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

Reds: Warren Beatty's history lesson is 25 years old

[Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.] The movie star Warren Beatty, like so many people these days, is getting old, and with the hot breath of mortality on the back of his wattled neck he has undertaken the large project of reclaiming his reputation as a maker of movies. And not a moment too soon, either. Beatty's last several pictures have ranged from the kind that barely break even (Bulworth) to the kind that break the bank--calamitous, apocalyptic commercia

1963 Profumo scandal spawns musical

The Profumo scandal, involving a Cabinet minister, a showgirl and a Soviet naval attaché, which shook the political establishment 50 years ago, is to be turned into a stage musical. The show, complete with nude romps and new theories about conspiracies and cover-ups, will be built around Christine Keeler. Keeler was a 19-year-old model and topless dancer whose affair with John Profumo, the Tory War Secretary, led to his resignation in 1963 after he lied about it in Parl

At 40, The Doors break on through -- again

It seems to happen every decade or so. In 1979, eight years after the death of the Doors' magnetic frontman Jim Morrison, the band's song"The End" seared the psyche of moviegoers during the opening scene of Francis Ford Coppola's landmark Vietnam epic,"Apocalypse Now." Then in 1991, Oliver Stone's Doors biopic relit the fire of interest in the band, recalls manager Jeff Jampol, commenting on the Doors' enduring and cyclical popularity. Now, the band's surviving members --

Filmmaker sees lessons in Iranian history (1953 coup)

Iranian artist Shirin Neshat plans to shoot a film about the United States overthrowing a democratically-elected government in Iran to gain control of the nation's vast oil supplies. Ripped from today's headlines? Not quite. The project is not based on the West's ongoing standoff over Tehran's nuclear program but rather on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's first overthrow of a foreign government, 53 years ago. But while the movie is set in the past, Neshat hopes it w

Alvaro Vargas Llosa: Flags of Our Fathers Is Powerful

[Alvaro Vargas Llosa is director of The Center on Global Prosperity at The Independent Institute. He is a native of Peru and received his B.S.C. in international history from the London School of Economics.] Most of the reviews of Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers” salute the movie as a powerful work of art whose message is that war, whether of choice or necessity, is always horrific. Actually, it does a lot more than that. It tells us that war tends to involve a d

Clint Eastwood's latest film sets the record straight

Any movie that deals with the battle of Iwo Jima is doing so under the long, tall shadow of John Wayne and his portrayal of Stryker in Sands of Iwo Jima. Thematically, however, Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers film has more in common with another Wayne movie -- John Ford’s final masterpiece, The Man who Shot Liberty Valance, in which Edmund O’Brien’s soused newspaperman declares, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Flags of our Fathers is faithfully based on the great

Photo exhibit in London features Iraqi cultural sites

Once they were the pride of ancient civilisations: mighty cities, fortresses, temples and ziggurats. But time, weather and man have left them in ruins. Now their glory can be seen in aerial photographs which go on display at the British Museum next month. The show, The Past from Above, demonstrates, like Shelley's poem Ozymandias ? "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains" ? the impermanence of man's labour. The damage caused by nature

Exhibition explodes myth of sponging refugees (UK)

One is a doctor who fled Saddam Hussein's Iraq and now runs a £1m felafel business. Another is a young Polish Roma woman who captains a boys' football team while another is a Kurdish separatist with a flourishing acting career. The courage of Britain's refugees and their contribution to their adoptive nation were yesterday highlighted in a new exhibition designed to refute the image of asylum-seekers as a social and financial burden. The show at the Museum of London, e

Film of Nazis at play is found in church

A film made by Nazi officers showing them laughing and joking on a verandah, enjoying coffee and cake with female companions, has been found in the storeroom of a church in rural Devon. The SS officers, who were running a forced labour regime in southern Russian during the Second World War, are seen relaxing while troops make prisoners work. Historians said the footage was highly unusual because it was taken in Russia, and shows informal scenes as opposed to the careful

Burying Private Ryan

WHEN Peter Bardazzi, a film professor, took his students at the Fashion Institute of Technology to see “Flags of Our Fathers” last Sunday, they were surrounded in the theater by gray- and white-haired people who seemed genuinely touched by the movie’s depiction of the marines who took Iwo Jima. But the young men and women with Mr. Bardazzi, he said, found it tough to sit through. One, Shirlyn Wong, 23, said she had barely learned about Hiroshima growing up, let alone about the blood

NYT praises new $60 million Mt. Vernon exhibits, but says the GW mystery remains

There is a mystery at the heart of Mount Vernon, the estate to which George Washington retired during intervals between accomplishments as a founding father. That mystery might have been less evident before the estate’s owners, the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, spent more than $60 million to build two exhibition halls opening Friday that will transform the nature of the pilgrimage made by a million visitors a year to these rolling acres overlooking the Potomac. Now there is no a

A Museum Gold Rush (NY Museum Exhibit)

It has driven nations to war, civilizations to the pinnacles of prosperity and desperate explorers to their demise. And when it comes to driving wide-eyed crowds to museum halls, the allure of gold is no less potent. Next month, New York's American Museum of Natural History's aptly named exhibit "Gold" will offer a comprehensive review of how different cultures have used the lustrous, malleable element and will feature artifacts that stretch from ancient times to modernity

‘Law & Order’ With a Touch of Zapruder (New film: Death of a President)

Since it was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival last month, “The Death of a President,” a formally clever fake-umentary directed by Gabriel Range, has attracted some fairly predictable controversy. Since the president in question is George W. Bush and the death is the result of an assassination, the film has become a lightning rod for the usual forms of self-righteousness that often masquerade as political discussion. On one side, howls of “How dare you?” and on the other, ringing

Holocaust novel creates a sensation in Europe

The 900-page fictional memoirs of a Nazi, written in French by an American descendant of Polish Jews, solidified its place yesterday as the European literary sensation of the year, when it was awarded the Grand Prix du Roman from the Academie Francaise.Les Bienveillantes, whose Canadian publishing rights were won late Wednesday by an "extremely strong" bid from McClelland & Stewart, has sold almost a quarter million copies since its French release in August, an

Rock And Roll History For Sale

Anyone who ever pretended to be Paul McCartney making the girls faint, or Dick Clark setting up the hits on "American Bandstand" or ushering in the years in Times Square, is in luck: their props are up for auction.Clark is going to auction off years of memorabilia from "American Bandstand," "New Year's Rockin' Eve" and his other shows. Among the items to be sold by Guernsey's is Clark's microphone that he used as host of "

This Film Is Pure Fiction, but the Chase Is All Too Real (Sarajevo)

SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina — In all the time that Radovan Karadzic has been on the run, numerous tales about his whereabouts have emerged. After being indicted by United Nations prosecutors as a war crimes suspect 11 years ago, Mr. Karadzic, the former leader of Bosnia’s Serbs, has supposedly been sighted disguised as a monk, spotted in a police car escaping from pursuing soldiers and even slipping into Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital, to sip coffee under the noses of international officials re

History doc to shed new light on NW Passage explorer John Rae

A new documentary about Arctic explorer John Rae will push the case that he discovered the Northwest Passage, filmmaker John Walker says. The work by the Nova Scotia-based filmmaker is based mainly on Ken McGoogan's book Fatal Passage: The Untold Story of John Rae, the Arctic Adventurer Who Discovered the Fate of Franklin. McGoogan credits Rae with, in 1854, finding evidence of a famous mystery — the disappearance of the British explorer Sir John Franklin and his 128 cr

At Long Last, a Neglected Language Is Put on a Pedestal (Portugese)

More people speak Portuguese as their native language than French, German, Italian or Japanese. So it can rankle the 230 million Portuguese speakers that the rest of the world often views their mother tongue as a minor language and that their novelists, poets and songwriters tend to be overlooked. An effort is being made here in the largest city in the world’s largest Portuguese-speaking country to remedy that situation. The Museum of the Portuguese Language, with multimedia display

After Weak ‘Flags’ Debut, Studio May Face Costly Oscar Battle

Clint Eastwood’s World War II movie “Flags of Our Fathers” lumbered ashore this weekend weighted with the expectations of a studio needing to win big. Looking for Oscars and a payoff on the film’s $90 million budget, Paramount, its distributor, put the film in nearly 1,900 theaters, and still plans to add hundreds more as early as this week. By Monday morning, however, the studio and its partners found themselves facing a costly fight to save their showcase awards entry, as “Flags”

Vivaldi, the sex-obsessed rock star

A biopic based on the early years of Antonio Vivaldi's life is set to do for the baroque composer what Milos Forman's Amadeus achieved for Mozart more than two decades ago. Joseph Fiennes plays the lead in Vivaldi, which starts filming next April, alongside Gerard Depardieu, Jacqueline Bisset and Malcolm McDowell. Its makers hope to reprise the success of Forman's 1984 epic, which won a multitude of Oscars, revitalising interest in Mozart and his works. The new project will chart t