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

Museum Honors Hispanic Culture

SAN ANTONIO, April 12 — With a hot pink carpet on the sidewalk and a 600-piece mariachi band in the wings, this city has swung into fiesta mode to welcome the nation’s largest Latino museum, a collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution.... The museum is in a 39,000-square-foot former food market, sheathed in Mexican pink panels and punched tin with pinpoint light holes recalling a giant luminaria. It joins a growing cultural zone including a 1949 movie palace, the Alameda, being

The World Since 9/11, in Detail and Sorrow (TV Documentary/'America at a Crossroads')

Apparently, a church dance in Greeley, Colo., led to 9/11. In 1948 Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian writer who became the father of the radical Islamist movement, was sent to the United States to temper his contempt for the West. What he saw over two years — postwar consumerism, suburban lawns, men and women dancing “breast to breast” — only further inflamed his conviction that the West was the enemy of Islam and doomed. Mr. Qutb went on to work up a pseudospiritual justificati

PBS to broadcast documentary on the Mormons

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is one of America's fastest growing religions, and its influence circles the globe. The church has 12 million members today and over half of them live outside the U.S. Yet the birth of Mormonism and its history is one of America's great neglected narratives. This four-hour documentary brings together FRONTLINE and AMERICAN EXPERIENCE in their first co-production to provide a searching portrait of this fascinating but often misunderstood religion. P

Inherit the Wind: Bibles Thumping, Suspenders Snapping (NYC Theater)

The handsome wooden courtroom that has been erected on the stage of the Lyceum Theater is Christopher Plummer’s personal playground. This may sound like a frivolous description of a forum for the lofty and abidingly important debate that occupies “Inherit the Wind,” the 1955 drama that opened last night, also starring Brian Dennehy, in a revival that is just about as wooden as its set. But while the subject of teaching evolution and religion in public schools is even more topical th

Pulitzer photography exhibit on tour in U.S.

U.S. troops raising the American flag at Iwo Jima. A gun held to the head of a Vietcong insurgent in Saigon. Students crying over the body of a fallen classmate at the bloody Kent State protest of the Vietnam War. And, most recently, relatives crying when a soldier arrives home from Iraq in a casket. These are just some of the many images to be displayed in the roving exhibit "Capture the Moment: The Pulitzer Prize Photographs," which opens Sunday at Pittsburgh's Sen. Joh

Masterpiece that fell victim to Stalin finds US audience

They are three of Russia's most towering cultural figures: the national poet Alexander Pushkin, the composer Sergei Prokofiev, and Vsevolod Meyerhold, the visionary theatrical director who was imprisoned and executed during Stalin's purges. Now after a delay of 70 years, the fruit of their collective genius will be unveiled in a world premiere of a new version of Pushkin's verse masterpiece, Boris Godunov. But the performance will not take place on a Moscow or St Petersburg stage, b

In Black Book, about the Dutch Resistance in World War II, the filmmaker Paul Verhoeven brings the brisk pacing of his Hollywood fantasies to the weightier themes of his early European features

You can't help admiring the candor of a filmmaker willing to call one of his most successful releases "nonsense." The film was Basic Instinct (1992), a blockbuster that provoked protests from gay activists over what they saw as dangerously negative stereotyping. It seems they took the movie more seriously than its director, Paul Verhoeven. In an interview on the DVD, Verhoeven says that Basic Instinct — which nods to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) — is well made, but that the Joe Es

Kurt Vonnegut, Novelist Who Caught the Imagination of His Age, Is Dead at 84

Kurt Vonnegut , whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island. Mr. Vonnegut suffered irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago, according to his wife, Jill Krementz. ... The defini

Civil War history seen through iPod tour

Twenty-nine Kansas counties are in line to receive up to $10 million in federal money to help people relive history with an iPod. It's all about freedom. From its inception, Kansas was about struggles for freedom and survival -- those of American Indians, black Americans, women and states. To recognize that, Congress has designated 29 counties in eastern Kansas and 12 in Missouri a National Heritage Area, creating the second largest historic area in the nat

Expectations great for Dickens the theme park (UK)

The river is brown and pungent, the houses are haunted and the streets teem with thieves. Charles Dickens's England, however, never had construction workers in hard hats and high visibility vests. News that the finishing touches are being applied to the £62 million theme park may be unwelcome among literary purists, but Dickens World in Chatham, Kent, is expected to attract more than 300,000 visitors a year. The complex offers a boat ride in a London sewer,

Latinos Attack PBS for WWII Series

Last month, President Bush saluted the famed Tuskegee airmen as they received the Congressional Gold Medal, affirming that the sacrifice and service of African-Americans had finally been granted its place of honor in the nation's remembrance of World War II. But Hispanic Americans of the Greatest Generation are still battling for acknowledgment, and their fight has now embroiled celebrated documentarian Ken Burns and PBS television. Emmy-award winner Burns is noted for TV series chr

Belgians Hail the Middle Ages (Well, Not the Plague Part)

AARSCHOT, Belgium — During the week, Ivonne Janssens, 57, is a hospital cleaner. But come the weekend, she climbs the narrow steps of a three-story medieval tower and turns into a 14th-century duchess with a faux-emerald necklace, a linen headdress, a leather satchel full of fake gold coins and a retinue of mercenaries to fend off invading French knights. Her husband, Daniel Grandjean, a 50-year-old furniture maker with a pot belly and bushy beard, becomes an ax-wielding soldier-for

Veteran novelist delves into Civil War

Robert Olmstead always considered his war the Revolutionary War, when he was growing up on a farm in New England. It was not until he was teaching at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania did the novelist first visit Gettysburg, where he was transfixed by another great American conflict. He returned countless times to the national military park, in the middle of the day and at midnight, on his own and paid $25 to ride with battlefield guides while they drove his car and nar

Historian calls 300 a racist and insulting film

[Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.]

Film revives notoriety for author Clifford Irving

Author Clifford Irving sounded wistful, even proud, this week as he recalled his wild adventures of the early 1970s, when he infamously duped his publishers at McGraw-Hill, the media, handwriting analysts and, as legend has it, President Nixon and the congressman who later investigated Watergate, into believing that the reclusive Howard Hughes had dictated his memoirs to him. But Irving's tone turned bitter when asked about the film "The Hoax," opening today, director Lass

On the reopening of the Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (slide show)

In this issue, Rebecca Mead reports on the reopening of the Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The renovation took thirty years, cost more than two hundred million dollars, and has been completed at a controversial time in the world of antiquities. In the past decade, a number of high-profile court cases have centered on the illegal excavation and exportation of ancient archeological finds. Here is a portfolio of images of the galleries and of some of the treasures feat

Hughes 'Hoax' revives famed 1970s literary lie on film

Reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes famously broke his silence in the 1970s to denounce a fake autobiography, a yarn he considered more wild and imaginative than any script he had ever seen in Hollywood. "I only wish I were still in the movie business," he said at the time. Thirty-five years later comes "The Hoax," the film the late Hughes never made about the roguish author Clifford Irving and the great literary fib he perpetrated. It opens in the

If you want a real history lesson, watch 'South Park'

An eight-year-old boy, dressed as Hitler and warped by repeated viewings of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, leads a marching parade past the town synagogue. “Es is Zeit fur Rache!” Eric Cartman chants (“It is time for revenge!”). “Wir mussen die Juden ausrotten!” the crowd replies (“We must exterminate the Jews!”). This is the world of South Park, the animated satire that last week depicted the bloody suicide of the Queen, bringing predictable calls for censorship when the series is broa

Judge who hounded Pinochet inspires show on Broadway

The Spanish judge who sprang to fame when he tried to extradite the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet from Britain has become the inspiration for a new Broadway play. Baltasar Garzón's campaigning work for human rights from the benches of Madrid's top court has pitted him against an exotic array of characters from Pinochet to George Bush and Osama bin Laden. Now this crusading work has inspired a new version of a classic Spanish play. La Vida es Sueñ

Sydney Pollack to Direct Film on 2000 Bush-Gore 'Recount' for HBO

HBO is revisiting one of the most dramatic events in U.S. election history with "Recount," a film about the 2000 turmoil in Florida to be directed by Oscar winner Sydney Pollack. Paula Weinstein is executive producing the HBO Films project, which is targeted to premiere in spring 2008. Written by actor Danny Strong, Spring Creek Prods.' "Recount" chronicles the weeks after the 2000 presidential election and goes behind the scenes of the recounts in F