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

Princess Margaret portrait on display

The 1957 painting by Pietro Annigoni, an Italian artist, depicts the young Princess in an English rose garden. Viscount Linley included the portrait in an auction of his mother's possessions at Christie's in 2006, arguing that he needed to meet a £3 million inheritance tax bill following her death in 2002. The Royal Family were said to be saddened at the prospect of losing the painting, a favourite of the Queen. It was sold for £680,000, three times its

William Wallace was a genocidal coward, says historian

Fans of the film Braveheart should look away now. A newly published book on Scottish history declares that William Wallace, immortalised by Mel Gibson, was nothing more than a genocidal maniac. Instead of lauding Wallace, the author of the new work says, the Scots should disown him and transform his monument at Stirling into a national museum to educate the public about the dangers of ethnic cleansing. Edwin Moore, who was a senior editor for the Collins reference divis

Spanish poet's family won't oppose opening of mass grave to establish truth about Franco

Federico Garcia Lorca's family won't oppose a petition to open a mass grave where his body is believed to have been dumped after Franco supporters allegedly executed the poet and playwright at the outbreak of Spain's Civil War, a relative said Thursday. A judge will decide whether to exhume the remains, but the announcement by the family of Spain's most prominent and popular 20th century poet is a significant about-face after years of refusing to touch the grave. It also takes

The cold war wasn't just about bombs. It was about cars, shoes and kitchens according to a new exhibition

In 1959, Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev made a rare public appearance together at Moscow's newest landmark: the American National Exhibition. A few days before the opening, the two men strolled through the pavilions, bickering flirtatiously for the press, and pretending to admire US handiwork. When they entered the re-creation of a Long Island kitchen, however, the tone changed. Khrushchev averred that Russian kitchens were longer-lasting than American ones and that, in any case, he doubted

Moscow street named after Solzhenitsyn

As Alexander Solzhenitsyn was laid to rest last month, President Dmitri Medvedev decreed that he be memorialized "for his extraordinary contribution" to Russian culture. Among other things, a Moscow street should be renamed for the great chronicler of Russia's turbulent 20th century. In short order, the office of Mayor Yuri Luzhkov announced that Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya Ulitsa, or Big Communist Street, actually one of the prettiest, quietest and most well-preserved str

Unknown Mozart work discovered

A French museum has found a previously unknown piece of music handwritten by Mozart, a researcher said Thursday. The 18th-century melody sketch is missing the harmony and instrumentation but was described as an important find. Ulrich Leisinger, head of research at the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, Austria, said there is no doubt that the single sheet was written by the composer. "This is absolutely new," Leisinger said in a telephone intervie

A City Reinvents Itself Beyond Conflict

TEL AVIV — The exhibit space is set up for only one viewer, who sits with headphones in a rotating chair and watches a video that alternates between the tony Tel Aviv space outside and the gritty, honking chaos of a military checkpoint in the West Bank. Between the harsh juxtaposition and the rotating chair, only one reaction is common: nausea. And that is the clear aim of the artist, Miri Segal, whose “Place de la Bonne Heure” is a highlight of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Biennial, a new sh

US Civil War museum to share surprising collection

RICHMOND, Virginia: With surgical gloves, S. Waite Rawls III pulls out a large drawer in the basement of the Museum of the Confederacy to reveal a startling display: dolls the size of children, neatly lined up like small bodies on a morgue slab. The dolls are among what the museum calls the "world's most comprehensive collection of Confederate artifacts," a trove valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Rawls, the museum's president and CEO.

How One President Might Have Altered a War (Documentary)

The title of the documentary “Virtual J F K.: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived” pretty much says it all, though the movie itself says not nearly enough. Directed by Koji Masutani, this speculative, provocative, frustrating and finally unpersuasive historical gloss races quickly and all too lightly over the major political crises that John F. Kennedy faced during his aborted presidency — Laos, Berlin, Cuba, Vietnam — in what may be the most aggressive big-screen shine job since Oliver Stone’s much de

Linz Tackles Its Past as a 'Führer' City

Linz is to be Europe's Capital of Culture in 2009. Before the Austrian city takes on that mantle it is showing an exhibition about how Hitler had wanted to make Linz a "Culture Capital for the Führer." Linz is taking on a lot. On New Year's Eve the Austrian city will kick off a three-day opening festival with fireworks and drum rolls, to celebrate its year as Europe's 2009 Capital of Culture. Under the direction of Martin Heller, it's planning an intensive program of exhi

Art in the glow of Amsterdam red lights

Never have its gracious enfilades and echoing halls witnessed anything like it: the National Gallery, repository of the nation's finest Old Masters, is to re-create a red-light district, complete with scantily clad prostitutes, sinister alleyways and shop windows filled with human wares. This walkthrough installation is Ed and Nancy Kienholz's work Hoerengracht - Dutch for "whores' canal" - which will take its place in the gallery next autumn. The idea is to

Matthew Shepard: 10 years later (Laramie Killing Given Epilogue in Play About His Murder)

LARAMIE, Wyo. — Near the end of “The Laramie Project,” the widely praised and frequently staged play about how this small city grappled with the notorious murder of the gay college student Matthew Shepard, one of the characters wonders if the convictions in the killing will help Laramie heal. “Maybe now we can go on and we can quit being stuck, you know?” says Reggie Fluty, a local policewoman. She is one of the real-life characters whose words, collected on tape, make up the actors

Picasso at the National Gallery

The National Gallery is to stage its first Picasso exhibition as it moves into territory recently dominated by the Tate. Some 60 paintings and sculptures by the Modernist master, including some of his best known works, will comprise Picasso: Challenging the Past. It will be the National Gallery's first ever exhibition dedicated to the artist, and the first major British exhibition on him since 2002. Christopher Riopelle, curator of post 1800 paintings, s

The Wave: A film of how a teacher carried out an experiment in fascism with his class

How could German citizens claim, after the war, to have known nothing about the Holocaust? Ron Jones's attempt to answer this question as a new teacher in 1960s California led to a risky experiment in fascism that has intrigued successive generations ever since. It is the subject of a major new German film, Die Welle (The Wave), released this week. Teachers dream of making a difference to their students' lives. It's part of the joy of teaching. Former students of Jones describe his

Agatha Christie used her grandmother as a model for Miss Marple, new tapes reveal

Lying undisturbed for more than 40 years, audio tapes bearing the unmistakeable voice of Agatha Christie have been discovered that show how she modelled Miss Marple on her own grandmother. Her grandson Mathew Prichard stumbled upon 27 of the half-hour long tapes in a dusty cardboard box as he cleaned out a storeroom in Greenway, the Georgian property overlooking the Dart estuary in Devon that Christie called "the loveliest place in the world". The tapes, which

HBO Developing Lincoln Mini

HBO is developing Manhunt, a miniseries from David Simon and Tom Fontana about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the frantic 12-day hunt for his killer, John Wilkes Booth. The project reunites the network with the creative forces behind two of its former critical hit series—Simon created The Wire and Fontana created Oz—as well as the two writers themselves. Simon and Fontana have not collaborated since Fontana turned Simon's book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets into t

Oldest Bowling Alley in America Turns 100

MILWAUKEE — The walls of this tiny bowling alley are so close together you'd think a bowler would feel claustrophobic. But stand before this pair of lanes, in the same spot where bowlers have been lacing up since before World War I, and the strongest reaction you feel is captivation. The lanes are real wood, not the synthetic wood of modern lanes, and it's so resilient it's never been changed since it was set in place 100 years ago. Pin boys reload the manual pin mecha

A Dallas orchestra reimagines LBJ's duel wars

A haunted tenor voice will sing out in Dallas on Thursday. It will lament that a terrible war was based on a hollow threat, and that millions might have died because of a"mistake." The Dallas Symphony Orchestra wanted a grand piece of music to commemorate Lyndon B. Johnson, born 100 years ago, and it may have gotten more than it bargained for: a 70-minute oratorio with implicit reverberations about another war propelled by faulty intelligence, prosecuted by another Texan. The

Madame Tussaud's returns wax Hitler to Berlin

Madame Tussaud's said Saturday it had returned a wax figure of the Nazi dictator to its newly opened Berlin branch weeks after the statue was beheaded by a 41-year-old German. Hitler's figure can be viewed sitting at a desk in a replica of his bunker, Madame Tussaud's, the British waxworks maker, said. Hitler committed suicide in the bunker in 1945 as the Red Army converged on Berlin. The Berlin branch said it does not allow visitors to enter the replica of the bunker,

Charlie Chaplin was a child pauper, website proves

Fascinating details of Charlie Chaplin's early years growing up in a grim Victorian workhouse can be revealed for the first time. Fans of the legendary silent film star can now see the stark scrap of paper that details his incarceration in the squalid building. Chaplin was admitted to the workhouse in London at the age of seven, along with his older brother Sydney, after his alcoholic father abandoned him when his mother was committed to an asylum in 1896.