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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frost/Nixon critic: Movies no place to learn real history

If you watched Oliver Stone’s 1991 film “JFK,” and came away with the belief that everybody did it, you also unintentionally stumbled into a debate about the responsibilities of filmmakers dealing with historical subject matter. “JFK” still stands as the most notorious example of how Hollywood sometimes takes facts, puts them in a blender, then serves the resulting smoothie to often unsuspecting moviegoers. Of course, this phenomenon is hardly an issue to those who do not go to the cinema for a history lesson. There are plenty of folks who read and seek their history from historians. They can differentiate between what is presented as an objective account of real events and what is offered as entertainment. The film “Frost/Nixon” opens Dec. 5. It is an adaptation of a stage play by Peter Morgan, which is itself taken from a series of real-life interviews done in 1977 between British TV personality David Frost and former President Richard M. Nixon. The stage version received raves when it opened in London two years ago, and the Ron Howard-directed film is receiving a considerable amount of Oscar buzz....

Washington to Obama, morphed

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

Mario Cuomo refuses to have his portrait painted

ALBANY — Under the lofty ceilings of the State Capitol’s Hall of Governors, the official portrait of George E. Pataki will be unveiled early next year, to be displayed alongside gilt-framed paintings of Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt, Martin Van Buren and a jowly Grover Cleveland, among others. But this happy occasion for the state’s 53rd governor is creating more than a little awkwardness in the capital, and bringing a nagging question to the surface: Where’s Mario? F

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

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

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

How movies help elucidate US nuclear history

... I soon realized that nuclear-age movies were not mere visual window-dressing. They influenced how Americans thought about nuclear issues, and they help one map the larger cultural and political trajectory of the nation’s nuclear history. MGM’s The Beginning or the End (1947), made with the Truman administration’s blessing, introduced egregious factual distortions to justify the atomic bombing of Japan.4 The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), released as the early postwar movement for the international control of atomic energy gave way to cold-war imperatives, can be read as both an idealistic call for international control and a coercive insistence on America’s global hegemony.

Kerouac manuscript exhibited in the UK

The original manuscript of one of the most important American novels of the last century, Jack Kerouac's On the Road, went on display in the UK for the first time yesterday. Kerouac wrote it in just three weeks, furiously tapping away on his typewriter on 3.6-metre (12ft) reels of paper. The scroll, of eight reels taped together, was unfurled at the Barber Institute in Birmingham, 50 years after the novel was published in Britain. "We're very excited,&

Human skull abandoned by Hamlet

The skull of concert pianist and Holocaust survivor Andrew Tchaikowsky has appeared in the Stratford production, starring David Tennant. It was his dying wish to have his skull used in Hamlet and he bequeathed it to the RSC. But the company says a fake skull will be used when it transfers to London. Tennant was the first actor to use Mr Tchaikowsky's skull during Hamlet's famous grave-digger scene. Audiences in Stratford were unaware the sk

Odetta, Voice of Civil Rights Movement, Dies at 77

Odetta, the singer whose deep voice wove together the strongest songs of American folk music and the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She was 77. The cause was heart disease, said her manager, Doug Yeager. He added that she had been hoping to sing at Barack Obama’s inauguration. Odetta sang at coffeehouses and at Carnegie Hall, made highly influential recordings of blues and ballads, and became one of the most widely known folk