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: The New Republic (2-24-11)
[David Thomson is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film and The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder.]
For a while in this awards season, The Social Network seemed to be the favorite for the Best Picture Oscar. But the later opening of The King’s Speech has served it well. In the crucial nomination and voting period, The Social Network’s domestic box office slowed down, and it has earned less than $100 million. The picture has been hard to find in theaters, in part because it appeared on DVD in January. But, in the Christmas and New Year period, The King’s Speech picked up surprising momentum—because of the royal family angle; because stuttering has led to several background stories; but chiefly because Colin Firth has been such a charm in publicity events. So The King’s Speech has now gone over $100 million, and its presence in theatres (and press advertising from the Weinstein Company) has probably impressed voters. It has...
For a while in this awards season, The Social Network seemed to be the favorite for the Best Picture Oscar. But the later opening of The King’s Speech has served it well. In the crucial nomination and voting period, The Social Network’s domestic box office slowed down, and it has earned less than $100 million. The picture has been hard to find in theaters, in part because it appeared on DVD in January. But, in the Christmas and New Year period, The King’s Speech picked up surprising momentum—because of the royal family angle; because stuttering has led to several background stories; but chiefly because Colin Firth has been such a charm in publicity events. So The King’s Speech has now gone over $100 million, and its presence in theatres (and press advertising from the Weinstein Company) has probably impressed voters. It has...
Thursday, February 24, 2011 - 13:04
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SOURCE: NYT (2-23-11)
The prospect of the stage play translated for television has long made me somnolent. Given the choice between revisiting the aggressively middlebrow and moralistic live dramas of the 1950s — those that are said to make up the golden age of television — or reruns of “Sex and the City” on TBS, I would unabashedly take the girl talk and consider myself a person of superior judgment for making the choice.
As a form the teleplay is mired in its own noble pedantry, which is why the arrival of “Thurgood” on HBO on Thursday initially seems dubious — especially so, perhaps, because it is a one-man enterprise even more heavily prone to the sensibility of tutorial. Starring Laurence Fishburne, “Thurgood” is the filmed version of the play by George Stevens Jr. that appeared on Broadway three years ago as a chronicle of the life and legal career of Thurgood Marshall. The HBO production was taped at a live performance at the Eisenhower Theater at the Kennedy Center, an incongruity given...
As a form the teleplay is mired in its own noble pedantry, which is why the arrival of “Thurgood” on HBO on Thursday initially seems dubious — especially so, perhaps, because it is a one-man enterprise even more heavily prone to the sensibility of tutorial. Starring Laurence Fishburne, “Thurgood” is the filmed version of the play by George Stevens Jr. that appeared on Broadway three years ago as a chronicle of the life and legal career of Thurgood Marshall. The HBO production was taped at a live performance at the Eisenhower Theater at the Kennedy Center, an incongruity given...
Thursday, February 24, 2011 - 11:50
SOURCE: La Times (2-20-11)
[Ralph Frammolino, a former Los Angeles Times reporter, was a finalist, with Jason Felch, for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the Getty antiquities scandal. Their book about the scandal, "Chasing Aphrodite," will be published in May.]
In the fall of 1973, a package arrived in a Rome newsroom. Delayed by an Italian postal strike, its contents had begun to spoil. Inside were a lock of red hair and a piece of rotting flesh. It bore a telltale freckle. The flesh was an ear belonging to the grandson of J. Paul Getty.
One of the richest men in the world, Getty had publicly refused to negotiate with the men who had kidnapped the younger Getty in Rome three months before. Now the oilman agreed to pay $2.2 million, the most he claimed could be deducted from his taxes as a theft loss. Getty lent the rest of the nearly $3 million ransom to his son, the teenager's father — at 4% interest. Released, the grandson called to say thanks. The oilman...
In the fall of 1973, a package arrived in a Rome newsroom. Delayed by an Italian postal strike, its contents had begun to spoil. Inside were a lock of red hair and a piece of rotting flesh. It bore a telltale freckle. The flesh was an ear belonging to the grandson of J. Paul Getty.
One of the richest men in the world, Getty had publicly refused to negotiate with the men who had kidnapped the younger Getty in Rome three months before. Now the oilman agreed to pay $2.2 million, the most he claimed could be deducted from his taxes as a theft loss. Getty lent the rest of the nearly $3 million ransom to his son, the teenager's father — at 4% interest. Released, the grandson called to say thanks. The oilman...
Monday, February 21, 2011 - 14:24
SOURCE: Lee P. Ruddin (2-17-11)
With the eyes of the political world fixed on North Africa and the possibility of an Islamist triumph in elections, it is fitting that a film about the Algerian Civil War and the French Trappist monks caught up in it has just hit the big screen. Yet with the eyes of the movie world fixed on The King's Speech and the possibility of an Oscar triumph at the Academy Awards, you are unlikely to have heard of Of Gods and Men (not least because "Des hommes et des dieux" has been omitted from the Best Foreign Language Film category of Oscar nominees).
This is unfortunate since the story revolves around the fact that Islamic militants wage a war against a secular, military-backed government after it cancels a general election fundamentalists are poised to win. What is more unfortunate, however, is director Xavier Beauvois does not tell you this in, what The Telegraph refers to as, his "monastic murder mystery." Granted, the cinemagoer does not necessarily pay...
This is unfortunate since the story revolves around the fact that Islamic militants wage a war against a secular, military-backed government after it cancels a general election fundamentalists are poised to win. What is more unfortunate, however, is director Xavier Beauvois does not tell you this in, what The Telegraph refers to as, his "monastic murder mystery." Granted, the cinemagoer does not necessarily pay...
Thursday, February 17, 2011 - 13:12
SOURCE: Time.com (2-6-11)
It's the result of nine years of painstaking work — essentially a giant 3,000-year-old, 27,000-piece 3D jigsaw puzzle. With plenty of patience and luck, German scholars and archaeologists have managed to re-assemble over 30 monumental basalt sculptures that were once thought lost to World War II bombs. Originally from the ancient site of Tell Halaf, the sculptures now feature in a new exhibition at Berlin's Pergamon Museum, The Rescued Gods of the Palace of Tell Halaf, serving as a powerful reminder of the glory of the Aramaean civilization — and the persistence of a small group of art lovers.
The spectacular stone sculptures were discovered by explorer Max von Oppenheim, who had abandoned his job as a diplomat in Cairo to dedicate himself to archaeology. "He had a real passion for the Middle East and was absolutely fascinated by the basalt sculptures at Tell Halaf," says Lutz Martin, one of the curators of the exhibition, which runs until August. "He was an...
The spectacular stone sculptures were discovered by explorer Max von Oppenheim, who had abandoned his job as a diplomat in Cairo to dedicate himself to archaeology. "He had a real passion for the Middle East and was absolutely fascinated by the basalt sculptures at Tell Halaf," says Lutz Martin, one of the curators of the exhibition, which runs until August. "He was an...
Tuesday, February 15, 2011 - 18:51
SOURCE: The Atlantic (2-14-11)
[Ben Heineman Jr. has held top positions in government, law and business. He is the author of High Performance with High Integrity.]
On a quiet Friday morning, my wife and I came face to face with history.
The face was a portrait, painted by Gustav Klimt in 1907, of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the spouse of a wealthy Austrian businessman. It is one of the iconic paintings of the 20th century.
A heavy-lidded, red-lipped, enigmatic 26-year-old woman is sheathed in a body-hugging gown of gold leaf punctuated by blue triangles and emblazoned with obscure Byzantine, Greek, Egyptian, and modernist symbols. She merges into darker gold leaf with swirling designs, and her long fingers are delicately intertwined below a shimmering necklace.
Klimt was a leader of Vienna's art nouveau movement (or jugendstil, "youth art," in German). His unique decorative style and his erotic sensibility made him a controversial painter of the time and a widely...
On a quiet Friday morning, my wife and I came face to face with history.
The face was a portrait, painted by Gustav Klimt in 1907, of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the spouse of a wealthy Austrian businessman. It is one of the iconic paintings of the 20th century.
A heavy-lidded, red-lipped, enigmatic 26-year-old woman is sheathed in a body-hugging gown of gold leaf punctuated by blue triangles and emblazoned with obscure Byzantine, Greek, Egyptian, and modernist symbols. She merges into darker gold leaf with swirling designs, and her long fingers are delicately intertwined below a shimmering necklace.
Klimt was a leader of Vienna's art nouveau movement (or jugendstil, "youth art," in German). His unique decorative style and his erotic sensibility made him a controversial painter of the time and a widely...
Tuesday, February 15, 2011 - 18:48
SOURCE: NYT (2-14-11)
[Bob Herbert is a columnist for the NYT.]
Early in Eugene Jarecki’s documentary, “Reagan,” you hear the voice of Ronald Reagan saying, “Someday it might be worthwhile to find out how images are created — and even more worthwhile to learn how false images come into being.”
Indeed. The image that many, perhaps most, Americans have of the nation’s 40th president is largely manufactured. Reagan has become this larger-than-life figure who all but single-handedly won the cold war, planted the Republican Party’s tax-cut philosophy in the resistant soil of the liberal Democrats and is the touchstone for all things allegedly conservative, no matter how wacky or extreme.
Mr. Jarecki’s documentary does a first-rate job of respectfully separating the real from the mythical, the significant from the nonsense. The truth is that Ronald Reagan, at one time or another, was all over the political map. Early on, he was a liberal Democrat and admirer of Franklin...
Early in Eugene Jarecki’s documentary, “Reagan,” you hear the voice of Ronald Reagan saying, “Someday it might be worthwhile to find out how images are created — and even more worthwhile to learn how false images come into being.”
Indeed. The image that many, perhaps most, Americans have of the nation’s 40th president is largely manufactured. Reagan has become this larger-than-life figure who all but single-handedly won the cold war, planted the Republican Party’s tax-cut philosophy in the resistant soil of the liberal Democrats and is the touchstone for all things allegedly conservative, no matter how wacky or extreme.
Mr. Jarecki’s documentary does a first-rate job of respectfully separating the real from the mythical, the significant from the nonsense. The truth is that Ronald Reagan, at one time or another, was all over the political map. Early on, he was a liberal Democrat and admirer of Franklin...
Tuesday, February 15, 2011 - 09:50
SOURCE: Collider.com (2-9-11)
For the 150th anniversary of America’s deadliest war, Ridley Scott and his brother Tony are teaming up with the History Channel to produce Gettysburg, a new feature documentary which reinvents how we look at the historic battle. In the four years of conflict between the Union and Confederate armies, over 600,000 American lives were lost. So it’s quite fitting that the Gettysburg is being described as “a visceral, terrifying experience.”
The Scott brothers plan to use re-enactment footage alongside CGI in order to tell the story of the soldiers on the ground. Gettysburg will be one part of a week-long theme event dedicated to the Civil War on The History Channel. This commemoration will be an annual event on the channel for the next four years. Hit the jump for more on the project, including what Ridley had to say, as well as what other programs The History Channel has in store for their Civil War-themed week. [Update: We've added the official press release to this story....
The Scott brothers plan to use re-enactment footage alongside CGI in order to tell the story of the soldiers on the ground. Gettysburg will be one part of a week-long theme event dedicated to the Civil War on The History Channel. This commemoration will be an annual event on the channel for the next four years. Hit the jump for more on the project, including what Ridley had to say, as well as what other programs The History Channel has in store for their Civil War-themed week. [Update: We've added the official press release to this story....
Thursday, February 10, 2011 - 17:16
SOURCE: NYT (2-7-11)
Over the centuries, Galileo’s trial in 1633 for defending heliocentrism — that Earth orbits the Sun, not the other way around — the Inquisition’s finding that he was “vehemently suspect of heresy” and his recantation have grown far beyond just a seminal clash between science and religion. The Galileo affair has become general shorthand for speaking truth to power, a cautionary tale to invoke whenever new ideas challenge the established order.
A play that peels back the myths and metaphors, then, to peer into the personal would be welcome. Too often the legend wins out, starting with the notion that Galileo, having renounced his belief that Earth moves, muttered, “But still, it moves.” (There is no evidence that he did.) Brecht’s famous drama “Life of Galileo” buys into that rumor and goes even further, painting a harsh portrait of a sly self-promoter who turns cowardly when it counts most.
Ira Hauptman’s “Starry Messenger,” now at the Theater for the New City...
A play that peels back the myths and metaphors, then, to peer into the personal would be welcome. Too often the legend wins out, starting with the notion that Galileo, having renounced his belief that Earth moves, muttered, “But still, it moves.” (There is no evidence that he did.) Brecht’s famous drama “Life of Galileo” buys into that rumor and goes even further, painting a harsh portrait of a sly self-promoter who turns cowardly when it counts most.
Ira Hauptman’s “Starry Messenger,” now at the Theater for the New City...
Wednesday, February 9, 2011 - 11:13
SOURCE: NYT (2-7-11)
If art is among your full-blown obsessions or just a budding interest, Google, which has already altered the collective universe in so many ways, changed your life last week. It unveiled its Art Project, a Web endeavor that offers easy, if not yet seamless, access to some of the art treasures and interiors of 17 museums in the United States and Europe.
It is very much a work in progress, full of bugs and information gaps, and sometimes blurry, careering virtual tours. But it is already a mesmerizing, world-expanding tool for self-education. You can spend hours exploring it, examining paintings from far off and close up, poking around some of the world’s great museums all by your lonesome. I have, and my advice is: Expect mood swings. This adventure is not without frustrations.
On the virtual tour of the Uffizi in Florence the paintings are sometimes little more than framed smudges on the wall. (The Dürer room: don’t go there.) But you can look at Botticelli’s...
It is very much a work in progress, full of bugs and information gaps, and sometimes blurry, careering virtual tours. But it is already a mesmerizing, world-expanding tool for self-education. You can spend hours exploring it, examining paintings from far off and close up, poking around some of the world’s great museums all by your lonesome. I have, and my advice is: Expect mood swings. This adventure is not without frustrations.
On the virtual tour of the Uffizi in Florence the paintings are sometimes little more than framed smudges on the wall. (The Dürer room: don’t go there.) But you can look at Botticelli’s...
Tuesday, February 8, 2011 - 12:20
SOURCE: Guardian (UK) (2-2-11)
An exhibition of more than 500 objects, most of them never before seen outside Greece, is set to rewrite knowledge of the Macedonian civilisation that brought forth Alexander the Great – the man who conquered most of the known world, from Greece to Egypt, Afghanistan and India, in the 4th century BC.
A magnificent array of objects, from intricate golden crowns to finely sculpted heads, will travel to the Ashmolean in Oxford this spring, for the first major archaeological exhibition to be held in the museum's newly expanded galleries.
The exhibition, Heracles to Alexander the Great, will show the fruits of recent excavations in Aegae, the ancient capital of Macedon. Artefacts in the exhibition will include objects from the burial tomb of the powerful King Philip II, Alexander's father, and his son, Alexander IV – and splendid jewellery and ornaments from the tombs of various Macedonian queens.
Some of the most revelatory objects in the exhibition are...
A magnificent array of objects, from intricate golden crowns to finely sculpted heads, will travel to the Ashmolean in Oxford this spring, for the first major archaeological exhibition to be held in the museum's newly expanded galleries.
The exhibition, Heracles to Alexander the Great, will show the fruits of recent excavations in Aegae, the ancient capital of Macedon. Artefacts in the exhibition will include objects from the burial tomb of the powerful King Philip II, Alexander's father, and his son, Alexander IV – and splendid jewellery and ornaments from the tombs of various Macedonian queens.
Some of the most revelatory objects in the exhibition are...
Tuesday, February 8, 2011 - 12:19
SOURCE: NYT (2-7-11)
Barbara Smith Conrad, a black child of the segregated South, did not seek to vote or to ride in the front of the bus. She just wanted to sing.
But in 1957, when this mezzo-soprano from a small East Texas town was cast opposite a white male student in a University of Texas, Austin, opera production, that was just as controversial. Suddenly Ms. Conrad was thrust into the drama of the larger struggle for civil rights. Her story is now the subject of “When I Rise,” a documentary scheduled to have its national television premiere on PBS’s “Independent Lens” on Tuesday night. (Check local listings.)
Objecting to Ms. Conrad’s casting, segregationists in the Texas Legislature threatened to withhold state financing from the university. University officials yanked Ms. Conrad from the production — Henry Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” — replacing her with a white student. After the incident made headlines, Harry Belafonte stepped in, promising to pay for Ms. Conrad’s music...
But in 1957, when this mezzo-soprano from a small East Texas town was cast opposite a white male student in a University of Texas, Austin, opera production, that was just as controversial. Suddenly Ms. Conrad was thrust into the drama of the larger struggle for civil rights. Her story is now the subject of “When I Rise,” a documentary scheduled to have its national television premiere on PBS’s “Independent Lens” on Tuesday night. (Check local listings.)
Objecting to Ms. Conrad’s casting, segregationists in the Texas Legislature threatened to withhold state financing from the university. University officials yanked Ms. Conrad from the production — Henry Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” — replacing her with a white student. After the incident made headlines, Harry Belafonte stepped in, promising to pay for Ms. Conrad’s music...
Tuesday, February 8, 2011 - 10:57
SOURCE: NYT (2-7-11)
The exhibition “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing,” which opens on Tuesday at the Museum of the City of New York, really ain’t anything like the real thing, but that is not really its fault. The “real thing” in this case is almost beyond the reach of a museum show. It is to be found not in Louis Armstrong’s trumpet or Miles Davis’s flugelhorn, or James Brown’s black jumpsuit studded with rhinestones spelling “Sex,” or Ella Fitzgerald’s orange dress or Michael Jackson’s fedora (all of which are on display here), but in the music those performers made while wearing these clothes and playing these instruments.
The real thing is suggested in the exhibition’s subtitle — “How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment” — because the music that was made at that relatively nondescript 1,500-seat theater on 125th Street in Harlem really did transform American popular-music culture in the 20th century. A habitat and an incubator, the Apollo has also been one of the few...
The real thing is suggested in the exhibition’s subtitle — “How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment” — because the music that was made at that relatively nondescript 1,500-seat theater on 125th Street in Harlem really did transform American popular-music culture in the 20th century. A habitat and an incubator, the Apollo has also been one of the few...
Tuesday, February 8, 2011 - 10:51
SOURCE: Newsweek (2-1-11)
Picture this on an opera stage: President Richard Nixon lands in Beijing to deliver an aria about the mystery of the news industry beaming his story back to the West. Then he receives a philosophical lecture from his host about Confucius—after which Madame Mao enters and promptly freaks everyone out by putting on a violent agitprop play that insults Henry Kissinger. No grand breakthrough comes of the heavily symbolic meeting, and so the main characters all retreat to their bedrooms and wonder whether their efforts to make the world anew amount to anything but a poetic failure. Curtain.
When Nixon in China premiered in Houston in 1987, few knew what to make of this first stage piece by composer John Adams (yes, a namesake of the president, but no relation). With visions of Rich Little’s Nixon impersonation dancing in their heads, half the audience was expecting a shallow, satirical hit job against the 37th president. The other half was probably wondering whether an American...
When Nixon in China premiered in Houston in 1987, few knew what to make of this first stage piece by composer John Adams (yes, a namesake of the president, but no relation). With visions of Rich Little’s Nixon impersonation dancing in their heads, half the audience was expecting a shallow, satirical hit job against the 37th president. The other half was probably wondering whether an American...
Tuesday, February 1, 2011 - 12:26
