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

TV review: HBO's 'Wartorn: 1861-2010' explores battles off the field

"Wartorn," HBO's depressing yet revealing Veterans Day exploration of post-traumatic stress disorders as experienced by American soldiers throughout history, carries a telling subtitle: "1861-2010." Sending men and women off to war has been a consistent way of derailing our national mental well-being over generations. In the name of winning our freedoms -- to use the patriotic parlance -- we get back a lot of messed-up people and then almost cruelly ignore their

Kevin Brownlow helped spread the word on silent film era

For the first time in its history, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is presenting one of its coveted annual honorary awards to a film preservationist. Kevin Brownlow, the revered British film historian, documentarian, author and preservationist, was chosen by the academy's Board of Governors for his "wide and devoted chronicling of the cinematic parade." "He is such a global ambassador for film restoration and film history," says Caroline Frick, cu

Brazil’s Best, Restored and Ready for a 21st-Century Audience

The French film critic Georges Sadoul called it “an unknown masterpiece” and once flew all the way to Brazil, in vain, in hopes of seeing a complete version. Orson Welles, in Brazil in the early 1940s to make a movie of his own, did view it in its entirety and pronounced the experience “fabulous.” More recently, both David Bowie and Caetano Veloso have also promoted it. Over the years, the Brazilian experimental silent film “Limite,” made in 1930 by the director Mário Peixoto, has

Ansel Adams or Not? More Twists

In the beginning, there was just Rick Norsigian, a California man who announced in July that he believed that he had purchased “lost negatives” of Ansel Adams for $45 at a garage sale. His art dealer put the value of the find at $200 million, and the story made news around the world. Then an 87-year-old woman surfaced to say that she had three prints that looked a lot like Mr. Norsigian’s images — one was hanging in her bathroom — and that they had been shot, she said,

Why tales of Bonnie Prince Charlie still have an edge

Made in Germany in the 18th century it features, near the hilt, the legends "Prosperity to Schottland" and "End the Union". The weapon is part of the "Rebels With a Cause" exhibition in Holyrood that examines the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 and the influence they had on the history of Scotland as well as the wider world. The sword is part of a fascinating display that is also the harbinger of a series of lectures on the Jacobites a

Portraits of Hollywood’s Founding Power Players

Those of us who hold Turner Classic Movies dear — who consider it the one indispensable channel among the 200 or 500 or 1,000 snaking into our televisions — don’t necessarily watch it very often. It can be enough to know it’s there, commercial-free and aspect-ratio-conscious, showing a silent movie in the wee hours of every Monday morning or classing up Halloween with “The Leopard Man” and “Cat People” (Jacques Tourneur, 1942, as if you had to ask). That may represent food for the soul, but it’s not much of a business model for TCM. So you really can’t complain when the channel does something a little different to drum up publicity, exploiting the finite resource of its movie library — as in the mostly dreary 31 Days of Oscar programming stunt each February — or creating its own content, like original documentaries about Chuck Jones or Clint Eastwood. Or when it does something a whole lot different, like “Moguls & Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood,” a seven-week series (beginning Monday night) that represents the channel’s most ambitious venture yet into original programming.

Jack Hamilton: Robert Plant's Second Act

[Jack Hamilton is a writer and student in the History of American Civilization program at Harvard University.] If Scott Fitzgerald was right and American lives are bereft of second acts (and somewhere he tires of hearing that quoted), British rock stars have eagerly picked up our slack. From the cockroachish longevity of the Rolling Stones and The Who to the tireless re-makings of David Bowie and Elvis Costello to the lucrative rushes to the Starbucksian middlebrow by Elton John and

Above It All: Tracing BP’s Imperious History

...As “The Spill,” a documentary that is a joint presentation of “Frontline” and ProPublica, so compellingly details, the company’s history of flagrantly violating safety standards made lethal personal injuries and horrific accidents practically inevitable. The film (to be shown on Tuesday on PBS) is an old-school, dig-deep production that could have been improved upon only if it had been longer. An hour somehow seems insufficient.... “The Spill” travels back, looking a

Martin Morse Wooster: Sci-Fi Conservatism

[Martin Morse Wooster, a former editor of The Wilson Quarterly and The American Enterprise, frequently reviews science fiction and fantasy.] Ask a science-fiction fan who the three greatest writers of the 20th century were and you’ll start an argument that will last all day, but the consensus remains that they were Isaac Asimov, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert A. Heinlein. Clarke kept politics out of his novels. Asimov was a devoutly liberal Democrat; liberal New York Times column

Abraham’s Progeny, and Their Texts at NY Public Library

The sweep of the new exhibition at the New York Public Library — “Three Faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam” — is stunning. It stretches from a Bible found in a monastery in coastal Brittany that was sacked by the Vikings in the year 917, to a 1904 lithograph showing the original Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue. It encompasses both an elaborately decorated book of 20th-century Coptic Christian readings and a modest 19th-century printing of the Gospels in the African language Grebo. There are Ko

Mary Elizabeth Williams: It's Time to Release Looney Tunes' Racist Cartoons

[Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream."] Nobody ever accused Bugs Bunny and company of being the most culturally sensitive pack of cartoon animals. Even their taste in opera ran toward the controversial – what was up with all the Wagner? Yet the recent rumors that Warner might at last be releasing Looney Tunes' and Merrie Melodies' notorious "Censored Eleven" vintage

The Dawn of Writing at the Oriental Institute

CHICAGO — One of the stars of the Oriental Institute’s new show, “Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond,” is a clay tablet that dates from around 3200 B.C. On it, written in cuneiform, the script language of ancient Sumer in Mesopotamia, is a list of professions, described in small, repetitive impressed characters that look more like wedge-shape footprints than what we recognize as writing. In fact “it is among the earliest examples of writing

Blackface and Bigotry, Finely Tuned

NO star actors. (Check.) A complex cast of characters. (Check.) A plot based on a low moment in American history. (Check.) Songs that satirize racism, anti-Semitism, and execution by electric chair. (Check.) And all told by resurrecting one of theater’s most controversial storytelling devices, the minstrel show. (Check.) Has there ever been a new Broadway musical facing a more daunting checklist of challenges than “The Scottsboro Boys,” which dares to set an infamous 1930s Alabama r

A Multitasking Nun in Medieval Germany

“Vision,” Margarethe von Trotta’s sympathetic imagining of the life of the 12th-century Benedictine nun Hildegard von Bingen, opens with a prologue that establishes a contemporary secular distance from the film’s devotional medieval ethos. The members of a millennialist sect anticipating their last night on earth prostrate themselves in an abbey overnight only to awaken in the bright morning sun to discover that the world hasn’t ended. The film is the most recent of several collabor

Tom Shales: The Media Making a Mess of Sex on the Airwaves

[Tom Shales is the style columnist of the WaPo.] ...Complaining about sex and nudity on TV is almost as old as the medium itself. A primeval diva named Dagmar was famous and infamous for the cleavage she brandished on an early precursor of NBC's "Tonight Show" -- she was early TV's response to Mae West of early talkies. Even prim Faye Emerson, who traveled from panel show to panel show, was chided for occasionally showing too much skin via one of her "gowns."

Faith and Politics, a Rocky Romance

NEARLY 15 years ago, while developing a documentary about early Christianity, the filmmaker Marilyn Mellowes came upon an unexpected version of the Gospels. This one had been assembled by Thomas Jefferson. During his presidency, he had literally cut and pasted the standard biblical account into a text more to his liking, omitting Jesus’ virgin birth, resurrection and supernatural miracles while maintaining the ethical teachings. Having always considered Jefferson “cerebral and sligh

Jaime O'Neill: James Dean, the Epitome of Cool

[Jaime O'Neill is a writer in Northern California.] James Dean died 55 years ago today, killed in a dramatic car wreck east of Paso Robles that became the stuff of legend. He was 24 when he died, and he inadvertently managed to take a lot of my generation with him, creating a cultural template for the risks we should take with our own lives. Had he lived, he'd be 80 in February. I was 13 when I first saw him in the movies, and his films offered me an introductory course

"Nuremberg": A lost war-crimes documentary lives again

Maybe the title of the documentary "Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today" sounds a little pedantic and old-fashioned. That's because the "today" in question is not, like, today but 1948, when this film was completed by a United States military team and shown in occupied Germany. A compact and devastating record of the history-making trial -- held in the symbolic birthplace of the Nazi Party -- that held two dozen leading Nazi officials to account for the crimes of the Holocaust an

Jed Perl: Is this the best MoMA can do for Abstract Expressionism?

“Abstract Expressionist New York,” the huge new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, is three-quarters brain dead. That is better than entirely brain dead. My advice is to begin with the strongest material, which you will find in galleries on the second and third floors at MoMA. Walking through “Rock Paper Scissors” and “’Ideas Not Theories’: Artists and The Club, 1942–1962”—with their excitable mix of works in multiple media by midcentury painters, sculptors, and architects—you can feel the

William Gladstone bicentenary show closing in Liverpool (UK)

Last year was a big one for significant bicentenaries, with Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln, William Ewart Gladstone and Alfred, Lord Tennyson all born in 1809. Summer university conferences aside, however, it is the three-month long show opened on Tuesday 29th December – 200 years on from the date of the birth of the three times Chancellor of the Exchequer and four times British Prime Minister, William Gladstone, which concerns us here. The free exhibition is staged at St George’s