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

At Spoleto Festival, Revisiting a Fateful Chapter in Slavery

Charleston, SC: Not so often do new American operas find life after birth. But Anthony Davis’s “Amistad,” a historically inspired exploration of slavery and freedom, has come back to the stage 11 years after its debut at the Chicago Lyric Opera, and in a deeply resonant setting. It is the central work at this summer’s Spoleto Festival U.S.A., whose host is Charleston, a city fully freighted with slavery’s legacy. The relevance has not been lost on African-Americans involved: the com

Cornell Capa, Photojournalist and Museum Founder, Dies at 90

Cornell Capa, who founded the International Center of Photography in New York after a long and distinguished career as a photojournalist, first on the staff of Life magazine and then as a member of Magnum Photos, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 90. His death was announced by Phyllis Levine, communications director at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan. Mr. Capa had three important incarnations in the field of photography: successful pho

Parents claim racism in Harper Lee's Ala. hometown

A south Alabama town that was the inspiration for the setting in Harper Lee's book "To Kill a Mockingbird" is finding itself as the backdrop for a real-life legal case involving allegations of racism at school. The parents of several black junior high school students have filed a discrimination lawsuit claiming their children are subject to racial slurs and punished more harshly than white students at Monroeville Junior High School. The lawsuit says black stud

Communists see red over Indiana Jones 'propaganda'

Russian Communist party members have condemned the new Indiana Jones film as crude anti-Soviet propaganda that distorted history, and called for it to be banned from Russian screens. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull stars Harrison Ford as an archaeologist in 1957 competing with an evil KGB agent (Cate Blanchett) to find a skull with mystic powers. The film, the fourth in the Indiana Jones series, went on release in Russian cinemas on Thursday. "Wh

What you should know about the Florida recount (Re: HBO's Recount)

You need to be made of stronger stuff than yours truly to watch Recount. I'm sure it's great, but I'm going to hold off until we inaugurate President Obama and I can stand to look back on it. In the meantime, Alessandra Stanley writes in Today's Times, here: "In 2001 painstaking postmortems of the Florida count, one by The New York Times and another by a consortium of newspapers, concluded that Mr. Bush would have come out slightly ahead, even if all the votes counted throughout the state h

2 man play about Nixon & Kissinger (Wash. DC)

On Aug. 8, 1974, in a nationally televised speech, President Richard M. Nixon announced his resignation. The night before, Nixon met with his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, in the Lincoln Sitting Room. What transpired is the fodder for "Nixon's Nixon," a politically charged satire by Russell Lees beginning Wednesday at the Round House Theatre in Bethesda. The two-man play takes an imaginative look at that late-night discussion in which Nixon and Kissinge

Revived Faberge to create first egg since 1917

A revived Faberge luxury goods group plans to resurrect its founder's work next year with the launch of the first jewel-encrusted egg since 1917, when the Faberge family was scattered by the Russian revolution. A group of investors bought rights to Faberge last year -- which had been used to market cosmetics like Brut men's fragrance -- and have been working to restore the firm to its origins with the support of the Russian founder's relatives. "Faberge will announ

The Not-So-Untold Story of the Great Comic-Book Scare

[Gene Kannenberg Jr. directs ComicsResearch.org, a bibliography of works about comics with information about other comics resources.] David Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) has been greeted mostly with glowing reviews. A lively read, The Ten-Cent Plague digs deeply into the social context surrounding the "comic-book panic" of the first half of the 20th century. The movement culminated in 19

Bobby Sands film fuels argument over Sinn Fein 'sell-out'

Bobby Sands, the subject of the controversial new film Hunger, shown at Cannes, is hardly a hero to everyone in Ireland, but to republicans he is a potent symbol of self-sacrifice. While republican factions continue to debate whether he would have supported the present peace process, they are united in regarding him as a martyr who died an agonising death for their cause after a 66-day hunger strike. The film, the debut feature by the Turner prize-winning artist Steve M

Expert: New Indiana Jones Movie Raises Issues of Looted Art

The new Indiana Jones movie released today might make it seem like finding ancient artifacts is a swashbuckling adventure, but that kind of art collecting is a thing of the past, says the director of Duke's art museum. Museums like the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University collect works of art from many different cultures, including antiquities, to share with a broad public. But looters have ruined it for Indiana Jones-style archeologists, who for decades had worked succes

N-Y Historical Society opens Grant & Lee exhibit this fall

By the end of the Civil War, most Americans considered either Robert E. Lee or Ulysses S. Grant to be a hero. The reputations of the two generals were molded in part by a sectional bias that would aggrandize the achievements of one often to the detriment of the other. In recent years, Grant has earned a growing reputation for his pioneering use of Federal power for civil rights and post-war reconstruction—a remarkable shift from a presidency that was more often condemned as a bumbling series of

Animated documentary about a Sabra and Shatila massacre attracting Cannes glory

An animated documentary about a massacre in the Middle East is the current frontrunner to win the coveted Palme d'Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Waltz with Bashir is a daring and provocative attempt by director Ari Folman to bear witness to an atrocity committed during his stint in the Israeli army in 1982. The invasion of Lebanon, codenamed Operation Peace for Galilee, was an attempt to occupy the country as far as the capital Beirut. It ended in what man

Critic: Good segments are compromised in History Channel semi-documentary about real Indiana Jones scholars

In the program "Indiana Jones the Ultimate Quest," the History Channel capitalizes on the Indiana Jones publicity juggernaut with this mixed bag of scientific fact and unsubstantiated new age religious beliefs. Using the Indiana Jones movies as a jumping off point, the show does a wonderful job of showing how real archaeologists work using state of the art technologies like ground-penetrating radar and satellite imaging to locate and explore ancient sites. The two-hour program also doe

Torturing Iron Man

[Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Adbusters, the Nation, and regularly for Tomdispatch.com. His first book, The Complex, an exploration of the new military-corporate complex in America, was recently published in th

Delivery man challenges Howard Hughes' will

A delivery man from Utah has gone to federal court to argue that he is owed a large fortune from the estate of Howard Hughes that he says was promised to him as a reward for rescuing the reclusive billionaire from a bed of dust in the desert more than 40 years ago. It is a return trip for Melvin Dummar, 63, whose first attempt to lay claim to $156m he said was left to him by Hughes was thrown out by the courts in a lengthy probate trial in 1978. Though he was widely branded a liar a

DC's Newest Museum: Crime & Punishment

The new Museum of Crime and Punishment, which opens Friday across the street from the Abe Pollin Arena and the National Portrait Gallery, is another in Washington's growing supply of museums that aspire to be a blend of theme park and TV show. In fact, it's even produced in cooperation with the long-running Fox hit, "America's Most Wanted," which will now be taped in the museum's basement TV studio. The museum is more fun than annoying. But not by terribly much.

Creation Museum still a hit (Ky)

Instead of going directly to a family gathering in Illinois, Larry and Shirley Lawrence of Hattiesburg, Miss., stopped by the Creation Museum in Petersburg. Larry Lawrence said he wanted to visit the museum because you see so much in the media and so much has been written proving evolution. "It was just real interesting to me to see something that gives the opposing viewpoint," he said. The Lawrences are among thousands of visitors that have trekk

First published shot of first flight by Wright brothers will be on display

RALEIGH — The definitive image of the Wright Brothers’ first flight has been a sepia-toned photograph, faded by time, from those scant airborne seconds of Dec. 17, 1903. There is Orville Wright, supine and centered on the lower wing of the fragile heavier-than-air craft, gliding a few feet above the flat sands near Kill Devil Hill. His brother Wilbur is a few feet from the right wing tip, frozen in chase. It is a famous frame, the inspiration for postage stamps and the silhouette fo

'Sound of Music' Hotel Plan Protested in Austria

The hills are alive ... with the sound of protest. Plans to run a hotel out of a former home of the von Trapp family immortalized in the movie "The Sound of Music" have triggered fierce resistance from neighbors who fear tourists will tie up traffic and make a nuisance of themselves. "We will fight this with all means at our disposal," said Andreas Braunbruck, who lives near the Villa Trapp in a neighborhood of Salzburg already teeming with "Sou

Remembering Fleming, Ian Fleming (Exhibit/London)

Rising early for a swim in the aquamarine waters in the cove below his idyllic Jamaican retreat, Goldeneye, Fleming tapped away at his Remington portable typewriter with six fingers for three hours in the morning and an hour in the afternoon — 2,000 words a day, a completed novel in two months, all the while keeping up the sybaritic lifestyle that led Noël Coward, a frequent guest at Goldeneye and no puritan himself, to describe the Fleming household as “golden ear, nose and throat.”