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

New Film on North Korea gets US premiere -- Tells story of the last US defector

'Crossing the Line' the new film from VeryMuchSo productions premiered at the Sundance film festival in Park City, Utah last week, this is the third film from the makers of 'The Game of Their Lives' and 'A State of Mind' and tells the story of Joe Dresnok, the last remaining American defector in North Korea (full disclosure: I worked on it). The film, narrated by Christian Slater, had its world premiere at the Pusan film festival in South Korea late last year and the 5 screenings at

A Japanese Filmmaker’s Devastating Window on the Iraq War (Documentary)

At a time when the Iraq war continues to be a defining issue on the American scene, it is ironic that the most powerful and uncompromising documentary on the subject remains almost entirely unknown and unseen in this country. It took Japanese filmmaker Watai Takeharu a year and a half to film more than 123 hours of footage in Iraq, which he managed to edit down to two unforgettable hours. The result is the stunning Little Birds, which plunges the viewer into the middle of the war, in all its sor

Milton Friedman: Free-Market Economist, Up by His Bootstraps (documentary/PBS)

Milton Friedman, arguably the most influential economist of the 20th century, died in November at 94, and today the world is commemorating him. In celebration of what has officially been named Milton Friedman Day, universities, political institutes and online discussion groups around the country will conduct debates and pay tribute to his legacy. What this at least partly seems to suggest is that liberals do not sanctify their own with quite the same verve as their conservative coun

Smithsonian Discloses Cable Programs

Smithsonian Networks, the on-demand cable channel that drew criticism over its exclusive content agreement with Showtime Networks, said yesterday that its first slate of programming would include two programs taking viewers behind the scenes of the Smithsonian’s vast collections of American memorabilia. “Stories from the Vaults,” a series of six 30-minute shows, will look at both the museum’s treasures and the people “who care for and unlock their secrets.” “American Treasures” will focus on a N

Spain Looks Back at Its Civil War (Exhibit/Madrid)

MADRID — It was “the golden age of foreign correspondents,” the historian Hugh Thomas wrote, a period in the late 1930s when the literary elite descended on Spain armed with a lust for adventure and belief in a cause. The lure was the Spanish Civil War. In February 1936 Spanish voters elected, by a small plurality, a center-left coalition of Socialists, Communists, Republicans and Anarchists. Then in July, Gen. Francisco Franco led an uprising against the five-year-old Spanish Repub

Broadcast museum to celebrate 'New Deal' speech (Chicago)

The time is right to make a little more history. In about five months, the Museum of Broadcast Communications will host a public celebration of Franklin D. Roosevelt's historic "New Deal" speech at Chicago's 1932 Democratic convention. On July 2, 75 years to the day after FDR took to the stage at the Chicago Stadium and issued a stirring "call to arms ... to restore America," actor Robert Vaughn ("The Man from U.N.C.L.E.") surrounded by bu

Rockwell's 'Lincoln the Railsplitter' bought for $1.6 million

The Norman Rockwell painting "Lincoln the Railsplitter," which shows a young Abraham Lincoln before he became U.S. president, will be shown in public for the first time in years after being bought by a museum for $1.6 million (€1.2 million). The Butler Institute of American Art bought the painting Nov. 30 in a sale at Christie's Auction House in New York. The previous owner was Texas billionaire and former presidential candidate H. Ross Perot. The acquisition

Exhibition traces revolution through portraiture (London)

A major new exhibition traces the decline of absolute monarchy and rise of the Enlightenment that swept North America and Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, and shows how portraits reflected the revolutionary changes. Called "Citizens and Kings," the show at London's Royal Academy of Arts gathers works by artists like Goya, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Joshua Reynolds, Jacques-Louis David and Thomas Gainsborough. The early works feature kings and queens

R.I. Teen Gets Armor-and-Sword Photo in Yearbook

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- A school district that initially refused to publish a yearbook photo showing a senior dressed in chain mail and holding a sword has agreed to print it after all, lawyers for both sides said Monday. School officials still believe their decision to ban Patrick Agin's photo was correct, but they face a $600,000 deficit and couldn't afford the legal fight, said the district's attorney, Stephen Robinson. ''It was strictly a cost-benefit analysis in the ma

New PBS series on the supreme court focuses on the history of personalities

... WNET, in New York, has produced an impressive if occasionally off-target new four-part series for PBS on the court's history. It starts with the great formative years under Chief Justice John Marshall, runs through the struggles leading to the Civil War, examines the court's shifting perspectives on property rights and government regulation during the post-Civil War years of rapid economic expansion, assesses the impact of the New Deal and the civil-rights movement, and finally discusses the

After stumbling upon an obscure historical atrocity, Boston author brought it to light as a novel

From Leo Tolstoy to contemporary British novelist Pat Barker, writers of historical fiction have wrestled with the problem. How do you make the facts serve your story, rather than the other way around? How do you respect the history you're using without letting it take charge? Boston novelist Michael Lowenthal faced the question with his new book, "Charity Girl." He stumbled on its little-known background and knew he wanted to spread the word. Only gradually did he realize

Route 66 town saved on road to oblivion

AMBOY, Calif. -- Before Interstate 40 bypassed them, this town on old Route 66 and its modernist landmark, Roy's Motel and Cafe, thumped with life day and night. Roy's atomic-age neon sign was a beacon of civilization to weary travelers rocketing along America's Mother Road, a sign of hope to motorists whose cars had croaked in the desert heat. Amboy was the domain of Buster Burris, a rough-hewn entrepreneur with strong opinions about bikers and men with long hair. Burr

Rehabilitating Robert Moses (Exhibits/NYC)

FOR three decades his image has been frozen in time. The bulldozing bully who callously displaced thousands of New Yorkers in the name of urban renewal. The public-works kingpin who championed highways as he starved mass transit. And yes, the visionary idealist who gave New York Lincoln Center and Jones Beach, along with parks, roads, playgrounds and public pools. This is the Robert Moses most of us know today, courtesy of Robert A. Caro’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography from 1974,

Gone but Hardly Forgotten, an Idol Isn’t Buried Yet, Either

AUGUSTA, Ga., Jan. 24 — More than a month after the death of the legendary soul singer James Brown, his body still has not been laid to rest, a circumstance that has dismayed his friends and bewildered residents here in the town that has honored him as a native son. “He wrote a song about this,” said Charles A. Reid Jr., a funeral director and a lifelong friend who is holding Mr. Brown’s body while his survivors and the trustees of his estate squabble over control. “ ‘Papa Don’t Tak

Capone legacy spurned by Chicago officials, embraced by tourists

Al Capone refuses to be rubbed out. Chicago officials shun any association with the world's most famous gangster, whose Prohibition-era exploits made his name synonymous with the city. But 60 years after his death, they still can't run him out of town. Visitors from all over the world come searching for anything to do with Capone, who died Jan. 25, 1947. They drive by his house. They leave flowers, coins and cigars at his grave. They take pictures of place

Spartan epic is last hope for sword and sandal movies

'Go tell the Spartans, passer-by, That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.' So reads the epigram carved into a commemorative stone, appropriately spartan, on a Greek hill. The tale behind it thrilled generations of schoolchildren educated in the classics. Hollywood is now praying it can breathe new life into the genre of the ancient historical epic with the help of a British-led cast. The Battle of Thermopylae is regarded as one of history's pivotal moments, a doomed

Your water bill includes a museum

The Metropolitan Water District has spent $16 million in ratepayer money to finance an unusual museum that officials hope will tell "the story of water" in Southern California. But today, months before its grand opening on a remote plain in Riverside County, the water museum is drowning in multimillion-dollar debt. Next month, the MWD board will be asked to spend $4 million or more to save the Center for Water Education from bankruptcy. Several contractors who

The prince, the PM and the Mona Lisa

Two Tuscan beauties have given a tantalising clue as to why Tony Blair cannot resist returning to the hospitality of Prince Girolamo Guicciardini Strozzi outside San Gimignano. The home of the prince, a professor of international law, has a swimming pool and tennis court, and the estate is comfortingly buried in dense woods. But perhaps what really keeps the Prime Minister coming back are the enigmatic yet strangely familiar smiles radiating from the prince's two charm

Victorian Bestsellers (Exhibit/NYC)

“I hate publishing!” Alfred Tennyson complained as he assembled his poems for London publication in 1842. Among his gripes was having to chase down pirated American versions of his verse, while trying to earn his keep from books and magazines. But those earnings came far more easily to him than to today’s poets. “In Memoriam” sold 25,000 copies in England in less than two years; in 1864 “Enoch Arden” sold 40,000 copies in just a few weeks. None of the other authors represented in “V

Our Father, the Nazi Zealot: A Family Grapples With Its Burdens and Blind Spots (Documentary)

The Nazis ruled Germany for 12 years and inflicted their cruelty on other European nations for around 7. Coming to terms with what Hitler and his followers did has been a much longer project — involving Jews, Germans, other Europeans and just about everyone else in the world — and it is unlikely to end anytime soon. Like many other films and books, “2 or 3 Things I Know About Him,” a new documentary directed by Malte Ludin, examines the impact of Nazism on a single family, in this case the famil