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

Ridley Scott takes on tale of Reagan-Gorbachev summit

Ridley Scott is to direct a film about the 1986 Reykjavik ballistic missile summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. The meeting, during which the US and Soviet leaders discussed limiting the use of ballistic missiles, ended in failure at the 11th hour. But it was widely credited for bringing about a treaty banning intermediate-range nuclear forces in 1987. "These are fascinating historical characters, larger-than-life figures, but I want to show who the

Pablo Picasso's burial site opened to public

The French château where Pablo Picasso is buried is to be opened to the public for the first time, 35 years after his death. The Spanish artist was buried in the grounds of a château that he bought on a whim in 1958 in the village of Vauvenargues in the south of France. Small groups of visitors will be allowed to view his final resting place, where he has lain since his death aged 91. The raised burial mound is topped with his 1933 sculpture, Femme au vase.

Director of the documentary "Chicago 10" defends his approach

A year after opening the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, Brett Morgen's third film Chicago 10 is finally being released, and it probably couldn't be coming out at a better time. (Watch exclusive clip) It's somewhat of a departure from his previous groundbreaking docs The Kid Stays in the Picture, a biography of producer Bob Evans, and the Oscar nominated On the Ropes, not only because he didn't make it with regular collaborator Nanete Burstein, but also because it's clearly a film made

Imagining nuclear holocaust: Remembering "The Day After"

The motion picture The Day After (not to be confused with the Gorean fantasy The Day After Tomorrow) aired the other day on one of the cable channels and, as usual, I watched most

Scott's slippers up for auction

A pair of slippers worn by Sir Walter Scott is expected to fetch several thousand pounds at auction. The famous writer's footwear will go under the hammer at Edinburgh's Shapes auctioneers on 1 March. The slippers were gifted to Scott in 1830 after visitors to his Abbotsford home in the Borders were dismayed at the state of the ones he was wearing. Consultant Dr Duncan Thomson said they had been "knocked around a bit" but remained in "pretty good c

Anne Frank given musical makeover

A controversial new musical telling the life story of Anne Frank opens in Madrid later this month. The producers call it an educational and sensitive portrayal of Anne's two years in hiding from the Nazis during World War II. But her only living relative says showbusiness is profiting from the Holocaust. Anne's cousin Buddy Elias, now 82, has called her a "fun-loving girl with a tremendous imagination". Watching Anne Frank: A Song to

Hi-tech Indiana Jones hunt for Leonardo da Vinci secrets

It was considered by many of Leonardo da Vinci’s peers to be his greatest masterpiece. But the unfinished mural of the Battle of Anghiari that graced the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence has not been seen since the mid-16th century when the Medici grand duke Cosimo commissioned a renovation and redecoration of the great hall. The fresco was long presumed lost forever behind the new paintings. But Maurizio Seracini, an Italian expert in high-technology art analysis, will soon deploy the c

Former Peruvian first lady blasts Yale for refusing to turn over Machu Picchu artifacts

[Eliane Karp-Toledo, the former first lady of Peru, is a visiting lecturer at Stanford.] SURE, it seemed like a great idea when, last September, President Alan García of Peru reached a preliminary agreement with Yale about the disposition of more than 350 artifacts taken from Machu Picchu. Everyone hoped the settlement might be a break for cultural understanding in the cloudy skies of international cooperation. News reports suggested that Yale would return more than 350 museum-quali

Plunder Goes on Tour

LONDON’S Royal Academy of Arts is drawing excited crowds with its exhibition “From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870-1925 From Moscow and St. Petersburg.” These 120 Impressionist and Modernist masterpieces couldn’t be shown, however, until Britain acceded to a very unusual condition: that Parliament enact special legislation providing complete immunity to Russia from anyone claiming ownership of these paintings, some of which were seized by the Communists during the Bolshevik Revo

Will Smith wins libel pay out after Hitler slur

Hollywood actor Will Smith won a public apology and damages in London's High Court Friday over a false allegation that he had described the former Nazi leader Adolf Hitler as a "good person". His lawyer Rachel Atkins told judge David Eady the "deeply distressing" libellous allegation by World Entertainment News Network Limited (WENN) had caused her client "acute embarrassment". The claim arose after London-based WENN, which provides enterta

Recapturing the ’60s, in DayGlo Colors

MORE than a year after the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago transformed the culture wars from metaphor to mayhem, Norman Mailer was still trying to make sense of what had happened. Mr. Mailer, under oath as a witness in a federal conspiracy trial, recalled a 1967 conversation with Jerry Rubin, the Yippie leader and provocateur, about a “youth festival” that groups opposed to the Vietnam War were planning as a convention counterpoint. “I was overtaken with

A Wandering Kazakh, Before Borat

AND you thought Genghis Khan was just the scourge of nations, the slayer of millions. Little did you know that he was, as a young man, a sensitive, enlightened husband and doting father. That, at least, is how Kazakhstan’s new burgeoning film industry presents him in “Mongol,” one of five films vying tonight for the Oscar for best foreign-language film. Call it, if you will, the Revenge of the Borats. Flush with oil profits, led by a prideful autocrat, this emerging pet

The Vietnam Oscars

Throughout the duration of the bloody, wasteful, and fratricidal Vietnam War—roughly, say, from the commitment of the first American military advisers, in 1961, to the war’s end, in 1975—the Hollywood studios maintained a discreet silence, save for a few exceptions, such as John Wayne’s jingoist picture, The Green Berets, released in 1968. This was a deeply unpopular war, and conventional studio wisdom held that Americans saw enough of it on the six-o’clock news. But the dam finally broke in 197

Upton Sinclair, Lost in the Hollywood jungle

[Ernest Freeberg, history professor at the University of Tennessee, is the author of "Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent," to be published by Harvard University Press this spring. This piece was first published in the Los Angeles Times.] Moviemakers have not been kind to novelist Upton Sinclair, and "There Will Be Blood" is no exception. In the early 20th century, Sinclair was one of the first serious write

Stolen Art on Display in a Search for Owners

Jerusalem | In a remarkable feat of cooperation between France and Israel, requiring intensive negotiations and the passage of a law by the Israeli Parliament, the Israel Museum here has opened an exhibition of important art looted by the Nazis from France and then returned after the war. Some of it was never reclaimed, presumably because the owners were killed in the Holocaust. Running parallel to the show of French-held art is a companion exhibition: looted art, with no known owne

August Wilson’s 1900s to Be a Cycle Onstage

Cal Hoffman will be spending his vacation at the theater. Mr. Hoffman, who lives in New York, plans to visit Washington for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ presentation of August Wilson’s 20th Century, a full month of staged readings of Wilson’s 10-play cycle chronicling the lives of African-Americans in the last century, a play for each decade. “The stories are so specific, you can’t help but get emotionally involved within the first 5 to 10 minutes

University of Chicago will present an exhibit: Catastrophe! The Looting and Destruction of Iraq’s Past

The Oriental Institute Museum of the University of Chicago will present an exhibit Catastrophe! The Looting and Destruction of Iraq’s Past in Chicago from April 10 to December 31, 2008. The opening date, April 10, marks the fifth anniversary of the looting of the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad. The looting of the Iraq Museum was widely publicized in the international press. However, it is less well known that ongoing looting of archaeological sites poses an even greater threat to t

At Folger, England Emerges From the Myths of Time

In 1588, the Spanish Armada that threatened Elizabethan England was undone by a storm. Seventeen years later, the infamous Gunpowder Plot, an effort by angry Catholics to blow up Parliament, failed when the conspirators panicked and were captured. These close calls with fate were rapidly put to good propaganda use by the rulers of England, and there emerged a persistent new theme in early 17th-century politics: Providence was looking out for Britain. A new exhibition at the Folger S

Author of biography of cartoonist Bill Mauldin interviewed

Visitors to the site may remember my late January used bookstore discovery of Bill Mauldin’s 1944 World War II book, Up Front. That discovery ultimately led me to contact Todd DePastino, regarding both his latest work, a biography of Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front (which is to be released by W. W. Norton on February 25) and Mauldin’s Willie & Joe: The WWII Years (edited by DePastino and set to be released on March 24 by Fantagraphics). I can honestly say I enjoy every interview I do for this

History mystery | S.C. black regiment to be featured on PBS

As the Great War raged in Europe in 1917, a group of African-American draftees and their white officers — all from South Carolina — mustered into the newly built Camp Jackson in Columbia to train for the trenches. But before they could be sent to fight in World War I, the institutional racism of the day kicked in. They would not be allowed to serve alongside all-white U.S. units. The solution? They would fight for France, a U.S. ally. “Some had never seen a