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

Losing my religion: Frank Cottrell Boyce's film about a group of Auschwitz prisoners that put God in the dock

People start to write because they think they can change the world for the better. In the end, you find that it's hard enough to make your writing better. Occasionally, though, you can change something, even if it's only yourself. You probably already know this story: a group of prisoners in Auschwitz convened a rabbinical court, put God himself on trial - and found him guilty. I'm pretty sure now that it's an apocryphal tale, one of those stories that persists because it strikes a chord. It cer

Beate Sirota Gordon: The woman responsible for protecting women's rights in Japan's modern constitution (documentary)

"This film is a requiem to people who have been persecuted and died in war." In this way documentary film director Tomoko Fujiwara characterizes her moving tribute to the life of Beate Sirota Gordon and her relatives. "Sirotake no 20-Seiki (The Sirota Family and the 20th Century)" will be screened in a three-week season at Iwanami Hall in Tokyo beginning Sept. 27. However, the film and its story deserve a much wider audience, both in Japan and overseas.

Abigail Daniels: Hip-hop and jazz: Sharing a similar destiny?

It was the music of rebellion and youth. Artists traded witty improvisations onstage chronicling the pain and the promise of being black in America, inspiring inner-city and rural Southern audiences alike in nightclubs and on street corners. That music was jazz. Today, Jaspects, an Atlanta-based group of young musicians who were born in the hip-hop era, fuse rap and jazz melodies to introduce younger audiences to jazz and the broader ideas regarding African-American soc

TV film tells story of hidden negotiations that changed South Africa

It was a moment of political history too sensitive to be revealed for more than a decade. In the luxurious surroundings of an English country house, secret round-table discussions took place in the late 1980s that were to bring about the dismantling of the apartheid system in South Africa. In the seclusion of Mells Park in Somerset, and unknown to all but a few invited guests, Thabo Mbeki, then a dissident member of the African National Congress and now President of his country, me

Claus von Stauffenberg: the true story behind the film Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise

Just before 1pm on a boiling hot day in 1944, a 10-year-old boy sat down to lunch at a grand country house in the hills near Stuttgart. An earnest young man, and the heir to one of Germany's most noble families, Berthold von Stauffenberg was in awe of the Nazi regime and talked excitedly about joining the Hitler Youth. But, 800 miles away, his father, Claus, had other plans. A colonel and a trusted member of the Führer's inner circle, he was, at that precise moment, trying to kill Hitler with a

Edna St. Vincent Millay's poetry was nurtured by her deep knowledge of the natural world

The staircase looks innocent enough, three narrow steps up to a landing, turn left, 11 more steps up to the second floor of this sprawling white clapboard farmhouse called Steepletop. But this is a house full of dark memories, and none more spooky than on these stairs. "I must warn you not to use the spindles for support," says Peter Bergman, leading a visitor on a tour. "And mind your left shoulder on the overhang at the top." "Are these the st

He dreamt up Bond, but did Fleming also create the CIA?

Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, liked to claim – only half in jest – that he had helped to create the CIA. During the Second World War Fleming worked as personal assistant to John Godfrey, the hard-driving head of Naval Intelligence, who was Fleming’s model for M in the Bond series. Part of Fleming’s job was to liaise with General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America’s newly minted wartime answer to MI6. The two

Greek tragedies offer modern lessons on war's pain

The screams of agony from the soldier echoed through the ballroom-turned-theater, forcing a hushed whisper among those witnessing his sudden break with reality. He was no longer with his wife, seated beside him on the stage; no longer with his comrades. In his mind, he was back on the battlefield, killing his enemy — the price of years of combat stress from witnessing war's horrors. In this "Theater of War," the wounds date back millennia and the words spoken

Hitler to get Pulp Fiction treatment in Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards

Quentin Tarantino, master of cinematic violence, is about to stir up a hornet's nest in Germany with a war film that depicts Nazi soldiers having their brains bashed out with a baseball bat wielded by a vengeful American. And far worse. Even by the stomach-curdling standards of the US director-maker of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs the new film is a veritable blood bath. Filming starts in Berlin on October 13 and the controversial director is already in the German c

Museum of New York City History Unveils Its Future

In 2003, one could be forgiven for questioning what the future held for the Museum of the City of New York. It had lost its promised new home in the Tweed Courthouse downtown, had given up on a proposed merger with the New-York Historical Society and was adjusting to a new director, Susan Henshaw Jones. Now, five years later, the museum is cutting the ribbon on Wednesday on the first completed phase of a building project intended to give the institution, on Fifth Avenue between 103

Movie Monkeys Around with the Truth about Scopes Trial

I had long wanted to visit Dayton, Tenn., the town that tried schoolteacher John Scopes. I knew the story mostly from Stanley Kramer's 1960 movie "Inherit the Wind." My son knew of it because his high-school science teacher showed it in class. It is the American way: Hollywood is our history teacher. In "Inherit the Wind," Dayton is fictionalized as "Hillsboro." The town's small-minded leaders arrest a startled science teacher in his classroom for servi

Oliver Stone's Bush biopic plays it for laughs, but it's every bit as controversial as JFK and Nixon

You have to admit it’s a great question: “How did George W Bush go from alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world?” That’s what the American film-maker Oliver Stone says he wants to explain in his forthcoming movie biopic, entitled, simply enough, W. Not surprisingly, Texas-sized dust storms have already blown up in Hollywood and Washington over the film, which is being rushed through production so it can be released in America on October 17, just three weeks before th

Stars to refight England's civil war in new TV drama

A passionate revolutionary saga will sweep across British television screens this autumn. The lavish four-part drama, The Devil's Whore, from the pen of Peter Flannery, creator of the hit serial Our Friends in the North, stars Dominic West, of The Wire, as Oliver Cromwell. Andrea Riseborough, fresh from her role as Margaret Thatcher in BBC4's The Long Walk to Finchley, will play alongside him as a young gentlewoman of the court, drawn into the English Civil War. And right at the cen

Quandary for Hebrew: How Would Isaiah Text?

Some Israelis have described being moved almost to tears by a rare viewing of the Great Isaiah Scroll, the best preserved and most complete Dead Sea biblical scroll, on special exhibit this summer at the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum for the first time in 40 years. The familiar, unfulfilled prophecy of the 2,100-year-old scroll — “and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither s

Little Pieces of Politics, Some Obscure, Lure Collectors

Over the next few weeks, Carl Toepel will send out letters, along with a donation of at least $2, to every major-party candidate for the United States Senate. And while other people might write expressing views on the Iraq war or the economy, Dr. Toepel will have just one request: A campaign button, maybe a bumper sticker, even a pencil with the candidate’s name. Just something. “I don’t know that I will say I’m a collector,” said Dr. Toepel, a 69-year-old retired elementary

Vote for Paris! Hilton 'Enters' Election Race with Spoof Ad

Paris Hilton threw her hat into the US presidential race, declaring her desire to campaign against "that wrinkly white-haired guy" and vowing to paint the White House pink if elected. The blond socialite responded to Republican candidate John McCain's controversial use of her image in a campaign television spot last week with a spoof ad posted on the website Funnyordie.com. In the ad, the 27-year-old appears reclining on a sun lounger beside a swimming pool, dress

Posh Spice Is Descendant of Marx Comrade: Historian

Pop singer Victoria Beckham is a descendant of a 19th century German communist who was close to Karl Marx, a German historian was quoted as saying on Monday. Beckham, born Victoria Adams and now wife of soccer player David Beckham, is the great-great-great-granddaughter of revolutionary and artist Carl Heinrich Pfaender, said Hans Mueller, a historian from the southwestern city of Heilbronn. Mueller told news agency ddp he had researched the life of Heilbronn native Pfa

'Some people leave, some people cry': The Factory brings home the horror of Auschwitz

In a dank, airless room beneath Edinburgh's Pleasance Courtyard, I am waiting to die. Beside me, a naked woman is whispering her boyfriend's name. A naked man is crying out that he is scared. Another naked man is standing tall, singing the Hatikva, a Jewish prayer. This is The Factory, a production by Badac Theatre Company that recreates the last hour in the life of prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It begins outside a corrugated iron wall, with the audience lined up in pairs beside

The winner's version of history. That's original

I read during the week that Ridley Scott has suspended filming on his Robin Hood epic, Nottingham, because he has realised that the onset of autumn threatens the greenness of his Sherwood Forest. Not that the man's horticultural naivety alarmed me especially. I do not expect Sir Ridley to know the exact timings of the carotenoid and anthocyanin pigmentation advance as late-summer chlorophylls dwindle in English leaves, any more than I would expect Hollywood to plough millions of do

Fantasies of the East, lacking accuracy and understanding

Masquerading, a deeply rooted human instinct that covers an ambivalent range of emotions from half jocose admiration to contemptuous hostility, often goes together with blind unawareness of meaning. Such is the message to be read between the lines of "The Lure of the East" show on view at Tate Britain until Aug. 31, with the more factual subtitle "British Orientalist Painting." What the exhibition reveals with striking clarity - without saying so in the accompany