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

U.S. movie about 1937 Japanese assault of Nanking to open in China

AN AMERICAN movie about Japan's mass slaughter of Chinese citizens in the World War II era will be released in China next week amid renewed friction between the country's over the atrocity's actual death toll. "Nanking" will premiere in Beijing Tuesday and be released across in China on July 7, the film's publicists said Monday. The movie examines the Japanese killings by mixing archival footage and actors' readings of witness accounts from Westerners who prot

Movie about kidnapping of Daniel Pearl

Mighty Heart tells the story of the hunt in Pakistan for kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl through the eyes of his pregnant wife, Mariane, played by Angelina Jolie dipped in caramel. Aside from Jolie—who is very fine, though improbably cast—and a sprinkling of idyllic flashbacks (Daniel gazing into his wife’s eyes, Daniel caressing her swollen belly), the movie is clipped, blunt, and grimly realistic. It is practically a policier, although the suspense is mitigated by our knowl

Book, exhibit celebrate baseball's great era of Dodgers, Giants, Yankees

Joe DiMaggio's 1948 Yankee jersey with a black sleeve strip commemorating the death that year of Babe Ruth. A telescope used by the Giants to steal catchers' signs from center field at the Polo Grounds, presumably helping them get to the 1951 World Series. The cap Johnny Podres wore when he pitched the Dodgers to their Series victory in 1955. These are among artifacts included in a new exhibit opening later this month, titled "The Glory Days,'' that glorifies the 11-year period

Local host of PBS' 'History Detectives' has all the answers

Here's a question that may or may not have an answer, but when Port Washington resident Elyse Luray comes to mind, it almost demands one: How many facts can the human brain absorb? Facts about wine or "Star Trek" or one-armed baseball players. Facts about slippers, or cowboy spurs, or paintings. Facts about bells, or newspapers (circa 1920). Facts, facts, facts -- there's a world of them out there, and Luray seems to have sponged up all of them. Some facts abo

Audiobook creators celebrate Bloomsday by recording a 32-hour version of Ulysses

Missed Bloomsday this year? There’s still time to celebrate. In fact, if your whole weekend is free, you can download a new audio version of Ulysses, listen to the entire book, and still have a few hours left for eating and sleeping. The folks at LibriVox, a group that dedicates itself to “acoustical liberation of books in the public domain,” have completed an ambitious reading of James Joyce’s masterpiece and posted it online in a couple of different formats. They’ve done a nice jo

Blade Runner at 25

Tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, which may well be the most dystopian film ever made. Set in the near future, a mere dozen years from now, in a Los Angeles gone as cold and rainy as 19th-century London, it takes the notion that life is a Darwinian struggle and runs with it, shooting as it goes. Amplifying the dark vision of Philip K. Dick, whose short novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? underlies it, Blade Runner ventures that anyone who can afford the trip

'Nanking' to hit Chinese movie screens

An American movie about Japan's mass slaughter of Chinese citizens in the World War II era will be released in the country in two weeks, amid debate over the atrocity's death toll, the film's publicists said Monday."Nanking," produced by Ted Leonsis, vice chairman of the American Internet company AOL, will premiere in Beijing July 3 and be released across in China on July 7, the publicists said in a statement. The movie, directed by Bill Guttentag and

Afghanistan Exhibition Provokes Questions

The National Geographic Society has struck a $1 million deal with the Afghan government to bring a rare cache of gold artifacts to the United States in a traveling exhibition. But some cultural experts who have followed the negotiations are questioning whether Afghanistan is being properly compensated. Plans call for the ancient Afghan pieces — part of the storied 2,000-year-old Bactrian hoard — to be displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washin

New York in All Its Nuts-and-Bolts Glory (Art Review/NYC)

The exhibition “New York Rises” makes a case for adding Eugene de Salignac, the official photographer for the New York City Department of Bridges, Plant and Structures from 1903 to 1934, to the canon of American photographers whose images are forever linked with the city. If he is not the equal of Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans and Alfred Stieglitz, his work now on view at the Museum of the City of New York demonstrates that he is at least their kin. Mr. de Sal

The Last Jews of Libya (documentary)

When UBS TMT Vice Chairman Aryeh Bourkoff arrived for the closing night of his documentary, "The Last Jews of Libya," at the Tribeca Film Festival on May 6, the place was so packed he had to give up his seat. The film, which recounts the last decades of Libya's ancient Sephardic Jewish community through the story of the Roumani family, drew more than 300 that night and about 1,000 over four screenings - quite respectable for a film that started out as a home-made family-h

The meaning of the death of Captain America

[John W. Vest is an Associate Pastor at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, and a PhD student in Biblical Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Portions of this essay are adapted from a sermon of the same title delivered at Fourth Presbyterian Church on the evening of Easter Sunday.] As scholars of religion and popular culture have long recognized, comic books are an important element of contemporary American mythology. In their 2003 book Captain America and the

Images of dying Diana anger her sons

A BRITISH television channel was to broadcast photographs overnight taken at the scene of the crash that killed Princess Diana, in defiance of a plea from her sons not to show them. The private secretary to Prince William and Prince Harry wrote to Channel 4 saying that they felt the images would be a "gross disrespect" to their mother's memory. Royal sources indicated that the letter had been written at the instigation of Prince William, who wanted to "take a s

Scott McLemee: C.L.R. James Meets Tony Soprano

Half a century before “The Sopranos” hit its stride, the Caribbean historian and theorist C.L.R. James recorded some penetrating thoughts on the gangster — or, more precisely, the gangster film — as symbol and proxy for the deepest tensions in American society. His insights are worth revising now, while saying farewell to one of the richest works of popular culture ever created. First, a little context. In 1938, shortly before James arrived in the United States, he had published The

The Bad Good Shepherd (what the movie got right and wrong)

Why did the CIA’s 1961 Bay of Pigs operation Cuba fail? In The Good Shepherd, the recent Robert DeNiro film starring Matt Damon, we are led to think that the plan collapsed because the landing site of the invasion was leaked. But in actuality, the problems with the invasion were far more profound. What really happened and in what other ways does Hollywood twist history? The CIA, surprisingly unshy these days about airing its dirty laundry, has now posted a transcript on the agency w

Cash for a bit of the old Hollywoodland sign

For 31 years, a slice of the long-gone Hollywoodland sign hung in the Andrinas' home or office. Not much longer than four feet and a few inches wide, the bronze-colored tin strip with six bright bulbs used to light up the edge of a letter D before the iconic sign was shortened in 1949. It was discovered by a relative scouring the Hollywood Hills for fossils. Guests who visited their home near the upper reaches of Beachwood Canyon would try to wrest the relic from the An

New Name and Mission for Museum of Television

First it was named the Museum of Broadcasting, and then, as cable and direct satellite grew, it became the Museum of Television and Radio. Now, in the Internet and cellphone era, that name seems out of date as well, so the museum is renaming itself again, this time as the Paley Center for Media, after the late CBS founder William S. Paley. The new name, adopted at a March board meeting, is being announced today, effective immediately. It is part of an overhaul intended to make the m

Frost/Nixon: What the NYC Play Gets Wrong (and Right)

[Robert Zelnick, professor of journalism at Boston University and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, served as executive editor of the original Nixon/Frost interviews.] With Frost/Nixon, Peter Morgan confirms his place as the multi-media master of a strange but engaging genre of fiction. The writer behind such award-sea

Frost/Nixon: What the NYC Play Is All About ... Controlling History

The crucial moment of Peter Morgan’s new play on Broadway, “Frost/Nixon,” about the four ninety-minute interviews that David Frost conducted with Richard Nixon in 1977, comes not during the famous final session, on Watergate, but the night before. Nixon, who has been drinking, places an imaginary but not unimaginable phone call to Frost, who has been agonizing over his abject failure to direct the conversation in the first three interviews. The ex-President, played by Frank Langella, point

Novel features historian as main character

[John Crowley's ] Endless Things concludes the story of Pierce Moffitt, a teacher and historian who leaves his painfully disordered city life for the pastoral solitude of the Faraway Hills. There, surrounded by friends, lovers and assorted castoffs from the '60s, Pierce embarks on a new, though no less complicated, life and begins writing a book based on a radical new theory of history. This theory posits that, at infrequent intervals, the nature of the world changes in fundamental ways. As one

Peter and Dan Snow tell Andrew Pettie about the eight key battles that shaped the 20th century

Peter and Dan Snow love war. Not waging it, of course. But discussing, analysing and explaining it. Which is why the father and son team are going back to war, as it were, for 20th Century Battlefields, the pair’s enthralling follow-up to their Bafta award-winning BBC2 series, Battlefield Britain. ‘War is the most extraordinary, extreme human experience,’ says Dan. ‘In the case of Stalingrad, 2million people came together in one place with the single intention of killing one another