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

Science and Religion on a Collision Course at Galileo’s Trial

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 me

The Work of Art in the Age of Google

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 alr

Alexander the Great exhibition to give insight into man who conquered world

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

With a Voice and a Spirit, Triumphing Over Racism

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 schedu

The Apollo, Uptown’s Showbiz Incubator

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 o

Nixon Returns—and Hits the High Notes

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 wh

Lee Ruddin: The King’s Speech -- Where's FDR?

[Lee P. Ruddin is Roundup Editor at HNN. He lives in England.] I have always considered Colin Firth (Bridget Jones’s Diary) to be an uptight, repressed Englishman. British film director Tom Hooper (John Adams) must think similarly otherwise he would not have chosen Firth to play the part of, well, an uptight, repressed Englishman in his period drama, The King’s Speech. Granted, the former Mr. Darcy pulls off the role as the ascendant King George VI. Yet it is Geoffrey Rush, cast her

The mythos of Carlos the Jackal

Modern terrorism has shaped our world in dramatic and obscure ways: Washington’s unbridled power to read our emails and tap our phones, President Barack Obama’s extraordinary decision to kill an American citizen hiding in Yemen because his sermons have inspired terrorist attacks, the lines at airport security as federal agents confiscate such potentially lethal items as toothpaste, cuticle scissors, and Diet Coke.... “Carlos the Jackal,” as the press fawningly called Ilich Ramirez S

Ted R. Bromund: Churchill, Edward VIII, and ‘Arms and the Covenant’

[Ted R. Bromund holds a PhD in history from Yale University. He blogs for Commentary Magazine.] Christopher Hitchens doesn’t like The King’s Speech. Not because of its cinematic qualities, which he appreciates, but because of its political ones. According to him, the movie is a “a gross falsification of history” because it shows Churchill as “generally in favor of a statesmanlike solution to the crisis of the abdication” and because it neglects to portray Edward VIII as “a firm admi

Tales of Lives Richly Lived, but True?

“I have tried to keep diaries before,” John Steinbeck writes in a giant ledger book filled with his methodical script, “but they didn’t work out because of the necessity to be honest.” This particular journal, on display at the Morgan Library & Museum in a compelling exhibition that opened on Friday, “The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives,” has such a modest goal — chronicling Steinbeck’s work on “The Grapes of Wrath” — that it probably does not bend the truth too much. Bu

Christopher Hitchens: Churchill Didn't Say That

[Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution.] The King's Speech is an extremely well-made film with a seductive human interest plot, very prettily calculated to appeal to the smarter filmgoer and the latent Anglophile. But it perpetrates a gross falsification of history. One of the very few miscast actors—Timothy Spall as a woefully thin pastiche of Winston Churchill—is the exemplar of this bizarre rewriting. He

Making Hollywood Films Was Brutal, Even for Fritz Lang

MAKING movies in Hollywood has never been easy, though maybe it should have been for the Austrian genius with a monocle screwed into his right eye and a dark, forbidding Weltanschauung lodged deep in his head. But life is cruel and filmmaking can be nearly as brutal, and so it was for Fritz Lang (1890-1976). “I always fought very hard in Hollywood,” he said in 1970, sounding like the embattled veteran he became. Late in life he said that the main theme in all his movies was the “fight against destiny, against fate,” and it’s hard not to wonder if he was thinking about his own fortunes as a Hollywood director By the time Lang landed in the United States in 1934 he was a legend in Germany, his adopted homeland, where he had directed films like “Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler,” “Metropolis” and “M.” He left Germany in 1933 after his film “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse” was banned there as a threat to law and order and public safety. He liked to say that he fled Germany in one frantic evening after Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, asked Lang to run its film division. He did leave, but several months after his alleged meeting with Goebbels. But then a pulse-pounding flight to freedom, as incredible as any manufactured on a back lot, certainly sounded better, sexier, more mythological than a calculated departure.

Dramatizing Camelot

A promotional trailer for “The Kennedys,” a multimillion-dollar mini-series prepared for the History channel, suggests it will offer a sweeping inside look at the backrooms and bedrooms of that political clan. There are stylized re-enactments of the life of President John F. Kennedy and his family, and a title card that reads, “Behind the public image lies the story of an American dynasty.” But concerns about the accuracy of the story presented in “The Kennedys” led to a decision b

‘The Kennedys’ Will Still Receive Worldwide Broadcast As Producers Seek a New U.S. Home

A major Canadian broadcaster on Monday reaffirmed its plans to show “The Kennedys,” a television miniseries about that political family that was dropped by the History channel, while the project’s producers continued to seek a new American broadcaster and disputed that the miniseries was historically inaccurate. Shaw Media, a division of the Canadian conglomerate Shaw Communications, said that it will still show “The Kennedys” on an as-yet undetermined television channel in the spri

History Channel Pulls 'The Kennedys'; Says Controversial Miniseries 'Not a Fit’

In a surprise move, A&E Television Networks has canceled plans to broadcast The Kennedys, the ambitious and much-anticipated miniseries about the American political family that was set to air this spring on the History channel. “Upon completion of the production of The Kennedys, History has decided not to air the 8-part miniseries on the network,” a rep for the network tells The Hollywood Reporter in a statement. “While the film is produced and acted with the highest quality, after

Aspiring to Musical Power and Glory

To say that the 1960s folk singer Phil Ochs dreamed big is to understate the huge scope of his ambition. As recalled in Kenneth Bowser’s respectful, nonmaudlin documentary portrait, “Phil Ochs: There but for Fortune,” Ochs moved to New York in the early ’60s intending to be the best songwriter in the country. After meeting Bob Dylan, Ochs was forced to revise his opinion of his own potential to “second best.” Even before Ochs discovered folk music and left-wing politics through Ji

Thomas Doherty: The Duke and the Dude

[Thomas Doherty is a professor of American studies at Brandeis University and author of Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration (Columbia University Press, 2007).] "True grit"—once known as "sand" and not to be confused with cojones—is terse praise for the bedrock quality desired in the American male. Stoic, hard-edged, and laconic, the gruff embodiment of Hemingway's "grace under pressure" and Tom Wolfe's "the ri

Smithsonian National Museum of American History puts visitors in mind of piano king William Steinway

A new museum exhibit is striking a chord with historians and music buffs alike, offering them a glimpse inside the mind of piano-making royalty. The diary of William Steinway is now on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. The exhibit is part of a more than 20-year-long transcription project that resulted in an online archive of the 2,500-page diary, spanning from 1861 to 1896. "It's an American immigrant story that I th

Robert E. Lee on PBS: How an Engineer Became a White-Haired General

Poor Robert E. Lee. All these years later he still can’t beat Ulysses S. Grant. On Monday the PBS series “American Experience” offers its take on Lee, and the account is serviceable enough. But an earlier “American Experience” on Grant’s war years, scheduled for rebroadcast next Monday, is better. There’s not much new to be learned about either of these men, of course, so the contest largely comes down to a matter of presentation. The Lee program favors lingering shots

Reopening a House That’s Still Divided

PHILADELPHIA — The convulsive currents that roil the telling of American history have become so familiar that they now seem an inseparable part of the story itself. Here is a nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to a proposition of human equality, that, for much of its first century of life, countenanced slavery, institutionally supported it and economically profited from it. The years that followed have been marked by repair, reform and reversals; recompense, recrimination and reinterpret