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

Last Titanic survivor sells mementoes to pay for care

The last remaining survivor of the Titanic disaster is auctioning mementoes from the doomed liner to pay for her nursing home fees, a newspaper said Thursday. Millvina Dean was only two months old when the Titanic struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sank in 1912, but now at the age of 96 she is struggling to make ends meet and hopes to make 3,000 pounds from the sale. Personal items going under the hammer include a 100-year-old suitcase filled with clothes given to her

Paul Giamatti Spars With Lincoln In 'Rivalry'

As presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain trade jabs in their final presidential debate Wednesday, another historic political debate will be under way across the country. In Los Angeles, actors Paul Giamatti and David Strathairn will be reenacting the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, as part of the play The Rivalry. Though the seven-part face-off occurred 150 years ago — and the Norman Corwin play was written in 1958 — its content is pertinent, the actors tell Alex Cohe

Vatican 'put obstacles' in way of filming The Da Vinci Code prequel

He said the Catholic Church had made it difficult to film Angels & Demons, the prequel to Dan Brown's best-selling novel. Howard told The Independent: "We experienced a lot of obstacles in shooting. We were even taken away from areas that weren't controlled by the Vatican." In June the Vatican banned the makers of Angels & Demons from entering the Holy See and any church in Rome. Instead they shot scenes in studios and relocated to Caserta

Lucian Freud's portrait of Francis Bacon expected to fetch 7 million pounds

A portrait by Lucian Freud of Francis Bacon from 1956-57 will go on display today for the first time since the 1970s. The portrait has been privately owned since 1972. It is expected to be sold on Sunday at Christie’s in London for £7 million. The only other portrait of Bacon by Freud – the two artists were friends after meeting in 1945 - was painted in 1952 and stolen in Berlin in 1988. In May Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping sold for £17.2 million, a record for the highest price paid in an

A film about the other man on the Black Power podium

Forty years ago, two black Americans, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, won gold and bronze medals in the 200m final at the Mexico Olympics, and used their time on the victory podium to protest with a Black Power salute. The photograph of the two men with their heads bowed, each of them with an arm raised in the air and a fist clothed in a black leather glove, is one of the most striking images of the 20th Century. Their actions caused havoc at the Games, ensuring the pai

Oedipus at the National Theatre (UK): Review

Great expectations can be a killer in the theatre. On paper this new production of Oedipus looked like a certain smash hit. It stars Ralph Fiennes in the title role, with Clare Higgins as Jocasta, and the great Alan Howard as the blind seer Teiresias. Jonathan Kent is the distinguished director, that fine dramatist Frank McGuinness has come up with the new translation, and even the smallest roles are played by terrific actors. Yet I watched this production of Sophocles

Sir Anthony Caro: Light for darkness at the church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste

In May 1940, the German army moving across northern France, driving the bedraggled British Expeditionary Force towards the beaches of Dunkirk, laid siege to the small market town of Bourbourg. On the morning of the 25th the bell tower of the church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste was struck by an artillery shell, and that afternoon a German fighter plane, hit in aerial combat, fell from the sky, shedding a tail of flaming petrol on to the roof of the church, transforming it within minutes into a blazing

BBC period drama The Tudors is 'gratuitously awful' says Dr David Starkey

Dr David Starkey, a specialist in the Tudor period, described the BBC Two series as "gratuitously awful", saying it was riddled with errors and inaccuracies. Characters wear costumes from the Elizabethan era and travel in Victorian carriages, suggesting that the modes of transport in the series were bought "lock, stock and barrel" from a "Jane Austen leftover". Made by Showtime, a US cable network, at a cost of £17 million for the first s

Documentary series to unearth quiet heroes of Scottish history

Shadowy figures from the Dark Ages including Ead, Giric and King Constantine will emerge as Scotland's nation-building heroes when a new series of documentaries is aired across British television from next month. After two years' preparation, Scotland's History will be broadcast on BBC Scotland and BBC Two. Presented by the archaeologist Neil Oliver, it sets out to demythologise Scottish history and to introduce unfamiliar characters, as well as the well-known William Wallace, Robe

Richard Nixon film may be a thinking man's Rocky - but I was not the underdog, says David Frost

Only one of the real-life antagonists in Frost/Nixon can be present when the film receives its world premiere in Leicester Square tonight. Richard Nixon died 14 years ago, but the interviewer who persuaded him to apologise for Watergate is very much alive and looking forward to seeing his finest hour commemorated in the opening film of The Times BFI London Film Festival. However, Sir David Frost’s evident delight at becoming a bona fide Hollywood hero is very slightly

Ted Koppel documentary about Obama, politics and the last lynching

We’re often reminded of Faulkner’s aphorism: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” It truly applies in the case of “The Last Lynching,” an hourlong sampling of American civil rights history on Monday night, a “Koppel on Discovery” special. In telling the stories of three delegates to the Democratic National Convention in August, Ted Koppel weaves Senator Barack Obama’s presidential nomination into the same social fabric as some of the best-known events of the civil rights er

Peter Vansittart, Prolific Writer of Historical Fiction, Is Dead at 88

Peter Vansittart, the English writer who breathed new life into the historical novel by mingling myth with modernity, and by injecting 20th-century preoccupations into historical settings as various as Roman Britain, medieval France and 16th-century Germany, died on Oct. 4, in Ipswich, Suffolk. He was 88 and lived in Kersey. His death was confirmed by Jill Harbinson, a neighbor. Mr. Vansittart confounded expectations in a much-abused literary genre, writing in language

Banderas deserts Hollywood for Spanish history

Antonio Banderas says he's tired of Hollywood, where he has lived since 1992, and wants to return to his Spanish homeland to develop his career as a director. The 48-year-old, whose triumph in Hollywood as a Latin lover/villain figure paved the way for Spanish successors like Javier Bardem, says he now wants to create the sort of movies suffocated by Hollywood. His latest project may be a case in point. Mr Banderas, with his film star wife Melanie Griffith by hi

McQueen and country: Steve McQueen's film about the starving to death of IRA prisoner Bobby Sands

The most visceral scene in Hunger, Steve McQueen's austere film about the IRA martyr Bobby Sands, shows a group of naked detainees being forced to run a gauntlet of baton-welding prison officers in full riot gear. It is a moment of sustained, ritualistic violence in a work that is characterised by its poetic tone and slow, cumulative power. When McQueen talks about the scene, something happens to him. He becomes suddenly voluble, agitated to the point of inarticulacy. 'We had to do

Artists support campaign to save Scotland's Titian paintings

The campaign to save two Titian masterpieces received a boost yesterday after 60 of Britain's leading artists called for them to be saved for the nation and a leading arts organisation donated £1m to the cause. Diana and Actaeon, considered one of the greatest paintings in private ownership, and its sister painting, Diana and Callisto, have been on public view in the National Gallery of Scotland as part of the Bridgewater collection since 1945 under a loan agreement. Bu

Is now the time for a Wall Street sequel?

Cometh the hour, cometh the Hollywood movie sequel. The economy is in crisis, the markets are in freefall, and rampant nationalising points the only way out of the jam. And this, it is deemed, is the perfect time to resuscitate Gordon Gekko, the slippery poster boy of 1980s Reaganomics. Certainly this puts a novel twist on the old Arthurian adage about sleeping warriors being awakened when their country is in direst need. While we're about it, why not dredge up Ivan Boesky and put him in charge

In 'W.,' Oliver Stone approaches his subject as a historian, not just a filmmaker. The widely reviled Bush comes off better than you'd think

Through most of the undistinguished history of films about American presidents, concern for truth has been in short supply. From "Young Mr. Lincoln" (1939) to "Wilson" (1944) to "Sunrise at Campobello" (1960) to "The Missiles of October" (1974), to the many other, often cheap and cheesy films that populate cable television and direct-to-video products, the purpose of these movies has mostly been hagiography, propaganda or both. "Young Mr. Lincoln"

Paddington bear celebrates 50th birthday

He would hardly appear out-of-place in any group of 50-year-old males: a little gnarled, anachronistically dressed, and clinging on to accessories which have seen better days. But what marks out Paddington bear, who celebrates his half-century today, is that he has always looked like this. It is 50 years since the first story featuring Paddingon, the iconic bear found at his namesake West London station and beloved of many an English schoolchild, was published by former BBC radio e

Counting cards: NY collection includes 6,356 decks

The collection spans 50 countries and four centuries and touches on subjects ranging from beer marketing to 19th-century Portuguese politics. Columbia University has a collection of playing cards that is among the world's largest, a trove of 6,356 decks that the Ivy League institution painstakingly catalogued this spring after they were donated to the school by an eccentric collector. Ranging from simple woodblock prints from 1550s Austria to a 1963 American pack with a

Why John longed to be Jock Lennon

The coastal village of Durness lies on the north-west tip of Scotland, in one of the least populated parts of western Europe. The landscape is one of savage beauty, with strange black rocks jutting out of the white sand beaches of Sango Bay like gigantic rotten teeth biting the leaden sky. Overlooking the beach stands a sturdy white croft with a blue plaque that reads: 'John Lennon 1940-1980, Musician & Songwriter, lived here.' It may seem a surprising claim - Lennon is most cl