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

Benecio del Toro’s new film about Che glorifies the communist mass murderer

“I’d like to dedicate this to the man himself, Che Guevara!” announced Benicio del Toro this May, as he received a “best actor” award for his starring role in Che, a reverent new film about the communist revolutionary. As the crowd at the Cannes Film Festival erupted in thunderous ovation, the Puerto Rico-born actor gushed that “I wouldn't be here without Che Guevara, and through all the awards the movie gets you'll have to pay your respects to the man!" But some stubbornly ref

Wilde's earliest letter to Bosie found after 50 years

A collection of letters and manuscripts by Oscar Wilde, seemingly lost for more than 50 years have been rediscovered by academics. The nine manuscripts and four letters that illuminate the life and work of the celebrated writer, dramatist, wit, and self-proclaimed "lord of language", were donated to The Morgan Library.

Race to South Pole in Cpt Scott's footsteps launched

Adventurers including Ben Fogle and James Cracknell have begun training in earnest for a race to the South Pole following in the footsteps of Captain Scott. The Amundsden Omega 3 South Pole Race represents the first international race over the Antarctic since the defeat of Capt Scott by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen almost 100 years ago. Olympic rowing gold medallist Cracknell, television presenter Fogle and their UK teammates will race a Norwegian team, among others f

Shakespeare and Dickens brought to life on Nintendo DS games consoles

Nintendo, the Japanese video games has announced a deal with the publisher HarperCollins to make the classics available to read on its DS games consoles. The unlikely partnership means that the names of computer game characters such as Donkey Kong and Mario will sit alongside the likes of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters on the hand-held gadgets. The 100 Classic Book Collection will cost about £20 and will be available initially only in Britain. However, if the collab

Winslet nude scenes 'trivialise' Holocaust

THE Oscar aspirations of Kate Winslet, the British star, have been threatened by critics’ claims that nudity in her latest film, The Reader, has “trivialised” the story it tells about the Nazi Holocaust. Winslet, who plays a former concentration camp guard with a voracious sexual appetite, was believed to be a certainty for her sixth Oscar nomination next month until an attack by Charlie Finch, an influential New York critic, spread across the internet and raised doubts among Oscar

New museum honours Parachute Regiment

PRINCE Charles will open a new £3m state-of-the-art new museum recording the names and exploits of all the soldiers who served in the Parachute Regiment since World War Two. The museum at the Imperial War Museum’s site at Duxford, Cambs, will have an online database detailing the regiment’s operations in a series of wars from Arnhem to Afghanistan. Called ParaData the system has taken several years to collate and includes thousands of names and details of airborne sol

The Most Dangerous Man in Publishing (Grove's Barney Rosset)

On a nondescript block south of New York's Union Square, up a dreary staircase and through a black-barred gate, there is a long, narrow room that might be mistaken for a very small museum of literary counterculture. On one wall hangs two rows of iconic posters: Paul Davis's print of Che Guevara's proud head; a photograph of the authors Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg marching at the 1968 Democratic National Convention; a portrait of Bobby Kennedy. Loose-leaf binders of corre

Memories of pain in Saddam Hussein's house of horror

An iron cage shaped like a man and used to torture unsuccessful athletes; bloodstained nooses; battle plans for the extermination of rebellious Kurds: these are just a few of the exhibits to go on show at Saddam Hussein’s house of horrors. The museum, which opens in Baghdad in the new year, chronicles the crimes committed by Saddam’s regime and is designed to send a clear message that even the most feared dictator cannot hope to evade justice. Its creator, Judge Arif

Charge: Smithsonian Honors Racist Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger — On Your Dime

In October 2008, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery opened its “Women of Our Time: Twentieth Century Photographs” exhibit. The collection includes a broad range of history-making women, including First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln and runner Marion Jones. Journalist, author, former ambassador and congresswoman Clare Booth Luce is one of the few conservatives to make the cut. The exhibit is intended to honor women who are or were “significant figures in t

National Academy Sells Two Hudson River School Paintings to Bolster Its Finances

The National Academy, the venerable artist-governed museum and school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, has quietly sold two Hudson River School paintings from its collection to shore up its finances and enable it to show more of its holdings on a consistent basis, the academy’s officials said on Friday. The sale of the paintings, Frederic Edwin Church’s “Scene on the Magdalene” from 1854 and Sanford Robinson Gifford’s “Mount Mansfield, Vermont” from 1859, was sharply criticized

Frost/Nixon (2008) (NYT Review)

It’s twinkle versus glower in the big-screen edition of Peter Morgan’s theatrical smackdown “Frost/Nixon.” Directed by Ron Howard and adapted by Mr. Morgan, the film revisits the televised May 1977 face-off between the toothy British personality David Frost and the disgraced former president Richard M. Nixon three years after he left office, trimming their nearly 30-hour armchair-to-armchair spar into a tidy 122-minute narrative of loss and redemption that, at least from this ringside seat, woul

Dorothy Sterling, 95, Children’s Author, Dies. Wrote about black history.

Dorothy Sterling, whose more than 35 books for children and adults included some of the first nonfiction works about black history for young readers, notably “Freedom Train,” about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, died on Monday at her home in Wellfleet, Mass. She was 95. The death was confirmed by her daughter, Anne Fausto-Sterling. A New Yorker with a passion for trees, flowers and bugs, Ms. Sterling found many of her subjects while following up on questio

Rock painting reveals unknown bat

The team thinks the rock art from Australia's Kimberley region could date to the height of the last Ice Age - about 20-25,000 years ago. The painting depicts eight roosting fruit bats - also called flying foxes. They have features that do not match any Australian bats alive today, suggesting the art depicts a species that is now extinct. The findings have been published online in the scholarly journal Antiquity. The bats would not have live

Illuminating the Dark Ages (Metropolitan Museum/Exhibit)

Of the three great artistic histories that extend for many centuries, and galleries, from the Great Hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Byzantine-Medieval epic is the most discreet. The Egyptian and the Greek and Roman wings are signaled by highly visible statues and tombs that start waving hello almost before you clear security. In contrast, the story of art starting in Bronze-Age Europe lies mostly out of sight in galleries that lie beside and behind the Grand Staircase. T

Iraq bids to stop Christie's sale of ancient earrings

They were earrings that literally could have been worn by a queen. The neo-Assyrian jewelry, 9,000 to 10,000 years old, is Lot 215 in an auction of ancient art and antiquities to be held at Christie's in New York next week. They are expected to fetch up to $65,000. But Iraqi authorities say they might have belonged to the treasures of Nimrud, excavated by an Iraqi team in 1989, just after the devastating Iran-Iraq War. They have been publicly exhibited only twice – the second time f

Odetta

In 1963, my family returned to the United States after my father’s 13-year stint as a foreign correspondent for this newspaper. I was born in New Delhi and had lived in Austria, Poland, Switzerland and Japan. I was 7 years old and had spent a total of about a month in America. Everything about this home I never knew was strange and fascinating, but nothing more than the music. I had a red plastic transistor radio on which I obsessively listened to the Beatles. I was also obsessed wi

Bush should go see Frost/Nixon for a pick-me-up

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 ac

The billion-dollar scrapbooking industry may be cheesy, but ...

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 sh

Berlin Film Festival to Showcase Cold War Flicks

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

So long, farewell von Trapp hotel

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. Himml