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

German Communist era film wins top Europe award

"The Lives of Others", a drama about a secret policeman in Communist East Germany, won the top prize at the European Film Awards on Saturday held in Poland's capital. The film beat Spanish director Pedro Almodovar's"Volver", which won five awards, including best director and best actress for Penelope Cruz."It means a lot to me to get this award here, since my father was born in this country," said Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck, the director of the winning film called"Das Leben Der

The Nativity Story earns positive review from the NYT

It’s best to think of “The Nativity Story” as a Hollywood version of the kind of Christmas production some of the “Peanuts” kids put on in “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” This is not meant as a criticism. Quite the contrary. Directed by Catherine Hardwicke from a script by Mike Rich, “The Nativity Story” sticks to the familiar details of the narrative and dramatizes them with sincerity and good taste. There are no flights of actorly or cinematic bravura — though all of the performances

Bobby: The Myth of the Kennedys

Emilio Estevez’s film Bobby opened in theaters across the country last week. It received mixed reviews from most critics, who nevertheless praised Estevez, the son of actor Martin Sheen, for making a “serious” movie that attempts to capture the political atmosphere in the U.S. on the eve of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968. Whatever its shortcomings as a film, the major problem with Bobby is political -- it regurgitates all of the myths about Robert K

Law Professor Turns to Fiction for 'The Shakespeare Chronicles'

Nineteen years ago, and 370 years after his death, William Shakespeare was on trial for literary fraud in front of three Supreme Court Justices.  The trial was not real of course, but it was public.  Before a panel made up of Justices William H. Brennan, Jr., Harry A. Blackmun, and John Paul Stevens, 900 observers in a Washington, D.C. church, and a national television audience, James Boyle , now the William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke, successfully argued that Shakespeare, not Edward

The unceasing drabness of The Nativity Story

In the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, common wisdom had it that there was something you were supposed to understand about The Passion of the Christ in order to understand the voters of the heartland, or the return to old-fashioned values, or whatever it was the liberal elite (remember them?) just didn't get about the wholesome populism of Red America. To observe that The Passion was simply a bad movie was far from a simple gesture; it positioned you, willy-nilly, in a camp with

Italy Lends Antiquities to 2 Museums

Courtesy of the Italian government, visitors to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will find an unfamiliar antiquity on view today in each institution’s classical galleries. The artifacts are the first fruits of separate agreements that Italy reached this year with those museums to return antiquities that Italian officials have long contended were looted or removed illegally from their country. In exchange for the return of the objects

$15.4 Million at Sotheby’s for a Rockwell Found Hidden Behind a Wall

A beloved Norman Rockwell painting that was discovered behind a false wall in a Vermont home last spring sold yesterday at Sotheby’s for $15.4 million, a record price for the artist at auction. The image, “Breaking Home Ties,” reproduced on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post on Sept. 25, 1954, was voted the second-most popular cover in the magazine’s history. (No. 1 was “Saying Grace,” the Nov. 24, 1951 cover, also by Rockwell.) The previous auction record for a Roc

The Great War gets an official museum of its own

KANSAS CITY, Mo.--It would have been easy for the new National World War I Museum, which opens here this week, to focus primarily on America's relatively minor role in the first "war to end all wars." Gen. John J. "Black Jack" Pershing, leader of the American Expeditionary Force, and a World War I artillery captain named Harry Truman were both native Missourians. Dwight Eisenhower, raised in neighboring Kansas, also fought in the Great War, as did a cavalryman-turned-tanker n

Hollywood's "Nativity" in world premiere at Vatican

"The Nativity Story", a Hollywood movie of the story of Mary and Joseph before the birth of Jesus, had its world premiere at the Vatican on Sunday and won strong praise from the man known as the"deputy pope". The audience of some 8,000 people who attended a benefit gala premiere in the Vatican's vast Paul VI Hall broke into applause five times during the screening and again at the end. It was the first feature film to premiere at the Vatican. "It is well done," said Cardinal Tarcisio

Sky disc of Nebra shines in Basel

The oldest representation of the cosmos – the sky disc of Nebra – has gone on show in Basel's history museum. Basel (Swiss) has a special place in the disc's history. It was here that police seized the disc after it was stolen from its place of origin in Germany. The disc, which forms the centrepiece of an exhibition devoted to Bronze Age objects, has been hailed as one of the most important archaeological discoveries of recent times. Made out of bronze with gold embossing, the 3,600-year-old ob

Ruby slippers land at space museum

Dorothy's ruby red slippers are now temporarily nestled near NASA's rockets and Charles Lindbergh's plane in a new Smithsonian exhibit that has the blessing of two original munchkins from "The Wizard of Oz." More than 150 well-known objects from the National Museum of American History collection are on public display in the "Treasures of American History" exhibit across the National Mall at the National Air and Space Museum. Leaders of the popular hi

James Bond: The Man Who Saved Britain

The cars, the girls, the martinis, the exotic locales, the eye-popping gadgets - for a generation of fans, James Bond embodied the quintessence of British savoir-faire: the civil servant with a license to kill, the secret agent who saved civilization from a series of nefarious villains while staying in the world's fanciest hotels and romancing a bevy of beauteous babes. In the entertaining and very funny new book "The Man Who Saved Britain," Simon Winder - publishing direc

Tom Stoppard's play about Russia gets favorable review from the NYT

The world turns quickly in Lincoln Center Theater’s exhilarating production of Tom Stoppard’s “Voyage,” the first installment of his “Coast of Utopia” trilogy about Russian intellectuals in the 19th century dreaming of revolution. It isn’t simply the industriously employed revolving stage of the Vivian Beaumont Theater, where the play opened last night, that gives the heady sense of an entire culture about to spin off its axis. As directed by Jack O’Brien and performed with freshnes

German Museums Move Closer to Reunification

BERLIN, Nov. 23 — It may be a decade or more before this city’s monumental Museum Island finally shakes off the twin legacies of World War II and East Germany’s Communist regime, but with the reopening of the Bode Museum, this cultural park in the former East Berlin has taken another step toward recovering its place as one of the world’s great centers of art. With the restoration of the Alte Nationalgalerie, or Old National Gallery, in 2001, two of the island’s five museums are now

Peter Plagens: Whose Art Is It Anyway?

"If that's art, I'm a Hottentot," declared President Harry S. Truman in 1947. The objects of his displeasure were a group of paintings about which Look magazine ran a spread under the watchdog headline "Your Money Bought These Pictures." The State Department had purchased the paintings for an exhibition that would travel overseas to proclaim by example that artistic creativity flourished best in America, under American capitalism. The paintings on trial--such as Yasuo Kuniyos

Teen Angel: 15th-Century Girl Makes Good in 'Joan of Arc' (exhibition review);

"Joan of Arc" at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, though not much of an art show, is a powerful and learned study in renown. The little Latin books, medieval swords, dinner bells and film stills crowded in its cases aren't what mainly matter. What matters is the girlish, great, utterly improbable person they call forth, and the forces she deploys on her long, triumphant march into your mind. Joan of Arc (1412-1431), dead while in her teens, didn't have much time.

McEwan: An inspiration, yes. Did I copy from another author? No

Ian McEwan, one of the most revered authors of his generation, has hit back at accusations that he copied another writer’s work — the second time the novelist has had to face such claims. Sections of the novel Atonement, which is being turned into a film starring Keira Knightley, are said to be similar to parts of a wartime memoir by Lucilla Andrews, a bestselling author of romantic fiction. Ms Andrews is mentioned briefly in the acknowledgements of Atonement, and McEwan says that h

‘Desperate’ measures: History Channel reveals truth behind Pilgrims’ journey

Desperate Crossing: The Untold Story of the Mayflower. Tomorrow at 8 p.m. on the History Channel. Grade: B Thanksgiving is often marked by cute school plays that celebrate the relationship between the Pilgrims and American Indians. The History Channel’s new special “Desperate Crossing: The Untold Story of the Mayflower” (tomorrow at 8 p.m.) goes beneath the veneer of the familiar story taught in elementary school. Told through believable and meticulous re-ena

Bringing a Political Trial to Animated Life (Chicago 10)

OUTSIDE, along broiling Main Street in Bridgehampton, N.Y., the summer traffic flow was controlled by Land Rovers and large dogs on leashes. Inside there was no traffic flow: the film director Brett Morgen and the actor Roy Scheider were jammed into a Buick-size sound booth, fashioning a vocal performance to accompany the animated sequences of Mr. Morgen’s new film. Mr. Morgan — to whom the words mad scientist have occasionally been applied — seemed to be channeling strange vo

In This Rogues’ Gallery, Photographs Are Just the Start

Fifteen years ago, Arthur Nash made one of his first purchases of gangland memorabilia when a dealer in rare photographs showed him what he said was the first published picture of the gangster Arnold Rothstein. Before long, Mr. Nash, who was 19 at the time, was searching for photographs of other notorious figures, like Al Capone, Machine Gun Jack McGurn and Abe Reles. Mr. Nash’s interest in gangland lore broadened, and he eventually assembled a collection of 1,500 items documenting