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

Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Album: No, Not Everyone Enjoyed the Show

It was 40 years ago last Friday that the Beatles released “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” widely, though not universally, considered the greatest rock album of all time. In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine ranked it No. 1 on its list of the 500 greatest rock albums, calling it “the most important rock & roll album ever made, an unsurpassed adventure in concept, sound, songwriting, cover art and studio technology by the greatest rock & roll group of all time.”

The History of Surf Movies

... To celebrate the newest in a long line of surf films, Sony's new CGI animated Surf's Up, which gives us the penguin perspective on competitive wave-riding, UGO offers this brief history of surfing in cinema. The history of surfing as a sport goes all the way back to the 1700s when Captain James Cook first witnessed natives riding the waves off of the Hawaiian Islands. The sport was outlawed in Hawaii by Calvinist missionaries for decades until it started a slow comeback into the public eye around the turn of the twentieth century. As surfing began to flourish again, thanks to media attention (by such writers as Mark Twain and Jack London) and new longboards, it wasn't long before the eye-catching sport caught the attention of one of the twentieth century's other major new developments - film.

History Channel pulls in big ratings for show on Star Wars

The History Channel earlier this week set a number of ratings records with a special about the origins of the Star Wars saga and the series premiere of The Universe. On Monday, Star Wars: The Legacy Revealed delivered 1.8 million adults 25-54 and 1.7 million adults 18-49, besting the network’s previous high-water marks for both demos. The special was seen by 3.1 million total viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research data. The following night, History set three recor

A Day in the Life: Sgt. Pepper Turns 40

It was forty years ago today: the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. "It's certainly a thrill," the Beatles sang; but listening today, much of the thrill is gone--except for one song. Still, it's easy to remember that day--June 1, 1967--when the first thing we saw was the cover: a collage featuring the Beatles surrounded by cut-out figures of their heroes and other celebrities, including wax figures of themselves two years earlier, when they were the lovable moptops. Roc

A new movie about WW II Japanese asks where the war-crimes buck stops

Over the coming months in this column, I will return a few times to a film titled "Ashita e no Yuigon (Best Wishes for Tomorrow)." I have been very fortunate to be able to write the script for this together with its director, Takashi Koizumi, whose last film, "Hakase no Aishita Sushiki (The Professor and his Beloved Equation)," was released in January 2006. The film, which starts shooting on June 2, concerns the postwar trial, in Yokohama, of Lt. Gen. Tasuku Okada, former

Aperture Foundation Photograph Exhibits

The Aperture Foundation is sponsoring several major photograph exhibits of interest to historians and patrons of the arts in the New York City area during the summer of 2007. Two of these exhibits, New York Rises and The Black Panthers: Making Sense of History, will start touring in the fall of 2007 and will run until 2011. Both are looking for institutions willing to host them on their tour. For more information, or to inquire about hosting one of the exhibits, please contact Annette Rosenblatt

History Channel to launch in South East Asia on 15 June

MUMBAI: AETN All Asia Networks (AAAN), a joint venture of A&E Television Networks and Astro All Asia Networks, will launch The History Channel (THC) and Crime and Investigation Network in South East Asia on 15 June. The channels will be launched in Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and Thailand. "We are going to launch both brands in additional territories in the region throughout the summer, and plan to deploy our brands and programming via VoD, mobile, and broadban

History of Modern Britain, BBC2

HE may look like a cartoon character but Andrew Marr has to be one of the most charismatic presenters on TV at the moment. Since he left his post as the BBC's political correspondent, broadcasts from outside Number 10 haven't quite been the same. Fans have been able to get a fix by getting up early on a Sunday morning but that has hardly been the best timeslot. But now Andrew Marr is back and presenting a History of Modern Britain in his own inimitable styl

Iran’s Giant Shoe Box of Faded Photographs, Full of the Unexpected

TEHRAN, May 29 — When Shadi Ghadirian was 21, she got a student job printing old photographs at the small photography museum here. She was so drawn by the 19th-century pictures of women with thick black eyebrows wearing head scarves and short skirts over baggy pants that two years later, in 2000, she began incorporating the imagery into her own photography. Using clothes from the late 1800s, she dressed female friends and posed them in front of painted backdrops to look like the wom

Largest-ever exhibit of Frida Kahlo work to open in Mexico

The 100th birthday of artist and feminist icon Frida Kahlo will be honored with the largest-ever exhibit of her paintings, the Museum of the Fine Arts Palace in Mexico said Tuesday. "The 354 pieces will be the largest exposition of Frida Kahlo," director of the National Fine Arts Institute Teresa Franco told reporters. It will also be Kahlo's first comprehensive exhibit in Mexico, she said: After Mexico proclaimed Rivera paintings to be national cultural heri

Kei Kumai: Japanese film director who won acclaim for confronting his country's history (obit)

Kei Kumai, who has died aged 76, was a distinguished Japanese film-maker whose work combined dramatic force with trenchant social criticism. He worked with many of Japan's most famous actors, and filmed a script left unrealised by world-renowned colleague Akira Kurosawa (obituary, September 7 1998). Yet he was neglected abroad, perhaps because he eschewed the fashionable experimentation of such New Wave contemporaries as Nagisa Oshima. Instead, he adopted a style of powerful simplicity, charting

Who Shall Live And Who Shall Die?--Holocaust documentary now available on DVD

"Could the Jews of Europe have been saved?" Documentary filmmaker Laurence Jarvik boldly confronts this question, exploring the actions and inaction of the Roosevelt Administration and American Jewish leaders and exposing the political tradeoffs that kept the doors closed to Jewish emigrants fleeing the Nazi regime. Requests were made to bomb Auschwitz, set up a Jewish army and construct rescue havens, yet no action was taken. Containing previously classified

Russian space history exhibition in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD: An exhibition of photographs on Russian space history that opened here on Monday features a string of interesting images, among them Laika the dog on board the second satellite launched from earth in 1957. Russian Ambassador Sergey Peskov inaugurated the five-day exhibition at the Institute of Space Technology (IST). The 57 photographs put up for display document Russian space history with images that include the maiden earth orbiting satellite, Valentina T

New Yorker profiles 3 1960s documentaries re-released

The social and political upheavals of the nineteen-sixties are the subject of an extraordinary trio of new releases—a pair of documentaries [ “American Revolution 2” and “The Murder of Fred Hampton”] by Mike Gray and Howard Alk, made in Chicago in the heat of the moment and released by Facets, and “The Hours and Times” (Choices), a 1991 drama directed by Christopher Münch.

The release of ‘Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' was a defining moment for rock -- and the world

It was 40 years ago this week -- to be precise, June 1, 1967, in Britain, a day later in the former colonies of America -- that the Beatles changed the world. Of course, the Beatles had changed the world many times before, but the release of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" was different. It was called "a decisive moment in the history of Western civilization," one of its tunes ("She's Leaving Home") was credited with being one of th

Elizabeth Kostova's 'The Historian' ... Author tried too hard

It usually can't be said that an author is trying to do too much with a book. These days, writers manufacture manuscripts at super-phonic speeds. Reading books by big name authors like James Patterson, Janet Evanovich, Dean Koontz, and Patricia Cornwell can be like springtime: It's beautiful while it lasts, but then you have to wait through the whole year again for decent weather. And popular books are always fast reads. An anomaly titled The Historian appeared on fiction be

Love affair might have fueled Jane Austen's writings

Jane Austen wrote some of English literature's most enduring romances, but she never enjoyed a passionate love affair of her own. Or did she? A new film and biography suggest that the young writer of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility wasn't the solitary genius long imagined by historians but a free spirit whose imagination was fed by a passionate, ill-fated courtship. The theory, presented by historian Jon Spence in his book Becoming Jane Austen, has been lo

NYT Critic: Drama Is Another Casualty of War

ON June 10 “Journey’s End” is likely to become the first show in recent memory to come to the end of its journey on Broadway on the very same day it takes home a major Tony award. The production is the favorite to win the prize as the best play revival of the season and is nominated in several other categories. But the producers have already set Tony Sunday, the industry’s annual festive rites, as the closing date.... What gives? A clue might be found in the fate of “Letters From Iw

New Newt Gingrich novel concerns Pearl Harbor

December 8, 1941, is not normally known as a day that will live in infamy. That phrase of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s usually refers to the preceding day, on which the American Naval fleet at Pearl Harbor was savaged by a surprise Japanese air raid. But “Pearl Harbor,” the war novel that is Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen’s latest foray into what they call “active history,” deliberately calls attention to the fact that Japan and Hawaii were on different sides of the International Da

Starring New York, City of Grit and Glamour (Exhibition)

To walk through the main concourse at Grand Central Terminal is to step onto a real-life movie set. Cary Grant passes through it while escaping his would-be killers in “North by Northwest.” Jim Carrey grabs Kate Winslet’s hand and dashes across it in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” watching people vanish one by one as his memory is erased. Most tellingly, it is the site of a pivotal moment in “The Fisher King,” when Robin Williams, as a pure-hearted, emotionally unbalanced man, spots th