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

Superman, the septuagenarian original comic book superhero

Superman, the original comic book superhero, turns 70 this month, but his strength and invulnerability draws fewer fans in the 21st century world of flawed, postmodern heroes. An indisputable icon of American pop culture, the Man of Steel made his first appearance in the June 1938 issue of "Action Comics." He is the brainchild of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, residents of the midwestern town of Cleveland, Ohio. Superman can fly in the sky, but he's not a bird

Austen's Inspiration

A portrait of the man believed to have inspired the character of Mr. Darcy in Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” is going on sale for £50,000 (about $98,000) at an antiques fair in London, the BBC reported. Thomas Lefroy, right, born in Ireland, met Austen in 1796, when both were in their early 20s. They had a flirtation, but Lefroy, whose family was poor, married an heiress.

A Northern Family's Role in the Slave Trade (Documentary)

Northerners are usually portrayed as benevolent abolitionists. But one woman tells a different story of slavery in the "deep north." American slave trading is a human rights atrocity forever associated with the Confederacy of the Southern United States. Northerners are stereotypically portrayed as benevolent abolitionists fighting the South's slave labor plantations. But history is rarely that cut and dried. Katrina Browne is the producer, director, and writer

John Adams, HBO Style

My, how times have changed. Just three months ago, HBO Films was gaining accolades for its newly released John Adams, a seven-part miniseries on America's second president and his history-making role in a world-changing political revolution. Three months later, HBO's newest entry, Recount--focused on the much smaller, modern melodrama surrounding Florida's battle over thousands of hanging chads--is gaining more eye rolls than applause. Perhaps it's a sign of the times. After all, we

Dancing with the New Tsars: Newly rich Russians invade London, throw UK elite into royal tizzy

With their tricked-out yachts, trained servants and diamond-frosted toys, newly rich Russians have invaded London - and thrown Britain's elite into a royal tizzy - reports Conservative researcher and activist Clare Foges in these few excerpts from a long feature article. After Perestroika ... Russia's economy spluttered and lurched as the old capitalist machine warmed up again after seven repressive decades of communism. These days, though, it is lubricated by a seemingly endless to

Is Spike Lee the Jesse Jackson of Film?

[Roger L. Simon is an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, novelist and blogger, and the CEO of Pajamas Media.] One of the ironies of these supposedly post-racial Barack Obama times is that so much seventies-era identity politics has been coming back to haunt us like the “undead” in a horror movie. And I’m not just talking about the excrescences of Wright, Pfleger and Meeks, et al. Director Spike Lee has reared his head to blow smoke from his joint again - targeting, o

Were African-Americans at Iwo Jima? Spike Lee vs. Clint Eastwood

Sixty-three years after U.S. forces vanquished the Japanese and planted their flag on Iwo Jima's Mount Suribachi, the remote outpost in the Volcano Islands is the focus of another pitched battle. This time, acclaimed film directors Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee are engaging in verbal warfare over the verisimilitude of Eastwood's two films about the epic clash, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Lee has claimed that by soft-pedaling African-American contributions to the battle, Eastwo

Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo is 50, but timeless in its moody semiotic complexity

Fifty years ago, Alfred Hitchcock's thriller Vertigo had its American premiere — in San Francisco, naturally, since that's where Hitchcock had filmed it. In his eyes, the city's timeless architecture and undulating streets were the perfect backdrop for a story of murder, treachery, and love so obsessive that the main character's mind spins out of control. Today the film is widely regarded as a masterpiece of world cinema, but in 1958 its prospects didn't seem so bright. Advance publ

Artist recreates world of DW Griffith

... In recent years Mr. [Adam] Cvijanovic, 47, has become known for his “wallpaper” painting installations, which typically render a landscape (a 52-foot-wide meadow, say, or a 21-foot-high glacier) at a relatively monumental size. But this time he has tackled a more mythic monument: D. W. Griffith’s 1916 silent epic “Intolerance,” in particular the portion that unfolds in the court of ancient Babylon. To create the film Griffith, the pioneer director, had a gargantuan

Archaeologists are using Indiana Jones to their advantage

Last week’s news that “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” had won one of Hollywood’s most coveted prizes—the Memorial Day-weekend box-office—sent shivers through the offices of Archaeology, a magazine of the Archaeological Institute of America. (The organization recently elected Harrison Ford to its board of directors.) “O.K., fine, the movie romanticizes what we do,” Eric Powell, one of the magazine’s editors, said recently. “Indy may be a horrible archeologist, but he’s

50 Years of NASA's Home Movies

ABOUT midway through “When We Left Earth,” a sweeping new video history of the American space program, the former NASA flight director Eugene F. Kranz looks into the camera with an intensity that is almost frightening. “The power of space was to raise our aspirations to those things that are possible,” he says, “if we will commit.” He punches each of those last four words, so it comes out “If. We. Will. Commit!” Those four words lay out the underlying argum

Hollywood Is Burning

THE most famous back lot fire in Hollywood history was intentional. In 1938, David O. Selznick staged the burning of Atlanta in “Gone With the Wind” by torching the old “King Kong” Skull Island set on RKO’s back lot and then filming the spectacular results. Another Kong, this one a 30-foot, animatronic gorilla featured in the Universal City tour, went up in flames this week, along with various sets, film prints, audio recording and videotape storage vaults, as Universal Studios suff

New Nixon play in DC (Reviewed)

Delight takes hold immediately in Round House Theatre's "Nixon's Nixon" as a familiar scowling figure air-conducts Tchaikovsky with physical abandon. The arms pump and the jowls flap, but nobody's there to follow his emphatic cues. It's the eve of his resignation, and Richard Nixon -- statesman, scoundrel and everything in between -- is alone. It's a magnificent, side-splitting image, and one that aptly sets the stage for a fascinating satire of a man losing control as he'

Alton Kelley, 67, Artist of the 1960s Rock Counterculture, Dies

Alton Kelley, whose psychedelic concert posters for artists like the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, and Big Brother and the Holding Company helped define the visual style of the 1960s counterculture, died on Sunday at his home in Petaluma, Calif. He was 67. Alton Kelley, whose psychedelic concert posters for artists like the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, and Big Brother and the Holding Company helped define the visual style of the 1960s counterculture, died on Sunday at his home in Pet

Shakespeare first folio sold for 435,250 pounds

A Shakespeare first folio has sold at auction for £435,250. The 1623 work sold to an anonymous bidder at the June 4th Christies sale of manuscripts and literature. A handwritten transcript of Winston Churchill’s famous Battle of Britain speech from August 1940 also sold for £139,250.

Getty Adds to Antiquities With Third-Century Work

The J. Paul Getty Museum announced Wednesday that it had acquired a third-century Roman marble sarcophagus that includes a detailed relief carving of a Dionysiac vintage festival. It is the museum’s second antiquities purchase since it adopted a new, stricter policy on buying ancient objects in 2006. The sarcophagus, which was bought from a private collector in London for an undisclosed sum, is to go on display at the Getty Villa next Thursday as the centerpiece of a new installatio

Why Indiana Jones is an emblem of Americanism

... Indiana Jones balances two of the essential American archetypes as defined by Constance Rourke in her 1931 essay "American Humor." With the broad-brimmed fedora, the bullwhip, and the six-shooter, he evokes the cowboy as frontier hero, the backwoodsman who stands casually ready to kill, if need be. Tall tales of frontiersmen erupted naturally from the American experience with the West. They were legendary figures like Davy Crockett, who boasted that he kept the sun in its path and

Mark Twain's house-museum near demise

It was here in the third-floor billiard room where America’s greatest humorist used to hole up when the bustle of his house, and the nursery one flight below, became too great, leaving strict orders not to be disturbed. Seated at a desk tucked behind the billiards table, he wrote and rewrote in longhand such masterpieces as “Huckleberry Finn,” often beseeching his editors to stop cleaning up his language and restore the earthier vernacular he preferred. But now the fanc

New hurdle for art forgers as A-bomb fallout is used to identify the fakes

A new and not very subtle weapon is helping art collectors in the battle against forgers: the Bomb. Russian scientists believe that nuclear test explosions and the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 released elements into the atmosphere that can be detected in oil paintings made after the Second World War. The technique has been patented and is being used by Russian collectors to test prospective purchases. Elena Basner, a former curator at the Russian Museum in St Petersbu

Not All Are Pleased about Wax Hitler

It's hard to find controversy in a wax museum. But with the Berlin version of Madame Tussauds set to open at the beginning of July, some are not overjoyed by the collection of famous Germans the museum is putting on display. Boris Becker won't raise any eyebrows. Neither will Albert Einstein. But some are questioning the need to put a wax model of Adolf Hitler on display. Michael Braun, of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) told the Thursday edition of the Berlin dail