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

Burns is alive and kicking, 250 years after his birth

"Then all unknown, I'll lay with the inglorious dead / forgot and gone," wrote Robert Burns. Scotland's national poet is far from forgotten, however, as the 250th anniversary of his birth approaches. It's funny to imagine the reaction Burns might have had to his immortality, how a Burns supper might have bewitched, bothered and bewildered him. As a child I went to many Burns suppers. Maisie Hill always did a fabulously dramatic address, her big knife glinting and her face

Nixon and the movies

Few politicians have been represented on screen as often as Richard Nixon. Frank Langella is magnificent in Frost/Nixon (released today), but many other notable actors have also played him: Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone's Nixon (1995), Beau Bridges in Kissinger and Nixon (1995), Philip Baker Hall in Robert Altman's Secret Honor (1984), Rip Torn in the 1979 television series Blind Ambition, and even Glenda Jackson in Michael Lindsay-Hogg's Nasty Habits (1977). In Jean Luc Godard's Made In USA - made in 1966! - one of the killers calls himself "Richard Nixon". The real Nixon was less comfortable appearing on screen. During the presidential debates against John F. Kennedy in 1960, the first of the modern era to be televised, he wore too little make up, sweated profusely under the harsh studio lights, and looked shifty and unconvincing to many viewers. Compared to Kennedy, or to Reagan (whom he regarded as too much of a performer), yet alone to Clinton, Nixon never learned fully to handle the demands of film or television. Paradoxically, it's exactly that unvarnished squirminess and gloomy menace - as well as the small matter of Watergate, of course - that makes him so compelling to film makers: he has often been likened to Richard III... 

'The American Future' on BBC America

The documentary asks: How did we get here? It is set against the presidential election. British historian Simon Schama never expected Barack Obama to so thoroughly wipe out the Democratic competition during primary season. But as he watched history unfold while filming his latest documentary The American Future: A History, Schama prepared for the unexpected. “This was not going to be an election of business as usual," he said. “Very likely this was going to be an electio

The new Bergen-Belsen Memorial

Habbo Knoch, who runs the new Bergen-Belsen Memorial at the former concentration camp, invited various scholars and museum directors to a four-day conference here last week called “Witnessing: Sites of Destruction and the Representation of the Holocaust.” He asked a question one evening during a break: “Will people in 20 years look back and say we built a museum that focuses on Nazi genocide while Darfur was happening? Will they ask whether anyone raised this issue?” Consider it ra

David Attenborough on Charles Darwin on the BBC

At the age of 82 Sir David Attenborough is still looking for adventure. So later this year he will pack his thermals and head back to Antarctica to see how places he has visited in the past have been affected by global warming. He is not as mobile as he was but, as he points out: “I'm not walking there, I tell you. In the polar regions it's a doddle if you've got all the gear. Got all the gear, no problem.” Then, with the immaculate timing that he has developed over decades of yarn

Van Dyck and Britain at the Tate Britain: The Man Who Pioneered The English Look

On August 2, 1788, Thomas Gainsborough lay dying. His last words, reportedly, were, "We are all going to heaven and Van Dyck is of the party." Of course, it is hard to know quite what was in the painter's mind as he slipped away from life, but it is evident that he felt a close link with the Flemish artist Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), who had then been dead for almost a century and a half. Gainsborough was not the only English artist to take his cue from Van Dyck. Reynol

Tom Cruise refused to meet Hitler's former bodyguard during making of Valkyrie

Rochus Misch, 91, who still lives in Berlin was at Hitler's side from 1940 to 1945 and was with the Fuhrer in his bunker in the last days of his life. Screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie interviewed him as part of research for the film Valkyrie. But Cruise told the Los Angeles Times: "I didn't want to meet him. Evil is still evil, I don't care how old you are." In the film Cruise plays Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, who led a failed plot to assass

The Bergen-Belsen Memorial museum, located on the site of the German concentration camp

Habbo Knoch, who runs the new Bergen-Belsen Memorial at the former concentration camp, invited various scholars and museum directors to a four-day conference here last week called "Witnessing: Sites of Destruction and the Representation of the Holocaust." He asked a question one evening during a break: "Will people in 20 years look back and say we built a museum that focuses on Nazi genocide while Darfur was happening? Will they ask whether anyone raised this issue?"

'Shah Abbas: The Remaking of Iran' exhibition in the UK

The bazaar at Isfahan has not changed much since it was built in the early 17th century. Nor, one would guess, have the wares on sale – a rich mixture of textiles, metalwork, ceramics, spices and Iranian sweets. One warm afternoon last October I was strolling through it with Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, a group of museum staff, and journalists. After a day packed with visits to mosques, museums and monuments, MacGregor was on a mission to buy a carpet – and there are few b

Dolls' house decorated by Jane Eyre author Charlotte Bronte up for auction

The house, complete with its miniature furniture and dolls, is one lot in a two-day auction of the private collection of antique dealer Roger Warner, whose shop in Burford, Oxfordshire, attracted an impressive list of visitors and customers including Queen Mary, Princess Margaret, Walt Disney, Peter Ustinov, Bruce Chatwin and the Mitford sisters during its 50 years of service between 1936 and 1986. The Christie's auction, which also features a piece of lace torn from a church altar

Stauffenberg's Daughter Praises 'Valkyrie'

The daughter of Count Stauffenberg, the German hero played by Tom Cruise in the film "Valkyrie," has praised the movie and Germany's culture deputy has called it a success. It's a far cry from the country's initial skepticism about the film. The youngest daughter of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the German army colonel who almost killed Adolf Hitler with a briefcase bomb in 1944, has praised the movie "Valkyrie" in which Tom Cruise portrays her father.

From Sammy Davis Jr. to Dave Chappelle's Black Bush, how pop culture

"Am I gonna be a great man, Mammy?""You sho' is, youse gwine be president. The book says anybody here can be president." "Ain't that somethin'!" p —Sammy Davis Jr. and Ethel Waters in Rufus Jones for President Before anybody had even heard of Barack Obama, before anyone had even considered his presidency a possibility, it was out there, this notion of a brother as commander in chief. Decades before Dennis Haysbert tried to avert bioterrorist threats on 24. Eons before Morgan

5 cities celebrate Poe’s 200th birthday

“He will appear in the enchanted garden,” Keith Kaufelt, a docent at the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Va., says with more certainty than should be warranted (seeing as how the person in question has been dead for 160 years). But on Jan. 19 — the bicentennial birthday of Edgar Allan Poe — the museum hopes to bring the master of mystery, king of rhyme-scheme and inventor of the detective-fiction genre back from the dead. As part of the 24-hour birthday party, Sandi Bergman (aka

Autographs of 'the 5 presidents' may go for $6K

When Barack Obama stepped into the Oval Office with his presidential brethren recently, he had already agreed to take part in one of this exclusive fraternity’s secret traditions: autographing a limited number of copies of the photograph that captured the moment. The former, current and future presidents’ pact — to create only 250 copies of the photograph with all of their signatures — upped the ante on an image that was a keepsake before it was even taken. Early estima

How the Movies Made a President

BARACK OBAMA’S victory in November demonstrated, to the surprise of many Americans and much of the world, that we were ready to see a black man as president. Of course, we had seen several black presidents already, not in the real White House but in the virtual America of movies and television. The presidencies of James Earl Jones in “The Man,” Morgan Freeman in “Deep Impact,” Chris Rock in “Head of State” and Dennis Haysbert in “24” helped us imagine Mr. Obama’s transformative breakthrough before it occurred. In a modest way, they also hastened its arrival. Make no mistake: Hollywood’s historic refusal to embrace black artists and its insistence on racist caricatures and stereotypes linger to this day. Yet in the past 50 years — or, to be precise, in the 47 years since Mr. Obama was born — black men in the movies have traveled from the ghetto to the boardroom, from supporting roles in kitchens, liveries and social-problem movies to the rarefied summit of the Hollywood A-list. In those years the movies have helped images of black popular life emerge from behind what W. E. B. Du Bois called “a vast veil,” creating public spaces in which we could glimpse who we are and what we might become.

When the Kennedys Took on Wallace Over Integration (Documentary)

THE first movie that Barack Obama should watch in the White House screening room is a 45-year-old television documentary about John F. Kennedy’s showdown with Gov. George C. Wallace over the court-ordered integration of the University of Alabama. Called “Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment,” the hourlong film — shot over a two-day period in June 1963, broadcast on ABC four months later and now available on DVD — is worth the new president’s time not so much for its subject matt

Kate Winslet's character in The Reader inspired by 'notorious female Nazi guard'

The life of Ilse Koch, a concentration camp guard nicknamed "The Bitch of Buchenwald", was strikingly similar to that of Hanna Schmitz, the role played by Winslet in the Oscar-tipped film, according to Professor Bill Niven, an expert on modern German history and culture. Bernhard Schlink, the author of the 1995 novel adapted for the film, has refused to disclose whether there was any real-life basis to Schmitz. Yet Prof Niven, of Nottingham Trent University, said that &qu

Iran to unveil copy of oldest Hafez manuscripts

The priceless treasure was discovered by Iranian scholar Ali Ferdowsi and will be unveiled during a ceremony at Niavaran Cultural Center on January 26. The collection is published by Dibayeh Publications and contains 49 ghazals and a single couplet along with a comparative study by scholar Ferdowsi. The original manuscript was inscribed by a contemporary named Ala Marandi during the years 1388 and 1389. All the ghazals (probably except five) were penned during the tim

Iranian treasures bound for Britain

Across a conference table in an Iranian vice president's office, tea and sweet pastries are offered before cultural diplomacy. An ancient clay cylinder, regarded by scholars as the world's first declaration of human rights, helps to seal a deal that could open a new diplomatic channel between Britain and Iran. On the table is a symbol rarely seen in Tehran, unless it's being burned by protesters outside the British embassy. A mini Union Jack stands alongside an Irania

Howard Zinn dismisses trivial in history movies

"Lawrence of Arabia" twisted the facts behind Europe's carving up the Middle East after WWII. Cate Blanchett was way too young to play 52-year-old Queen Elizabeth at the height of her power. "300" went over the top in making Persian king Xerxes 8-foot-tall.