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

Expert: New Indiana Jones Movie Raises Issues of Looted Art

The new Indiana Jones movie released today might make it seem like finding ancient artifacts is a swashbuckling adventure, but that kind of art collecting is a thing of the past, says the director of Duke's art museum. Museums like the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University collect works of art from many different cultures, including antiquities, to share with a broad public. But looters have ruined it for Indiana Jones-style archeologists, who for decades had worked succes

DC's Newest Museum: Crime & Punishment

The new Museum of Crime and Punishment, which opens Friday across the street from the Abe Pollin Arena and the National Portrait Gallery, is another in Washington's growing supply of museums that aspire to be a blend of theme park and TV show. In fact, it's even produced in cooperation with the long-running Fox hit, "America's Most Wanted," which will now be taped in the museum's basement TV studio. The museum is more fun than annoying. But not by terribly much.

Animated documentary about a Sabra and Shatila massacre attracting Cannes glory

An animated documentary about a massacre in the Middle East is the current frontrunner to win the coveted Palme d'Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Waltz with Bashir is a daring and provocative attempt by director Ari Folman to bear witness to an atrocity committed during his stint in the Israeli army in 1982. The invasion of Lebanon, codenamed Operation Peace for Galilee, was an attempt to occupy the country as far as the capital Beirut. It ended in what man

'Recount' recalls 'Bush v. Gore'

... Sports analogies are way overdone in politics, but keep this one in mind if you watch Recount, the new HBO movie about the 2000 presidential election that will make its debut on Sunday, May 25, with a repeat broadcast on Monday, May 26. One game — the contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush for a majority of votes on Election Day — was played throughout the entire country in all the familiar ways: debates, speeches, rallies, fund-raising campaigns, ads, hoopla. But when that game ended in

N-Y Historical Society opens Grant & Lee exhibit this fall

By the end of the Civil War, most Americans considered either Robert E. Lee or Ulysses S. Grant to be a hero. The reputations of the two generals were molded in part by a sectional bias that would aggrandize the achievements of one often to the detriment of the other. In recent years, Grant has earned a growing reputation for his pioneering use of Federal power for civil rights and post-war reconstruction—a remarkable shift from a presidency that was more often condemned as a bumbling series of

The Not-So-Untold Story of the Great Comic-Book Scare

[Gene Kannenberg Jr. directs ComicsResearch.org, a bibliography of works about comics with information about other comics resources.] David Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) has been greeted mostly with glowing reviews. A lively read, The Ten-Cent Plague digs deeply into the social context surrounding the "comic-book panic" of the first half of the 20th century. The movement culminated in 19

Critic: Good segments are compromised in History Channel semi-documentary about real Indiana Jones scholars

In the program "Indiana Jones the Ultimate Quest," the History Channel capitalizes on the Indiana Jones publicity juggernaut with this mixed bag of scientific fact and unsubstantiated new age religious beliefs. Using the Indiana Jones movies as a jumping off point, the show does a wonderful job of showing how real archaeologists work using state of the art technologies like ground-penetrating radar and satellite imaging to locate and explore ancient sites. The two-hour program also doe

Creation Museum still a hit (Ky)

Instead of going directly to a family gathering in Illinois, Larry and Shirley Lawrence of Hattiesburg, Miss., stopped by the Creation Museum in Petersburg. Larry Lawrence said he wanted to visit the museum because you see so much in the media and so much has been written proving evolution. "It was just real interesting to me to see something that gives the opposing viewpoint," he said. The Lawrences are among thousands of visitors that have trekk

First published shot of first flight by Wright brothers will be on display

RALEIGH — The definitive image of the Wright Brothers’ first flight has been a sepia-toned photograph, faded by time, from those scant airborne seconds of Dec. 17, 1903. There is Orville Wright, supine and centered on the lower wing of the fragile heavier-than-air craft, gliding a few feet above the flat sands near Kill Devil Hill. His brother Wilbur is a few feet from the right wing tip, frozen in chase. It is a famous frame, the inspiration for postage stamps and the silhouette fo

Torturing Iron Man

[Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Adbusters, the Nation, and regularly for Tomdispatch.com. His first book, The Complex, an exploration of the new military-corporate complex in America, was recently published in th

Delivery man challenges Howard Hughes' will

A delivery man from Utah has gone to federal court to argue that he is owed a large fortune from the estate of Howard Hughes that he says was promised to him as a reward for rescuing the reclusive billionaire from a bed of dust in the desert more than 40 years ago. It is a return trip for Melvin Dummar, 63, whose first attempt to lay claim to $156m he said was left to him by Hughes was thrown out by the courts in a lengthy probate trial in 1978. Though he was widely branded a liar a

'Sound of Music' Hotel Plan Protested in Austria

The hills are alive ... with the sound of protest. Plans to run a hotel out of a former home of the von Trapp family immortalized in the movie "The Sound of Music" have triggered fierce resistance from neighbors who fear tourists will tie up traffic and make a nuisance of themselves. "We will fight this with all means at our disposal," said Andreas Braunbruck, who lives near the Villa Trapp in a neighborhood of Salzburg already teeming with "Sou

Remembering Fleming, Ian Fleming (Exhibit/London)

Rising early for a swim in the aquamarine waters in the cove below his idyllic Jamaican retreat, Goldeneye, Fleming tapped away at his Remington portable typewriter with six fingers for three hours in the morning and an hour in the afternoon — 2,000 words a day, a completed novel in two months, all the while keeping up the sybaritic lifestyle that led Noël Coward, a frequent guest at Goldeneye and no puritan himself, to describe the Fleming household as “golden ear, nose and throat.”

TR subject of a new NY play

A wildlife conservationist? A union supporter? It’s sometimes hard to believe that Theodore Roosevelt was a Republican. But he was never one to reflexively conform to party ideology, as Michael O. Smith demonstrates in his informative one-man show, “The Bully Pulpit,” which he also wrote. Set almost a decade after Roosevelt left office, in 1918, at Sagamore Hill, his estate in Oyster Bay, N.Y., the play gives us a Roosevelt who, entertaining visitors in his study, reminisces about h

Smithsonian approves filming of "Night at the Museum II: Escape from the Smithsonian"

The Smithsonian Institution this week announced an agreement with 20th Century Fox to allow the use of its name and facilities for the filming of "Night at the Museum II: Escape from the Smithsonian." The movie is the sequel to the 2006 film "Night at the Museum" starring Ben Stiller that earned over $250 million at the box office in the U.S., and over $500 million worldwide. This is the first time in its 162-year history that the Smithsonian Institution has allowed its name

A film documenting the final weeks of the IRA gunman Bobby Sands has been defended by its makers at the Cannes Film Festival as a useful insight into the mindset of modern suicide bombers

Hunger, a 96-minute film by the artist Steve McQueen, in competition at Cannes and part-funded by Film4, tells the story of Sands who died on hunger strike at the Maze prison; some critics say it is creating a hero out of a terrorist. But Jan Younghusband, the executive producer of the film and commissioning editor of arts at Channel 4, said the harrowing story merely exposed the mentality of someone ready to die for a cause, such as the London suicide bombers. "You look at sui

Back to the London of Jack the Ripper (Exhibit/London)

A new exhibition debunks the myths surrounding Jack the Ripper and paints a vivid portait of Victorian London. Nigel Richardson reports. ### It is a repulsive and fascinating item and true obsessives will make a beeline for it. “This is the original 'Dear Boss’ letter,” confirmed Julia Hoffbrand, the co-curator of a new exhibition dedicated to Jack the Ripper. The letter marks the point in the Ripper story at which reality turned into myth. It was sent to t

Persecuted to Powerful: Exhibiting a History of New York’s Catholics

Hundreds of years ago, there was a tiny religious minority so despised and persecuted that it was forced to build its own educational, social-welfare and political infrastructure just to survive in the city of New York. Improbably enough, this subculture ultimately seized power from the entrenched majority, became the city’s largest Christian group, created institutions that affected everyone in the five boroughs and permanently changed what it meant to be a New Yorker. Yet a museum

HBO Film About 2000 Recount Draws Protests From Democrats

Wounds from the Florida recount, still healing for many Democrats, are being ripped open again for some prominent former advisers to Al Gore. They say that a coming HBO film dramatizing the ballot battle after the 2000 election unfairly blames them for the Democrats’ failure to secure the White House. Warren Christopher, the former secretary of state who served as the public face of the Gore team in the early days of the recount effort, said this week that he believed the film, “Rec

Chinese filmmaker talks about his documentary, "Yasukuni"

Li Ying’s documentary film “Yasukuni” opened in Tokyo on May 3, without incident but under heavy police protection. The original launch of the film, scheduled for April 12, was postponed when four theaters in Tokyo and another in Osaka cancelled their screenings of the film after conservative members of the Japanese Diet raised questions about the film’s political stance (See also David McNeill and John Junkerman, Freedom Next Time. Japanese Neonationalists Seek to Silence Yasukuni Film.