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

Film to be shot in Gdansk about Irish patriot, Connolly

The Polish port of Gdansk is to provide the backdrop for a new film based on the life of Irish patriot James Connolly. Connolly - executed for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising - will be played by Peter Mullan of Trainspotting fame. The film, due to be filmed in late 2008 or 2009, will be shot in Poland because Dublin has become far too modern. "Dublin has become Google city," said Tom Stokes of Rascal Films. "All the old dockla

Elvis is Alive Museum isn't dead

Don't count Andy Key as one of those Elvis Presley fanatics who insist the King never died. Key, 38, said he's "open to the possibility" Presley is alive, but he's counting on there being enough skeptics out there to make his new business a success. With an $8,000 eBay bid, Key won the Elvis is Alive Museum's collection and plans to move the museum from its current site in Wright City, Missouri, to Mississippi, where Key lives and Presley was born.

'Rosie the Riveter' model going strong at 85

At 79, Patricia Berberich is certainly old enough to have heard of Rosie the Riveter, but when it came to placing a face with the name, she admits her mind was blank. So, when the woman dining with her one evening this spring at the McLean retirement home mentioned having been the model for artist Norman Rockwell's World War II-era heroine, Berberich politely excused herself to do a little research. "My instinct was to get right to the Internet and look it up," she

Life’s Pleasures: The Ashcan Artists’ Brush with Leisure, 1895-1925 (N-Y Historical Society/Exhibit)

New York City’s first museum, the New-York Historical Society, will showcase the dynamic works of America’s first modern painters—“The Eight” and the Ashcan School—in Life’s Pleasures: The Ashcan Artists’ Brush with Leisure, 1895–1925. The exhibition commemorates the centennial of their groundbreaking 1908 show at New York’s Macbeth Galleries with more than seventy renowned canvasses. Featured among these are William Glacke

Looted art returned to Iran from Italy

The Italian Culture Ministry yesterday returned 41 archaeological artifacts of Middle Eastern origin to the Iranian ambassador in Italy. The pieces date between the 8th and 14th centuries and were part of a larger haul of 309 objects found by the ministry’s art-theft police in September 2005 at an antiquities fair near Milan. Experts at the National Museum of Oriental Art in Rome studied the artifacts and determined which countries they belonged to. Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli told report

Hokum That Stands the Test of Time (Exhibition/LA)

LOS ANGELES — Before I arrived here, a flier was in my mailbox, an advertisement for “China China — Le Grand Cirque.” It described “an unprecedented dimension of body control, acrobatic precision and unbelievable capability.” Obviously they didn’t know about Ricky Jay. For years Mr. Jay, the sleight-of-hand artist and archivist of all sorts of eccentric entertainments, has been collecting historic equivalents of the circus broadside, some dating back to Shakespeare’s day.

French Founding Father: Lafayette's Return to Washington's America (N-Y Historical Society/Exhibition Review in NYT)

From Lafayette, Wis., to Fayette, Me.; from Fayetteville, Ark., to Lafayette County in Missouri; even in La Grange, Wyo., and La Grange County in Indiana the renowned Frenchman Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette left his mark (or at least the name of his estate east of Paris, La Grange). Lafayette, as he was more familiarly known here, also left his visage on 19th-century punch bowls and serving plates, clothes brushes and bank notes, pitchers and paintings.

Vietnam War Novel Wins National Book Award

“Tree of Smoke,” a sweeping novel by Denis Johnson about the Vietnam War that features intersecting stories of an array of American and Vietnamese soldiers and intelligence officers, won the National Book Award for fiction last night. Mr. Johnson, who had been widely favored to take the prize for the book, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, was on assignment in Iraq. His wife, Cindy Lee Johnson, accepted the award. She read from a speech Mr. Johnson had prepared, in which he

The 'Myth' of the Would-Be Hitler Assassin, subject of the new Tom Cruise movie

Claus Graf von Stauffenberg, who tried to kill Adolf Hitler with a briefcase bomb on July 20, 1944, is everywhere these days. But does he really deserve all the attention? German soldiers on Wednesday celebrated what would have been Stauffenberg's 100th birthday. Considering he's been dead for more than half of the 100 years since his birth, Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg sure is making a lot of headlines these days. Not only is Tom Cruise playing the colonel, who t

Korean-German exhibit highlights WWII sex slavery

Korea and Germany are to hold a joint photo exhibition detailing atrocities from World War II. Korea's state-run Northeast Asia History Foundation and Germany's Ravensbrück Memorial Museum will hold the Korea-Germany Forced Sexual Slavery Exhibition against the backdrop of rising awareness of the plight of "Comfort Women." The exhibition will be held at Seoul's Seodaemun Prison History Hall from Nov. 15-30 and will compare the plight of women in Nazi concent

From home front to battlefield, new exhibit tells story of World War II (PA)

ALLENTOWN, Pennsylvania: Fresh-faced soldier Paul Yoder dashed off a letter to his mother on Feb. 10, 1945, acknowledging receipt of a package from home and discussing the snowy weather on the German front. "Things look a little better," he wrote in hurried, barely legible script. "Maybe one of these days the war will be over. We keep praying that it will." Yoder was killed in action a day later. He was 19. His mother likely did not see the letter un

An exhibition of pictures by Pyotr Otsup features defining shots of Lenin and Stalin

Pyotr Otsup's name may not ring any bells, but his images are familiar to anyone who has studied modern history. His photographs of Josef Stalin, Vladimir Lenin and Mikhail Kalinin were repeatedly reprinted during the Soviet era, and appeared on posters, stamps and in textbooks. An exhibition of his photographs at the Zurab Gallery, "The Space of Revolution: Russia. 1917-1941," opened on Thursday, the 90th anniversary of the October Revolution. Recordings of folk tunes su

Enthusiast finds history in antique records (78 rpm et al.)

After cranking up his Edison Diamond Disc Phonograph by hand, Timothy Brooks gingerly drops a needle onto the black plastic disc, bringing forth a boisterous jazz tune. Along the walls of his Glenville home, Brooks has more than 10,000 other antique records, representing almost a half century of collecting 78 rpm records at rummage sales, auctions and through the Internet. While showing off several of the ancient phonographs, Brooks explained how the primitive state o

Wolfe sparks battle in the art world

It's not the first time Gen. James Wolfe has been at the centre of an international tug of war. But now it's the fate of a rare 18th-century painting of the famed British commander - not the future of Canada - that's on the line. The British government has blocked the planned export of a landmark portrait of the Canadian history icon - created within months of Wolfe's death at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759 - after an unidentified Canadian or American collector purchase

Frizzy hair and hats... a Victorian fashion guide

The dresses might have been longer and the relationship advice more conservative, but 144 years ago, the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine was studied no less keenly than the pages of Cosmopolitan. Published by Isabella Beeton - better known as Mrs Beeton, the celebrated Victorian cook - it was an indispensable guide for those ladies of high society who were terrified of committing a fashion faux pas. Now that 19th-century style advice will be available to modern women w

Ancient music wins new fans

One of the world's oldest styles of religious music is attracting a host of new enthusiasts. Gregorian chant is usually associated with monks in monasteries, but it's being heard more often now in regular services. Its growing popularity brought 70 representatives of choirs from Northern Ireland to a chanting workshop in the Dominican Convent in west Belfast. The college chapel became a study for a day as experts passed on advice on how best to perform the

Wild West: The Prequel

The western genre and the Hollywood mythmaking machine match up so nicely that it’s hard to imagine one without the other. But the hunger — and the market — for a reassuring romantic national creation story as a pop-culture staple did not wait for the movies to be invented. In the late 19th century, even while the frontier was still a place and not a memory, “Wild West” shows traversed the United States and even Europe, drawing millions of spectators who paid to witness the western idea acted ou

American Assassin, the first in-depth documentary about Oswald's years in Minsk

[American Assassin is] a joint production of Denver filmmaker Robert Bayne and Minsk Channel 8 in Belarus, the only independent broadcast TV station in that former Soviet republic. Three years in the making, the 2006 documentary is the first to delve deeply into the 2½ years Oswald spent in Minsk, Byelorussia, at the height of the Cold War. He was not yet 20 years old when he defected to the Soviet Union in September 1959, and not quite 23 when he returned to the United States, bitterly disappoi

Oswald’s Ghost, a new documentary by filmmaker Robert Stone, debuts on American Experience

The 2007-08 season of AMERICAN EXPERIENCE opens with Oswald’s Ghost, a new documentary by filmmaker Robert Stone. It purports to chronicle “America’s forty-year obsession with the pivotal event of a generation,” the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963. Oswald’s Ghost is not another “whodunit” film about the assassination. Rather, it is billed as close to a “definitive account” of what the assassination did to America. “This is a film,” in the words of

The forgotten battle of Passchendaele (Movie)

A new movie may finally illuminate the `black hole' in our memory of this World War I battle in which feared Canadian `storm troopers' wrested a tiny Belgian town from the Germans. It's about time. *** Paul Gross's $20 million epic film Passchendaele will be the largest homegrown Canadian war movie ever made, and he makes no apologies for that. "We're woefully ignorant of our military history," Gross says. "For me it's an issue. How do you kn