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

African-Americans written out of Pacific war in Clint Eastwood's new film, veterans say

On February 19 1945 Thomas McPhatter found himself on a landing craft heading toward the beach on Iwo Jima. "There were bodies bobbing up all around, all these dead men," said the former US marine, now 83 and living in San Diego. "Then we were crawling on our bellies and moving up the beach. I jumped in a foxhole and there was a young white marine holding his family pictures. He had been hit by shrapnel, he was bleeding from the ears, nose and mouth. It frightened me

Doisneau's 'stolen moments' testify to Paris's lost heritage

The French photographer Robert Doisneau once said that he had done just three seconds of useful work in 50 years. In a fraction of one of those seconds he produced one of the world's most admired, reproduced and imitated romantic photographs: a picture of two lovers kissing outside the Paris town hall in 1950. The photograph - Le Baiser de l'Hôtel de Ville - is tucked away casually amongst 280 other Doisneau images in a free exhibition which began yesterday at, appropr

A lesson for the History Boys

Alan Bennett, commentators like to say, is heir to Betjeman as the nation's teddy bear. On the evidence of his all-conquering play (and now film) The History Boys he is also the outright winner of the Evelyn Waugh memorial "Brideshead" award for the nation's arch-educational snob. I watched the film in the Odeon, Camden Town. As readers of Bennett's diaries will know, it's home ground - opposite Fresh and Wild, where the playwright likes to shop. To say the audience was f

The mystery of Velazquez's 'Lady with a Fan': was she a fugitive French duchess?

With 13,000 advance tickets sold, the first substantial exhibition in Britain of the 17th-century Spanish master Velázquez, which opened yesterday, is certain to be a bigger draw for the National Gallery than any of its previous blockbusters - including Vermeer, Titian and Caravaggio. But the work that is absorbing devotees of Spain's greatest painter and pre-eminent exponent of baroque is to be found a short distance across London, in the former French embassy building which house

NYT Raves about Flag of Our Fathers

It seems hard to believe there is anything left to say about World War II that has not already been stated and restated, chewed, digested and spat out for your consideration and that of the Oscar voters. And yet here, at age 76, is Clint Eastwood saying something new and vital about the war in his new film, and here, too, is this great, gray battleship of a man and a movie icon saying something new and urgent about the uses of war and of the men who fight. “Flags of Our Fathers” concerns one of

The Coast of Utopia (Tom Stoppard Play/Lincoln Center NYC)

“THE COAST Of UTOPIA,” Tom Stoppard’s sweeping three-part epic that will be populating Lincoln Center for the next six months, contains, among other things: 35 years of 19th-century Russian intellectual history; more than 70 roles; discussions of Hegel, Schelling, Pushkin and Kant; adulterous affairs, both secret and permitted; the revolution of 1848; scenes in Moscow, Paris, Nice, London, under a large chandelier, at a picnic, beside an ice skating rink. It examines the lives, public and domest

Flags of Our Fathers (Movie)

Iwo Jima was an island about 500 miles south of Tokyo. It was volcanic, and it was known for its black sand. Like many islands in the Pacific, it was not much to speak of and not valuable to hold. But it lay directly in the path of America's theoretical invasion of Japan. Moreover, Japanese forces had occupied the island and prepared their positions. Iwo Jima had to be attacked. The battle was fought in February and March of 1945, and when it was over the Japanese losses were 20,000 while 26,000

Bobby (Movie)

Emilio Estevez, once best known for his roles in the Brat Pack movies St Elmo's Fire and The Breakfast Club, has written and directed Bobby, an impressively kaleidoscopic movie about [Robert] Kennedy's assassination. The film is not a reconstruction but the recasting of a certain historical moment, the repercussions of which, it is implied, add up to the present one. (Kennedy was murdered by a Palestinian-American named Sirhan Sirhan, who said he had acted in retaliation against Kennedy's views

The Ritchie Boys (Documentary)

Those whose tolerance of Greatest Generation war stories isn’t exhausted, not to mention those who still thrive on them, will find the group of men who called themselves the Ritchie Boys good company. This documentary, named for a military boot camp in Maryland, tells of a group of Jewish immigrants who fled Germany for the United States in the years of the Nazi buildup. When the war broke out, they realized that, with their language skills and knowledge of the enemy, they could help the America

History Boys (Movie)

SOURCE: Guardian There can't be many people under 40 for whom the lost convention of the"seventh-term" Oxbridge exam means anything, and even among the over-40s, it isn't exactly a cultural touchstone, like the 11-plus. But until 20 years ago, this was how post-A-level teenagers at top schools prepared for the now abolished entrance examinations for Oxford and Cambridge Universities: they

New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War (Ezxhibit/N-Y Historical Society)

The New-York Historical Society (www.nyhistory.org) will take a penetrating look at these and other questions in its provocative new show, New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War, opening November 17, 2006 and running through September 3, 2007. The exhibition, spearheaded by Society President and CEO Louise Mirrer, marks the final installation of a two-year, three-part examination of the history and legacy of slavery in New York and the na

The Tudors (Showtime Miniseries)

With a cornucopia of sex, politics and religious conflict, the life of Henry VIII seems well suited to dramatization on screen. After all, even in the rollicking 16th century, it is impossible to find another king who had six wives, executed nobles and prelates at a whim and provoked the Vatican into ordering his excommunication. Yet if high drama seems assured, casting the right actor to play the lead is trickier because, unlike the case with most English monarchs before Queen Vict

Red Baron (Movie)

SOURCE: Times Online (UK) FASTEN your seatbelts for some historical turbulence and critical fire. Germany is preparing to break a 61-year-old taboo by celebrating the life of one of its war heroes, the flying ace known as the Red Baron. A film depicting the daring deeds of Manfred von Richthofen — who shot down 80 British, Canadian, and Australian pilots during the First World War — will be released in German

Nixon's Nixon (Play)

“I don’t feel like I’ve done anything wrong,” the president of the United States is saying peevishly, his mouth puckering into a lemon-sucking moue. “They gave me so much power, why are they surprised I used it?” Care to guess the name of the president in question, who is currently being depicted spewing self-justification from the stage of the Lucille Lortel Theater? You might be inclined to choose the White House’s current occupant. After all, according to some analysts, George W.

Reds (Movie)

“What kind of lunatic would make a movie like this and ask someone to invest in it?” asked Warren Beatty, reached by telephone recently at his home in Los Angeles. It was a rhetorical question, since the movie he was talking about was “Reds,” the three-and-a-half-hour historical epic he wrote (with Trevor Griffiths), directed and starred in 25 years ago. [The movie is being released as a DVD for the first time.]

The Last King of Scotland (Movie)

SOURCE: NYT The queasily enjoyable fiction film “The Last King of Scotland,” based on the novel by Giles Foden and directed by Kevin Macdonald, creates a portrait of the famous Ugandan dictator Idi Amin from inside the palace walls. Furiously paced, with excellent performances by Forest Whitaker as Amin and James McAvoy as the foolish Scotsman who becomes the leader’s personal physician, the film has texture, if no

So Goes the Nation (Documentary)

A ‘what went wrong?’ documentary bristling with answers, “...So Goes the Nation” is a clear-eyed and utterly ruthless dissection of the battle for Ohio in the months leading up to the 2004 presidential election. Zeroing in on the strategic decisions of both major parties, the directors, James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo, illuminate not only the putative blunders of the Kerry-Edwards campaign but also the larger difficulties of the Democratic Party itself. It’s not pretty, but it is instructive.

Marie Antoinette (Movie)

SOURCE: NYT Writer and director Sofia Coppola puts a new spin on the life and times of one of Europe's most infamous monarchs in this lavish historical drama which fuses a contemporary sensibility with painstaking recreations of the look of the 18th century. Born to Austrian nobility, Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) is only 14 years old when she's pledged to marry Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman)

The Queen (Movie)

Directed by Stephen Frears from a very smart script by Peter Morgan, who helped write “The Last King of Scotland,” also about crazy rulers and the people who love (and hate) them, “The Queen” pries open a window in the House of Windsor around the time of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, blending fact with fiction. It begins just days before her fatal car crash in 1997, when the princess, glimpsed only in television news clips and photographs, had completely transformed into Diana, the onet

American Blackout (Documentary)

Few things in a democracy are more sacrosanct than the right to vote, and in his furious documentary “American Blackout,” Ian Inaba assembles compelling evidence to support his claim that African-Americans — who are traditionally more likely to vote Democratic — are being deliberately and systematically excluded from the political process. Interviewing Congressional leaders, journalists and regular voters, Mr. Inaba begins by addressing the Florida debacle of 2000, arguing that behind the exhaus