Roundup: Pop Culture & the Arts ... Movies, Documentaries and Museum Exhibits

History Channel Taps Kevin Costner For Hatfield And McCoy Miniseries

The History Channel is partnering with Kevin Costner for a special miniseries chronicling the most talked about family feud of all-time. For nearly thirty years, the Hatfield's and the McCoy's shot, stabbed and burned each other alive with reckless zeal, culminating in a threatened standoff between Kentucky and West Virginia's militias. Seeing as how often the back-and-forth is referenced today, it's crazy to think the Hatfield's and the McCoy's battled it out almost one hundred and fifty years ago.

A Brief History of Blacks in Opera

People of African descent have long been involved in "classical music" -- as creators, interpreters, performers and entrepreneurs. A number of well-known black singers -- from William Warfield to Jessye Norman -- have made their mark in the rarefied world of opera. So it's no surprise that even in the age of hip-hop, young African Americans are a growing presence on opera stages around the world.

Oh, the Stuff Those Lions Guard

“One of the five greatest public libraries in the world” is the boast made at a new exhibition celebrating the centennial of the New York Public Library’s august building on Fifth Avenue. And if we are inclined to question the claim, it is only because the institution’s distinctiveness is scarcely suggested by putting it in a class with the Library of Congress, the British Library, the National Library of France and the Russian State Library.

Artist makes high-priced sculptures from old books

Atlanta artist Brian Dettmer creates memorable works of art by slicing, whittling and tearing into books. Mark Strassmann reports on Dettmer's vision for a vanishing form of art. 

An Explorer of Black History’s Uncharted Terrain

FOR some people, filmmaking is a lifelong dream. For Stanley Nelson, it began as more of a situational thing, a response to time and place. The time was the late 1960s and early ’70s, the place to be avoided was Vietnam, the refuge was film school at the City University of New York. “It was kind of my motive to stay in school no matter what, you know what I’m saying?” 

Aside From the Vampires, Lincoln Film Seeks Accuracy

EDGARD, La. — Mary Todd Lincoln, in shimmering evening wear, calls to her husband. They are late. A gaunt, black-clad president strides to join her in a horse-drawn carriage bound for Ford’s Theater. The rest is history. But not the usual kind.

A Tale of Nanjing Atrocities That Spares No Brutal Detail

Two terrible faces stare out from “City of Life and Death,” a fictionalized telling of the Rape of Nanjing, a pair of indelible bookends for this anguished film. The first belongs to Lu (Liu Ye), who, with hundreds of other soldiers, has been rounded up by invading Japanese troops amid a frenzy of violence. The close-up of Lu’s impassive face locked in unspoken emotion floods the screen.

Making the Holocaust the Lesson on All Evils

LOS ANGELES — Before you are submerged within the museum’s theatrically darkened central galleries, before you learn how the cafes and intellectual life of the Weimar Republic gradually gave way to the annihilationist racial fantasies Hitler outlined in “Mein Kampf” — before, that is, you experience a variation of the Holocaust narrative with its wrenching genocidal climax — there are other trials a visitor to the Museum of Tolerance here must pass through.

Treasures Pose Ethics Issues for Smithsonian

Amid mounting calls by scientists for the Smithsonian Institution to cancel a planned exhibition of Chinese artifacts salvaged from a shipwreck, the institution will hold a meeting on Monday afternoon to hear from critics. The contents of the exhibition, “Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds,” were mined by a commercial treasure hunter and not according to academic methods, a practice that many archaeologists deplore, equating it with modern-day piracy. In an April 5 letter to the top official at the Smithsonian, G.

Albert Auster and Leonard Quart: Hollywood in Iraq

Albert Auster and Leonard Quart are the authors of American Film and Society since 1945. This article is adapted from that book’s fourth edition, which will be published by Praeger this summer.IN TIM O’Brien’s National Book Award–winning novel Going After Cacciato, a GI says of the Vietnam War, “Honest it was such a swell war they should make it a movie.” The sarcasm in that statement applies just as well to our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—wars that have seen few triumphs, and that elicited public protest and political criticism. Hollywood, which never had a problem depicting America’s past wars, especially the First and Second World Wars, has had difficulty representing our most recent military struggles.

Liverpool and the American Civil War display and trail at Merseyside Maritime Museum

It is protocol that U.S. presidents visit London ahead of travelling elsewhere in the UK. The commander-in-chief, more often than not, visits places such as Buckingham Palace and Downing Street on the diplomatic tourist trail, before venturing further afield – into the real heartlands of Britain, if you like. Woodrow Wilson was the first American leader to travel to the UK as a guest of the Royal Family, in December 1918, and took much more in than just the capital; he boarded the

TV review: On PBS, ‘Rediscovering Alexander Hamilton’ means kickin’ it old school

Just what we need after the federal machine’s near-death experience last week: a documentary about Alexander Hamilton that turns out to be a compellingly loopy exercise in Founding Father vogue, fixating on the life and mind of the nation’s first Treasury secretary, who, among other things, devised a credit-based American economy that turned us into the most impressive army of borrowers and shopaholics the world has ever known. Desperate to keep the viewer’s attention and set itsel

Investing in a Conspiracy of a Past Century

JOE RICKETTS has a simple objective for his new production company: He wants you to go to his movies and then talk about them. “I really like the idea of people seeing a movie and then visiting about it, having cocktails or dinner and talking about the movie,” he said. “ What about this part here? What did you think about that?’ I think that’s fun.” Given that Mr. Ricketts, the 69-year-old founder and former chief executive of TD Ameritrade, built a fortune getting people to change

Machine Age Poet, Born in Revolution, Stifled Under Stalin

IN many ways the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov (1896-1954) was an artist of his time. A kindred spirit of the Constructivist artists who thrived in the wake of the 1917 October Revolution only to be stifled by the Stalinist policies of the 1930s, Vertov was a futurist at heart, a poet of the machine age. For a filmmaker in the reborn Russia the thrill of the new was palpable. Vertov, who saw theory and practice as inseparable, sought to uncover what made the young medium of moving images distinc

Owning George Washington: The Auction

Growing up in the tiny town of Ephrata, Wash., Tom Washington and his older brother Nat, blood relatives of George (yes, that George) were surrounded by family lore. There were more tangible connections as well: family papers going back to 1662, tools George Washington used in his early years as a surveyor, even bits of his coffin. Now, after generations of safekeeping, the family is selling its treasures at auction starting Thursday, creating a buzz of excitement among Americana experts.

A Reality Check for Steinbeck and Charley

In the fall of 1960 an ailing, out-of-sorts John Steinbeck, pretty much depleted as a novelist, decided that his problem was he had lost touch with America. He outfitted a three-quarter-ton pickup truck as a sort of land yacht and set off from his home in Sag Harbor, N.Y., with his French poodle, Charley, to drive cross-country. The idea was that he would travel alone, stay at campgrounds and reconnect himself with the country by talking to the locals he met along the way. Ste

'The Kennedys' Mini-Series: Sorting Fact from Fiction

When the controversial mini-series "The Kennedys," starring Katie Holmes and Greg Kinnear, debuts Sunday night, viewers will finally get a chance to see what all the fuss has been about. In January, History Channel dropped the $25 million production it had optioned two years earlier, saying in a statement, "After viewing the final product in its totality, we have concluded this dramatic interpretation is not a fit for the History brand."... Much lik

A Critique of Clint Eastwood’s ‘J. Edgar’ Movie

Larry Cohen has issues — 17 pages’ worth — with “J. Edgar,” the movie now being shot here by Clint Eastwood for Imagine Entertainment and Warner Brothers with Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role as J. Edgar Hoover. Mr. Cohen is a writer and director who was in the news when his sister, the publicist Ronni Chasen, was murdered last year, and whose film “The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover” was released in 1977 with Broderick Crawford in the lead. He has now compiled a lengthy

Melynda Nuss: Theater Review: A Weekend with Pablo Picasso

[Melynda Nuss is a writer and an Associate Professor of Romantic Literature and Drama at the University of Texas - Pan American. She last wrote on the film The King's Speech for Culturekiosque.] HOUSTON, TEXAS, 28 MARCH 2011 — What happens when an artist gets old? It is a question that we’re bound to hear more often, as each generation of artists lives longer than the next. If so, Herbert Siguenza’s A Weekend with Pablo Picasso, now having its premiere courtesy of the New Play Initi

‘The Kennedys’: After the Debate, the Debut

When the first episode of “The Kennedys,” the costly and controversial mini-series about that American political dynasty, makes its debut on Sunday, a chapter in television history will be closed, but a debate about the balance between accuracy and creative license in historical dramas will be renewed. Arriving on television shortly after an Oscars race between “The King’s Speech” and “The Social Network,” movies that put their own spin on real-life events, “The Kennedys” employs m