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

Muscovite Lives, Entangled in History

MOSCOW — The Meyersons of Moscow are not oligarchs or ex-K.G.B. agents, gangsters or alcoholics. They are a pair of public school teachers who have little in common with the stock characters often depicted in tales of this land. They disdain Communism, but warmly recall childhoods in the 1970s. They bristle at what they believe Vladimir V. Putin has done to Russia, but don’t deny that things are far better now. Their ambivalence about their country’s standing, nearly two decades af

Midcentury collectivism on Long Island

One of the good things about art history is that it is always being rewritten. In the case of the New York School, that self-described Greatest Generation of midcentury artists, newer histories have moved past the singular, heroic-figure narrative to emphasize the era’s inherent collectivism and internationalism, and the presence of women — and not just as wives or lovers. “Esteban Vicente: Portrait of the Artist,” at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, starts with one artist, bu

Movie on Lincoln assassination has second life in D.C. crime museum

Hollywood producer Webster Stone entered the world of museum exhibition creation with the adrenaline rush he brings to his movies. "We wanted to break it down just like a movie. There's the conspiracy. There's the attacks. There's the arrests," said Stone, standing by the product of his venture into static exhibitions. He quickly sails to a display case. "Here's the exact replica of the .44-caliber derringer Booth used. There's even the pineapple emblem on the side,&q

Security, sabotage, spies at Constitution Center

PHILADELPHIA – It was one of the worst acts of terrorism in U.S. history, a deadly deed that filled the New York City sky with smoke and debris, thrust the nation into war, prompted restrictive new laws and intensified hostility toward foreigners. Yet it happened nearly a century before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, on Black Tom Island, a munitions depot in New York Harbor sabotaged by German agents and American collaborators in 1916. This and other examples of domestic t

New Film Based on Nixon Home Movies

During the Watergate investigation, the FBI confiscated more than 3700 hours of Nixon's secret tape recordings. But the FBI also confiscated 204 reels of Super-8 film. The confiscated films were home movies made by Chief of Staff H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, Chief Domestic Advisor John Ehrlichman, Special Assistant to the President Dwight Chapin, and Deputy Assistant Larry Higby. Everyone knows about the secret tapes because they forced Nixon to resign. But the home movies were filed away

'Decadent' Russian Art, Still Under the Boot’s Shadow

MOSCOW — Later this week moviegoers in New York will learn the strange story of Igor V. Savitsky, an obsessive collector credited with saving tens of thousands of avant-garde artworks from Soviet authorities who forced artists toward Socialist Realism in the 1930s. “The Desert of Forbidden Art,” an American-made documentary, will try to draw international attention to Mr. Savitsky’s life’s work: a museum in the parched hinterland of Uzbekistan that is home to one of the world’s larg

A behind-the-scenes look at Nazi propaganda

In "A Film Unfinished," Yael Hersonski turns something evil into a work of education and remembrance. The Israeli director takes an uncompleted Nazi propaganda film shot in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II and shows how the original filmmakers staged scenes intended to serve their anti-Semitic propaganda purposes. Yet these German filmmakers, whose identities remain lost in time, also provided later generations with rare views of Nazi oppression and barbarism. "A

Jonathan Jones: Do Artists Need to be Accurate to Recreate History?

[Jonathan Jones is an art critic for the Guardian.] The royal film in the news is The King's Speech, and so – as ever the first with film – I have been catching up with the 2008 version of the novel The Other Boleyn Girl. Tom Hooper's award-winner has been accused of playing fast and loose with historical fact. But the earlier film, starring Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson, manages to virtually edit out a rather large historical fact: the Reformation.... I was su

Following controversy, mummies at Penn Museum remain objects of mystery

The Beauty of Xiaohe, a mummy from the torrid deserts of western China, had a long but uneventful trip to Philadelphia. For almost a year, she lay on view in museums in California and Texas, without controversy and without much more public notice than that which might be expected to greet an almost-4,000-year-old, perfectly preserved human being. But when she got to Philadelphia, something changed. As she lay in a crate, surrounded by an astoundingly rich trove of cultural objects

What If? In Next Novel, Stephen King Imagines a Chance To Alter the JFK Presidency

In early 2002, Stephen King said he was written out and was thinking of retiring. Some retirement. He has since published at least four novels, a couple of story collections and has collaborated on a monthly comic book. On Wednesday, Scribner, his publisher, announced that in the fall it will bring out yet another King novel, called “11/23/63.” The new book is 1,000 pages long — enormous by most standards, but cruising length for Mr. King — and is apparently a “counterfactual,” a no

The ghosts of ancient Afghanistan

In 1971, a team of French archaeologists discovered a sculpture in fragments at a site by the river Oxus in northern Afghanistan. It was restored and placed in the National Museum in Kabul. Then, a decade ago, it was smashed all over again, this time deliberately – by the Taliban, who were also demolishing the colossal Buddhas at Bamiyan, in the centre of the country. Those vast masterpieces of religious art are gone for ever, but this wonder of nudity was luckier. Afghan experts have now pieced

Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World

Late in April 2004, there was a tense gathering in a bank vault beneath the Presidential Palace at Kabul. This was the moment when it would finally be discovered whether the greatest archaeological treasures of ancient Afghanistan had survived over two decades of anarchy, civil war, looting and deliberate iconoclastic destruction. Present, in addition to a scrum of diplomats, press and officials were the director of the Kabul Museum, the Minister of Culture and the Russian archaeologist who had

David Thomson: Why "The King's Speech" Will Win the Oscar

[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 har

Marshall v. Bias: A Life Revealed in Anecdotes

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 arriva

Ralph Frammolino: J. Paul Getty: Rich Man, Poor Man

[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

Film review: "Of Gods and Men"

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

From the Ashes: Reviving Ancient Works in Berlin

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 remi

Ben Heineman Jr.: The Portrait and the Nazis

[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

Bob Herbert: Reagan and Reality

[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 col

Ridley Scott and The History Channel to Develop American Civil War Documentary GETTYSBURG

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 fo