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

'Mao's Last Dancer' tiptoes through forgotten history

Sometimes it takes an outside perspective to remind Americans how good they have it. Australian-born filmmaker Bruce Beresford and a Chinese-born former ballet dancer named Li Cunxin are happy to oblige. On Friday, Beresford's latest film, Mao's Last Dancer, based on Cunxin's best-selling 2003 autobiography, arrives in U.S. theaters, following a successful opening last year in Australia and a fistful of nominations and awards. Besides spectacular dancing and music, the film packs an

NYT: Review of "Army of Crime"

The closest person to a protagonist in the gripping historical mosaic “Army of Crime” is the eminent Armenian poet Missak Manouchian (Simon Abkarian). A militant Communist and hero of the French Resistance, executed by the Nazis in 1944, he is the noblest figure in a sprawling, semifictional movie that has enough characters to fill an entire neighborhood. As the story begins in 1941 in occupied Paris, Germany has just invaded Russia. Manouchian, along with fellow Communists, is rou

Yes, Modern Celebrities are Sleazy, but Not Originals

It is tempting to view “Jersey Shore” or any Kardashian sister as the knell of civilization’s end. The second season of “Jersey Shore,” which takes place in Miami, is even more popular than the first, and “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” is returning on Sunday for a fifth season, carrying in tow a spinoff about publicists, “The Spin Crowd.” There is no need to panic. Reality shows that exalt indolent, loud-mouthed exhibitionists may seem like almost bibli

An Israeli Finds New Meanings in a Nazi Film

For almost half a century, an unfinished Nazi propaganda film of the Warsaw Ghetto, simply titled “Das Ghetto” and discovered by East German archivists after the war, was used by scholars and historians as a flawed but authentic record of ghetto life. Shot over 30 days in May 1942 — just two months before deportations to the Treblinka extermination camp would begin — this hourlong silent film juxtaposed random scenes of Jews enjoying various luxuries with images of profound suffering.

Caravaggio’s Sensual Art Is Baroque Film Noir: Martin Gayford

Michelangelo Merisi (1571-1610), better known as Caravaggio, stands a good chance of becoming the preferred old master of the 21st century. Research by art historian Philip Sohm shows that in recent decades more has been written about him than that other Michelangelo (Buonarroti), previously top of art pop charts. A steady stream of Caravaggio news stories appears, intensifying this year to mark the 400th anniversary of his death. In June, Italian anthropologists claime

Storied Trove of 1930’s Jazz Is Acquired by Museum

For decades jazz cognoscenti have talked reverently of “the Savory Collection.” Recorded from radio broadcasts in the late 1930s by an audio engineer named William Savory, it was known to include extended live performances by some of the most honored names in jazz — but only a handful of people had ever heard even the smallest fraction of that music, adding to its mystique. After 70 years that wait has now ended. This year the National Jazz Museum in Harlem acquired the entire set o

“John Sergeant on Tracks of Empire” on BBC TV

Michael Palin hit the headlines last year for making a relatively modest defence of the British Empire. The former Monty Python star said that Brits should stop apologising for their colonial past. Palin had just taken up the role of president of the Royal Geographic Society and, in an interview in October’s Geographical Magazine, he said: “If we say that all of our past involvement with the world was bad and wicked and wrong, I think we’re doing ourselves a great disservice.” The

Vietnamese Voices Against a Whir of War

In slumberous mid-August thousands of visitors fidget and drift through the Museum of Modern Art, finding almost everything worth photographing and almost nothing worth more than a point-and-shoot glance. But in one gallery — basically a wide glorified corridor — people tend to stop, focus, even settle down in front of a three-channel video by the Vietnamese-American artist Dinh Q. Le projected across a long wall. Titled “The Farmers and the Helicopters,” the video is partly and spe

A Long, Hot Summer in Mississippi That Still Burns

“Neshoba: The Price of Freedom,” a documentary by Micki Dickoff and Tony Pagano, focuses on one of the most notorious and terrible incidents of the 1960s and on its long aftermath.... But the dramatic heart of the film consists of scenes that, in plain moviegoing terms, transform “Neshoba” from an earnest courtroom chronicle into something much more fascinating and troubling. These are interviews with Mr. Killen himself. A member of the Philadelphia Coalition observes that a lot of

A.J. Goldmann: A New Film Examines Footage Staged by the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto

[A.J. Goldmann is a writer based in Berlin. His articles on art and culture have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Forward.] Months before the Warsaw Ghetto was to be liquidated, Joseph Goebbels commissioned a documentary about Ghetto life. The project was never completed, but the surviving raw footage forms the backbone of a new documentary, Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished, which opens in New York and Los Angeles next week and nationwide thereafter

Johnny Carson, Now Quipping Online

In one of his last “Tonight Show” monologues, in 1992, Johnny Carson informed his audience that a virus had struck the program’s computers, wiping out “29 years of our writers’ material.” “Three of the best jokes you’ve ever heard in your life,” he said. “Gone forever.” Now, nearly two decades later, that gag and more than 3,500 hours of Carson’s “Tonight Show” have been preserved digitally and will begin making their way onto the Web. On Wednesday the Cars

Nathan Gardels: Oliver Stone on Wall Street, Gordon Gekko, and Hugo Chávez

Oliver Stone is the director of some of Hollywood’s most famous films, from “Platoon” to “Wall Street” to “JFK.” Last week he sat down in the Los Angeles offices of his production company, IXTLAN, to talk with Global Viewpoint Network editor Nathan Gardels about his recent documentary, “South of the Border,” and his upcoming release, “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.”"South of the Border"Nathan Gardels: As you show in your recent documentary, “South of the Border,” US diplomacy and the American media have reacted with general hostility to the empowerment of the poor and indigenous in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay and, to some extent, in Brazil. Why is that?Oliver Stone: I suppose it comes from the old imperial impulse of the US toward Latin America going back to the Monroe Doctrine, Teddy Roosevelt, the protection of American business interests, and support for military dictators throughout the cold war. The US remains hostile to anyone on the left coming to power in their “backyard,” anyone who thinks the resources of a country belong to its people.

King Tut’s Chariot Arrives in Times Square

As 18th-Dynasty pharaohs’ chariots go, the one that arrived in Times Square on Friday night was not a Mercedes or a Bentley. There was no gold leaf or fine animal-fur interior or richly appointed cartouche-ing. It was more like a teenager’s dragster stripped down for speed, just a lightweight frame of tamarisk, elm and birch, missing only its two-horsepower engine. Late on Sunday night, in a subterranean exhibition space on West 44th Street, a group of gloved art handlers — under th

Todd Boyd: Miles Davis: Truly the Birth of the Cool

[Dr. Todd Boyd is the Katherine and Frank Price Endowed Chair for the Study of Race and Popular Culture and professor of critical studies in the USC School of Cinematic Arts. His blog is Notorious Ph.D.] Would it be proper to describe Mad Men as ''cool''? Well, yes and no, but before answering that question, let's ponder the often misunderstood properties of cool. Cool has a history, believe it or not. It is the lack of historical knowledge about cool's origins that has

What lies beneath: the fakes, mistakes and discoveries at the National Gallery

Scientists working at the National Gallery found that Woman at a Window, a painting of a girl with neat dark hair and a steady gaze, contained a secret. Hidden under layers of varnish and paint was the original painting of the same woman, only this time she has a suggestive sideways glance and was dressed in a more revealing bodice. The painting is featured in a new exhibition, Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes & Discoveries, which reveals the stories behind more t

At National Gallery, Edvard Munch's 'Prints' reveal artist's methodical process

With all his "Scream"-ing and "Vampire"-ism, we tend to think of Edvard Munch as the Neurotic from Norway. What's harder to recognize is that those direct effusions from a tortured soul are, in fact, craftily organized constructions worked out over years, sometimes decades, until Munch had exhausted the options they offered.... An important new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, titled "Edvard Munch: Master Prints," explores a dozen or so emotiv

Our Mysterious Stranger, Mark Twain

Mark Twain is surely America’s best-known author. It is tempting to say he is also the country’s favorite writer, but that can’t be true. Too many grandparents have given too many copies of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or The Prince and the Pauper to too many grandchildren, who then went about for the rest of childhood under a cloud of undischarged obligation while those books sat on numberless shelves, unread. If that didn’t finish off any appetite for Twain, there was always the high-school ri

Italian artist sparks controversy with Hitler and Spiderman pictures

An Italian artist has sparked reactions from fury to bemusement by including Spiderman and Hitler among his subjects the bizarre creation. Giuseppe Veneziano's show entitled 'The Zeitgeist' opened this month in Pietrasanta, Tuscany, Italy, featuring among others a work featuring Hitler as a child cuddling up to the Virgin Mary. The picture titled 'The Virgin of the Third Reich' is just one of many paintings featuring famous figures including Jesus Christ and Pope Bened

Antoine du Rocher: "Inception" is a Derivative Feature that Stands on the Shoulders of Giants

[Antoine du Rocher is Managing Editor of Culturekiosque.]In Gosford Park (2001), Robert Altman's stylish evocation of the British Upper Class, Hollywood film producer Morris Weissman (Bob Balaban), a short, self-important, culturally tone-deaf, gay American, who produces Charlie Chan mystery movies, gamely describes his latest project, Charlie Chan in London during dinner at a shooting weekend at a country estate.  When

David Thomson: The Menace of ‘Metropolis’

[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.] I have just had a sensational night at the movies, and the picture was only 83 years old. At the Silent Film Festival in San Francisco, the Castro Theater was packed for a showing of a “complete” Metropolis. Moreover, the screening was graced by the presence of the two Argentineans—scholar Fernando Pena and archivist Paula Felix-Didie