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

Abel Gance's 'Napoléon' to be shown in LA for Bastille Day

To mark Bastille Day, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will screen Abel Gance's legendary 1927 epic "Napoléon," which has rarely been shown publicly since its 1981 restoration by film historian Kevin Brownlow, complete with tinted sequences, and presented by Francis Ford Coppola with a score composed by Coppola's late father, Carmine, that is as glorious as the silent classic is itself. (Brownlow also completed a five-hour version in 2004.) On Friday and Saturday at 7

New documentary narrated by Sean Penn compares Bush with LBJ and Nixon war talk

While debate over Iraq intensifies in Washington, a new film's rarely-seen archival footage shows that current arguments against withdrawing U.S. troops are eerily reminiscent of persistent claims from the Johnson and Nixon administrations during the Vietnam War.Parallels emerge sharply in the documentary, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." Striking footage of Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush p

Cradle of Rock? Two Towns Stake Their Claims (NJ)

Wildwood, NJ Dick Richards was pounding the drums and thinking of the girls on the beach. It was Saturday night during Memorial Day weekend in 1954, and more than 500 people were jammed into the HofBrau Hotel here to hear his band, the Comets, kick off the summer. “We had just recorded this song in April,” he said, “and that night we introduced it to the crowd. I guess that was the first real night of rock ’n’ roll.” The song was “Rock Around the Clock,” by Bill Haley

Revival of Morning Star, a play about an immigrant family on the Lower East Side (NYC)

When “Morning Star” opened on Broadway in 1940, featuring the Yiddish theater star Molly Picon and a young Sidney Lumet, its portrait of a Jewish widow stoically enduring the death and disaster brought by the major events of recent history (from 1910 to 1931) sent a hopeful message to audiences desperately in need of one. As the play’s audiences followed the Nazis’ march through Europe, here was a woman, Becky Felderman, who refused to give in. For most audiences today, Sylvia Regan

Instead of Making Films About the Civil Rights Era, Hollywood Has Made Excuses

Sometimes it takes the briefest glimpse of something to make its absence so scandalously obvious. Consider: Midway through the film "Talk to Me," which opens Friday and stars Don Cheadle as the legendary Washington disc jockey Ralph Waldo "Petey" Greene, a remarkable scene transpires in which, in the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Greene tries to calm a city in flames. As the sequence plays, and the fires climb higher on 14th and U, it becom

New film, Strike, tells the story of the strike that led to the victory of Solidarity

This fictionalized biopic of a respected Polish labor activist is nicely balanced between the political and the personal. "Strike" tells how the dismissal of aging crane operator Anna Walentynowicz (who's renamed Agnieszka in the film) provided the spark for the Solidarity trade union. Solidarnosc would later effectively bring down the Communist government in Poland. This film, directed by Germany's Volker Schloendorff, explains the politics clearly, but still leaves room

Key West Commission Moves to Protect Ernest Hemingway's Famed 6-Toed Cats

KEY WEST, Fla. — City officials have sided with Ernest Hemingway's former home and its celebrated six-toed felines in its catfight with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The Key West City Commission exempted the home from a city law prohibiting more than four domestic animals per household. About 50 cats live there. The house has been locked in a dispute with the USDA, which claims the museum is an "exhibitor" of cats and needs a special license, a clwritea

Smut: The Earliest Recordings

IN 1997 Bruce Young, a collector of memorabilia from the early phonograph era, placed a newly acquired 100-year-old wax cylinder record on his Edison Standard Model D player and heard a surprising sound: a young man saying filthy words. It was a 2 minute 25 second poetic recitation, suggestively titled “The Virtues of Raw Oysters,” written in the voice of a sexually voracious woman. “I never had it but twice in my life/Make me, just for tonight, your dear little wife,” went one of the few lines

Vietnam, China to make another film on Ho Chi Minh

Vietnam and China will co-produce a second film on late Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, Hanh trinh qua ba be (Journey across three oceans), starting early next year. The director of a film studio owned by the Vietnamese Writers Association, Ha Pham Phu, said it would be based on the life of Uncle Ho during the period when he went to the Soviet Union from Hong Kong where he received plenty of help to elude enemy spies. The 100-minute feature, to cost over VND10 billion (U

Virgin queen and love triangle with Sir Walter (Movie)

Putting matters of state before affairs of the heart earned Elizabeth I the title of the Virgin Queen. However, a Hollywood film is about to claim that she was so in love with Sir Walter Raleigh that she had one of her ladies-in-waiting seduce him so she could live out her own sexual fantasies. Elizabeth The Golden Age will claim that an infatuated Queen Elizabeth, played by Cate Blanchett, longed for a physical relationship with Raleigh, played by Clive Owen, but held

Images of dying Diana anger her sons

A BRITISH television channel was to broadcast photographs overnight taken at the scene of the crash that killed Princess Diana, in defiance of a plea from her sons not to show them. The private secretary to Prince William and Prince Harry wrote to Channel 4 saying that they felt the images would be a "gross disrespect" to their mother's memory. Royal sources indicated that the letter had been written at the instigation of Prince William, who wanted to "take a s

Germans to Subsidize Cruise Film

A German film fund will grant subsidies worth $6.5 million to Tom Cruise’s new film, “Valkyrie,” Reuters reported. The grant, from a fund with an annual film-subsidy budget of $82 million, exceeds the total cost of most German movies. Last week the German government barred the filmmakers from using a location where the military officer portrayed by Mr. Cruise was executed for a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler. A spokesman for the German government said that Mr. Cruise’s affiliation with Sci

80 Years of Robots in Hollywood

Fritz Lang's silent masterpiece set many of the ground rules for the sci-fi epics to come, not just in the way it depicted a dystopic future, but also the way it dealt with mad scientists and of course, their creations. Depicting a world in which the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are literally divided by the Earth's surface ˜ the elitists living above ground and the workers living in the dark, dank caverns beneath the surface ˜ Maria is a robot us

Finding true history amid the false: History Museum exhibit puts visitors in the role of curator to try to determine what is real and what isn't

Before the Chicago History Museum puts any one of its 22 million objects and documents on display, the staff has to check out whether the object is real or fake. But ascertaining the legitimacy of a historic object isn't as easy as it might seem. Was a stovepipe hat that has been at the museum for more than 80 years really worn by Abe Lincoln? Is a wooden gun the one gangster John Dillinger used to break out of jail? Could a very old piece of snakeskin, long kept in mus

'China’s Mona Lisa' Makes a Rare Appearance in Hong Kong

Politics and art don’t always mix well, but the combination has yielded a rare chance for Hong Kong residents and visitors to see what is arguably China’s most famous painting. Trying to foster nationalistic pride in China’s heritage among Hong Kong residents, the Chinese government has sent 32 artworks here for an exhibition to mark the 10th anniversary of Britain’s return of Hong Kong to China on July 1, 1997. Among them is Zhang Zeduan’s “Along the River During the Qingming Festi

Showgirls Return to the Spotlight for History’s Sake (Exhibit/Reno)

RENO, Nev. The American West has inspired art like the bullet-spitting buffalo hunters of Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell’s bronco riders. But the canon may not yet be ready for Terry Ritter, a former Las Vegas showgirl whose canvases include “The Red Boas,” ecstatic torsos swirling in a sea of red feathers. Forget the Ash Can School. Behold the Can-Can School. Ms. Ritter, 54, is featured in what is billed as the first Showgirl Art Competition Exhibition, whic

Germany Reasserts Ban on Tom Cruise Film Location

The German Finance Ministry, the landlord of all public buildings, said yesterday that the filmmakers behind the Tom Cruise movie about the failed 1944 plot to kill Hitler could not use a memorial site as a location but said its decision was unrelated to Mr. Cruise’s adherence to Scientology, which the government regards as a dangerous cult, Reuters reported. The Finance Ministry said the filmmakers were welcome to make the movie, “Valkyrie,” in Germany, but not at the Bendler Block complex in B

Japanese WW2 massacre film premieres in Beijing

"Nanking", a U.S.-made film documenting eyewitness accounts of atrocities committed by Japanese troops in China during World War Two, opened in Beijing on Tuesday, as the two countries struggle to mend strained ties.The 90-minute movie, co-directed by Oscar-winner Bill Guttentag and producer Dan Sturman, will open in mainland China in general release on July 7, to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Japan's full-scale invasion of China. It is one of

They've long been history; now drive-ins are historical (Australia)

TWO of Victoria's three drive-ins have been classified by the National Trust in a bid to protect a movie phenomenon that refuses to die. The National Trust has classified the Coburg and Dromana drive-ins, and is considering classifying the third, Dandenong's Lunar Drive-In. However, classification offers the drive-ins no legal protection. Drive-in theatres were almost wiped out in the 1980s by the video recorder and spiralling property prices. But Melbourne

Sex and butchery: how Rome made history fun (UK TV)

Blink and you might miss the second series of Rome (Sundays and Wednesdays, 9pm, BBC2). We will be rattling through two episodes a week for the next five weeks. The bloodthirsty re-telling of the birth of the Roman empire focuses on the political players of the time and their almost universal fondness for sex and gouging. It is somewhat similar to watching Patsy and Edina from Absolutely Fabulous getting drunk and shouting at snooty shop girls: you would never do it yourself but it's terrific to