of armour loaned from the Royal Armoury in Madrid, considered the finest collection in the world along with that of the imperial collection in Vienna. Together, they will narrate the evolution and impact of the court portrait in the period from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Particularly noteworthy is the juxtaposition of Titian’s portrait of Charles V at Mühlberg and the impressive suit of equestrian armour belonging to the Emperor: a masterpiece of the art made by Desiderius Helmschmid, one of the leading armourers of the 16th century.
Based on the exhibition held at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, last year, “The Art of Power” to be held at the Prado offers a more complete presentation of the subject. It focuses on the meaning and symbolism of armour and its representation in painting. From the viewpoint of an exhibition, this is an unprecedented subject that has only previously been...
Based on the exhibition held at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, last year, “The Art of Power” to be held at the Prado offers a more complete presentation of the subject. It focuses on the meaning and symbolism of armour and its representation in painting. From the viewpoint of an exhibition, this is an unprecedented subject that has only previously been...
Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - 07:05
SOURCE: NYT (3-5-10)
MIDWAY through the first hour of “Band of Brothers,” HBO’s 2001 mini-series about a company of paratroopers during and after D-Day, there’s a scene on a troop ship that’s jampacked with new recruits on their way to hard fighting in the European theater. “Right now some lucky bastard’s headed for the South Pacific,” one soldier says to another, envious. “He’s going to get billeted on some tropical island sitting under a palm tree with six naked native girls helping him cut up coconuts so he can hand-feed them to the flamingos.”
Now comes “The Pacific,” an HBO mini-series by Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and the rest of the “Band of Brothers” crew that spends 10 grueling hours and almost $200 million showing just how inaccurate that newbie’s idyllic image was. The series, in one-hour episodes that begin next Sunday, follows three real-life Marines from Pearl Harbor to homecoming after V-J Day. There are no naked native girls or flamingos. Instead there are bloody battles...
Now comes “The Pacific,” an HBO mini-series by Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and the rest of the “Band of Brothers” crew that spends 10 grueling hours and almost $200 million showing just how inaccurate that newbie’s idyllic image was. The series, in one-hour episodes that begin next Sunday, follows three real-life Marines from Pearl Harbor to homecoming after V-J Day. There are no naked native girls or flamingos. Instead there are bloody battles...
Sunday, March 7, 2010 - 20:08
SOURCE: Time.com (3-3-10)
[Douglas Brinkley is a professor of history at Rice University and a CBS News historian. His most recent book is The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America.]
To the young Tom Hanks, history was as dull as an algebra equation. For Hanks — a classic baby boomer, born in 1956 — World War II was just a string of long-ago muzzle flashes in black-and-white. Yet he did have a more direct connection to the global cataclysm. His father had been a U.S. Naval mechanic (second class) in World War II. But Amos Hanks wasn't the type to tell his son tales of bravery and sacrifice. "Growing up, I always knew Dad was somewhere in the Pacific fixing things," Hanks says. "He had nothing nice to say about the Navy. He hated the Navy. He hated everybody in the Navy. He had no glorious stories about it."...
Yet over the past two decades — from his movies Saving Private Ryan and Charlie Wilson's War to the HBO miniseries he has produced...
To the young Tom Hanks, history was as dull as an algebra equation. For Hanks — a classic baby boomer, born in 1956 — World War II was just a string of long-ago muzzle flashes in black-and-white. Yet he did have a more direct connection to the global cataclysm. His father had been a U.S. Naval mechanic (second class) in World War II. But Amos Hanks wasn't the type to tell his son tales of bravery and sacrifice. "Growing up, I always knew Dad was somewhere in the Pacific fixing things," Hanks says. "He had nothing nice to say about the Navy. He hated the Navy. He hated everybody in the Navy. He had no glorious stories about it."...
Yet over the past two decades — from his movies Saving Private Ryan and Charlie Wilson's War to the HBO miniseries he has produced...
Thursday, March 4, 2010 - 10:44
SOURCE: PopMatters (3-3-10)
“The dimensions are unimaginable. What did such films lead to? What was their direct effect?” Christiane Kubrick poses the question that can’t be answered in Harlan: In the Shadow of “Jew Süss” (Harlan-Im Schatten von Jud Süß). But if it’s impossible to measure direct consequences of a film (or any work of art), Felix Moeller’s documentary considers the layered and lasting aftermath of Jew Süss, the 1940 anti-Semitic propaganda drama made by Kubrick’s uncle, Viet Harlan.
Opening 3 March at the Film Forum, Harlan: In the Shadow of “Jew Süss” features interviews with Harlan’s relatives, all struggling with his legacy and his responsibility for Nazi activities and beliefs. That legacy is complicated, if only because Harlan made films for decades, because and despite his notoriety for Jew Süss. At the same time, it seems easy to judge, because his movies were so insistently similar—in theme and construction. “It was the cinema of illusion and playing with emotions,” observes...
Opening 3 March at the Film Forum, Harlan: In the Shadow of “Jew Süss” features interviews with Harlan’s relatives, all struggling with his legacy and his responsibility for Nazi activities and beliefs. That legacy is complicated, if only because Harlan made films for decades, because and despite his notoriety for Jew Süss. At the same time, it seems easy to judge, because his movies were so insistently similar—in theme and construction. “It was the cinema of illusion and playing with emotions,” observes...
Wednesday, March 3, 2010 - 11:15
