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

Face masks put on Chinese Warrior sculptures to protest pollution

Putting anti-pollution face masks on two 2,000-year-old Chinese terra cotta warriors on view at the British Museum, a father of two young girls sought on Sunday to draw attention to China’s role in carbon dioxide emissions and global warming, Reuters reported. Hustled out of the exhibition by guards, the father, Martin Wyness, said he was protesting the lack of international action. “Nothing was damaged,” he said. “It was all very respectful.”

Exhibit on Antiquaries in Britain 1707–2007: Celebrating the people who laid foundations of modern history of Britain

LONDON: At distant intervals, crucial decisions give a new twist to the cultural history of a nation. When the Society of Antiquaries held its second meeting only one week after its foundation on Dec. 5, 1707, the members decided that its purpose was to seek out "such things as may Illustrate and Relate to the History of Great Britain." By "things" they meant "Antient Coins, books, sepulchres or other Remains of Antient Worship." So it was that at one s

Antiquaries in Britain 1707–2007 (Exhibit/Royal Academy of Art UK)

Making History is not a big exhibition. It takes up only three-and-a-bit of the Royal Academy’s main rooms. But it is full of charm and its catalogue burns with enthusiasm, more so than many a self-styled blockbuster that takes a period or style and smothers it in philistine commentary about the consumption patterns of a new leisured class. There are some beautiful objects on show that antiquaries have dug up or got hold of: the Roman legionary’s cavalry parade helmet, found in 1796 by a clogmak

Vanity Fair features never before seen pics of the Kennedys

President-Elect John F. Kennedy was determined to project a wholesome, healthy image to the nation. So, on January 3, 1961, he posed with his young family for Richard Avedon. Robert Dallek tells how the photos—many published here for the first time—helped position an American dynasty. Plus: candid moments from the diaries of White House insider Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Web exclusive: The Kennedys: An archive of classic articles, photographs, and video from Vanity Fair and VF.com

NYT calls new Elizabeth movie kitschy

A kitsch extravaganza aquiver with trembling bosoms, booming guns and wild energy, “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” tells, if more often shouts, the story of the bastard monarch who ruled England with an iron grip and two tightly closed legs. It’s the story of a woman, who, as played by the irresistibly watchable Cate Blanchett as David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust period, sublimated her libidinal energies through court intrigue until she found sweet relief by violently bringing the Spanish Empire to

Elizabeth: The Golden Age (Movie Review)

Elizabeth: The Golden Age (Universal) is a great hulking slab of English cheese, Stilton perhaps, or Wensleydale. It's one part historical melodrama, two parts bodice-ripper (and that's no metaphor; at one point, Clive Owen's manly mitts literally tug at a lady-in-waiting's heaving corset). If you go in fully prepared for the cinematic equivalent of a grocery-store novel, this unnecessary sequel to Elizabeth (1998) has its pleasures: There's Cate Blanchett's ever-mobile and fascinating face, Owe

U.K.’s Lessing wins Nobel Prize in literature

Doris Lessing, author of dozens of works from short stories to science fiction, including the classic “The Golden Notebook,” won the Nobel Prize for literature Thursday. She was praised by the judges for her “skepticism, fire and visionary power.” The Swedish academy’s announcement was stunning even by the standards of Nobel judges, who have been known for such surprises as Austria’s Elfriede Jelinek and Italy’s Dario Fo. Lessing, 11 days short of her 88th birthday, is

For Soviet-Era Architecture, a White Russian Knight Emerges

... Two years ago, [Sergey] Gordeev bought a share of the Melnikov House (1927) in Moscow, setting off a panic in the city’s small but tightly knit preservation community. With its cylindrical interlocking forms, a hypnotic blend of Modernist purity and Russian mysticism, the house is considered a landmark of Soviet architecture. Yet it stands on valuable land in the city center. Preservationists feared that Mr. Gordeev, who made his money in the rough-and-tumble Russian real estat

Barbican's new exhibition which traces the history of sex in art (UK)

When police seized a photograph from the Baltic art gallery in Gateshead recently, taken by the celebrated American photographer Nan Goldin and owned by Sir Elton John, the directors of the Barbican art gallery must have felt pretty nervous. The Barbican's new show, Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now, deals with precisely the difference between art and pornography that the debate over Goldin's image of two small girls has reignited. Is Klare and Edda belly-danci

How Jean-Luc Godard made history when French intellectuals ruled the world

There's a cineaste myth that Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise, which opened in New York on April 3, 1968, at the out-of-the-way Kip's Bay Theater, inspired the Columbia students who, three weeks later, began occupying campus buildings. Godard had recently toured Ameri- can colleges with a print of La Chinoise— initially considered unreleasable—but he never got any closer to New York than SUNY Albany and, if reviews in the sec- tarian press are any indication, student radicals took La C

Gallery Vandals Destroy Photos

A grainy video of four masked vandals running through an art gallery in Sweden, smashing sexually explicit photographs with crowbars and axes to the strain of thundering death-metal music, was posted on YouTube Friday night. This was no joke or acting stunt. It was what actually happened on a quiet Friday afternoon in Lund, a small university town in southern Sweden where “The History of Sex,” an exhibi

Social Issues in American Film 1900-1934 (DVD)

American movies didn’t wait for Angelina Jolie and Michael Moore to develop a social conscience. One of the sobering lessons of the new anthology from the National Film Preservation Foundation, “Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film 1900-1934,” is that the pictures of the early 20th century were in many ways more open to the social and political world: people struggle to make a living, fight against disadvantages and prejudices and are confronted with confounding moral choices on a daily

New Republic says Jesse James movie is best of the year so far

Gentleman bandit. Heartless killer. Confederate martyr. Rank opportunist. Inspiration. Abomination. Jesse James has been considered all of the above by various people at various times, but Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is largely agnostic regarding such disputes. The film is concerned less with the content of James's character than with the meaning of his murder. Insofar as it asks a question, it is whether a man who has been elevated to myth can con

40 years after Che's death, his image is a battleground

SANTA CLARA, Cuba: Aleida Guevara March, the 46-year-old daughter of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, says she can bear the Che T-shirts, the Che key chains, the Che postcards and Che paintings sold all over Cuba, not to mention the world. At least some of the purchasers truly cherish Che, she says. On Monday she was surrounded by thousands of Che fans wearing his image here in Santa Clara, where her father's remains are kept, and where she sat in the front row of a ceremony to mark

Lee & Grant: The Opera (Review/NYT)

For a pioneer of a movement called Minimalism, the composer Philip Glass has tended to think big in finding subjects for his operas. He has already taken on Einstein, Gandhi and Columbus. Now, in “Appomattox,” which had its premiere here on Friday night at the San Francisco Opera, Mr. Glass grapples with the bloody final weeks and complex aftermath of the Civil War. The work, with a libretto by the British playwright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton, focuses on the strained, embittered yet

Germany's film industry making a comeback

The buildings are still there: the cavernous wooden-roofed studio where a 29-year-old Marlene Dietrich donned a silver top hat and suspenders and became a star overnight, and the brick blockhouse from which Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, began his cinematic tirade against the Jews. Babelsberg, the German film studios that in the 1920s and early '30s won international fame as the Teutonic Hollywood, endured the trials of Nazi rule, the Second World War and Communism.

Frankenstein's monster and his evolution over two centuries into a cultural icon

Review of Susan Tyler Hitchcock's 'Frankenstein: A Cultural History' "Hear my tale," Frankenstein's monster begs his creator. "It is long and strange." In her cultural history of our favorite monster, Susan Tyler Hitchcock shows that the story is longer and stranger than the creature or Victor Frankenstein or even Mary Shelley could ever have imagined. The unloved horror has now been flourishing for almost 200 years. The response to it has ranged from early 19th

‘Sex and the Silver Screen’ traces history of racy films

Few films nowadays spare us nudity and/or sex scenes, so we might be forgiven for thinking Hollywood features were always that liberal. Not so. ‘Sex and the Silver Screen’ (Scanbox; €44.99) shows that movies have fought a long and often controversial campaign to open up the minds of censors. While ‘Deep Throat’ may have given explicit sex a profitable outlet, it’s hard to believe Hollywood was once under the grip of a regime where couples always slept in separate beds and even a kis

Thom Sokoloski’s artwork reminds us of the victims of smallpox

At about 7 last night, “The Encampment,” an installation of 100 19th-century-style tents by the Canadian artist Thom Sokoloski, was to open in an empty field at the southern tip of Roosevelt Island. A year in the making, the tents represent the patients who once lived in the island’s smallpox hospital, the remains of which loom nearby. Inside each, volunteers would arrange artifacts to memorialize patients and other island residents. As a final touch, the tents were to be illuminate

No street to be named after Saul Bellow in Chicago

In a city whose streets commemorate fascist pilots and other controversial figures, it should have been a rubber-stamped request: a street, a statue, maybe a school named in honor of Saul Bellow, one of America's greatest writers and a Chicago literary icon. The request, made several months ago to Mayor Richard Daley's office by Bellow's longtime friend and University of Chicago colleague Richard Stern, was sent along to Ald. Toni Preckwinkle (4th.) The request was prom