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

Viggo Mortensen: "Great Man" Theory? History Is Driven by the Little Guy

Actors have the privilege of exploring fictional characters, to see the world from the perspective of another person's imagined life. Sometimes, usually less often, we have the opportunity to speak the words of historical figures, to say the words they themselves spoke. This presents a different kind of challenge, in many ways, something I have been thinking about personally since becoming involved with a performance project and now documentary film called The People Speak, which is airing on Hi

A Shtick With a Thousand Lives: Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner

MEL BROOKS and Carl Reiner have been cracking each other up for nearly 60 years. The two met while working on Sid Caesar’s early television series “Your Show of Shows,” when they cooked up a routine in which Mr. Reiner played an earnest, unnamed TV interviewer, and Mr. Brooks, the 2,000 Year Old Man. In a Yiddish accent, the old guy held forth on the questionable wisdom of an absurdly long life, touching on topics including parenthood (“I have over 42,000 children — and not one come

Information Highway: Camel Speed but Exotic Links (Silk Road Exhibit NY)

“You are about to make an unusual journey,” a wall label proclaims at the beginning of an exhibition that opens on Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History. Normally that promise would provide reason enough to be wary. But this is something different. You are welcomed by life-size camels laden with worn canvas sacks, their bodies framed by sand dunes stretching into the distance. A while later, near a 17-foot-long wooden Chinese loom, you find bowls filled with mulberry l

He Was the Great Connector ( Composer Henry Cowell)

Which composer exerted the greatest influence on 20th-century American classical music? Thursday and Friday, Other Minds, a San Francisco-based organization dedicated to such music, will make the case for Henry Cowell. Cowell, who died in 1965, was a prolific composer whose own music was eclipsed by the works of his students. Other Minds director Charles Amirkhanian discovered Cowell through the pioneering percussion music of the composer's famous pupils John Cage and Lou Harrison.

Mythical End for Legendary Route 66

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — The question of where the old Route 66 officially ended in the West has been the subject of debate among history buffs and roadsters. On Wednesday it was resolved in a quintessentially American way, by placing the terminus in a place where it can best be monetized. A Route 66 sign embossed with “end of the trail” was dedicated at the Santa Monica Pier, a popular tourist destination, marking the 83rd anniversary of the road’s opening and what James M. Conkle, t

BBC’s Berlin Season

It’s 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the extraordinary moment when the Cold War symbolically ended. The anniversary was covered extensively by the BBC: from television and radio to a magazine. And this by an organization Winston Churchill once mused was “honeycombed with Socialists – probably with Communists.” Watching, listening and reading the material on events as they transpired in Berlin, it becomes clear that the producers and editors had a choice between one of tw

Siegfried Sassoon Collection unveiled at the University of Oxford

November 11 is Armistice Day, which marks the cessation of Great War hostilities in 1918. (Here in the United States, of course, this is now Veterans Day.) In honor of the day and the dead, the First World War Poetry Digital Archive, housed at the University of Oxford, chose today to unveil its Siegfried Sassoon Collection. Although it contains photographs and other materials, the collection centers on manuscripts of Sassoon's poems, drawn from holdings at Oxford's Bodleian Library

Lincoln’s History, Melded With a Choreographer’s

Past, present, future. History, memory, experience. The recasting of history through memory and experience. All of these slippery subjects are the matter of Bill T. Jones’s “Serenade/The Proposition,” an hourlong work that reaffirms this artist’s gift for creating powerful theater but reveals little of sustained choreographic interest. Perhaps that’s because the dance never quite feels like the point of the piece, which opened at the Joyce on Tuesday night. “Serenade,” a Joyce commi

Bill T. Jones celebrating Lincoln

Past, present, future. History, memory, experience. The recasting of history through memory and experience. All of these slippery subjects are the matter of Bill T. Jones’s “Serenade/The Proposition,” an hourlong work that reaffirms this artist’s gift for creating powerful theater but reveals little of sustained choreographic interest. Perhaps that’s because the dance never quite feels like the point of the piece, which opened at the Joyce on Tuesday night. “Serenade,” a Joyce commi

The Anguish of War for Today’s Soldiers, Explored by Sophocles

The ancient Greeks had a shorthand for the mental anguish of war, for post-traumatic stress disorder and even for outbursts of fratricidal bloodshed like last week’s shootings at Fort Hood. They would invoke the names of mythological military heroes who battled inner demons: Achilles, consumed by the deaths of his men; Philoctetes, hollowed out from betrayals by fellow officers; Ajax, warped with so much rage that he wanted to kill his comrades. Now officials at the Defense Departme

Dress Code: This Just in From the 1890s

IT’S usually easy to distinguish between clothes and costumes: either you’re Spider-Man, or you’re not. Drawing the line between polish and pretension is trickier, especially when last year’s costume can be this year’s classic, and next year’s yawn. Just consider the steady infiltration of 19th-century haberdashery into the 21st-century wardrobe. Garment after garment has arrived on the scene that one might think more Gilbert and Sullivan than Bergdorf and Goodman, only to be taken

D-Day historian: 'Ryan' not best war film

(CNN) -- Some reviewers have called "Saving Private Ryan," Steven Spielberg's World War II film about D-Day and the search for a soldier, one of the greatest war movies. Military historian Antony Beevor begs to differ. Not only is it not the greatest war movie, it's not even the best cinematic depiction of D-Day, says Beevor, author of the newly published "D-Day: The Battle for Normandy" (Viking). He admires the famed Omaha Beach opening

A new exhibit at Berlin's Checkpoint Charlie Museum is dedicated to the Gipper

A few blocks from where the Wall stood is the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, which commemorates the more than 1,000 people who died trying to cross the deadly East German border. A group of important Berliners gathered over the weekend to inaugurate a new exhibit on the Gipper and his famous efforts to end the division of Berlin. The collection tells a fascinating story of just how focused Ronald Reagan was on tearing down the Wall. He first visited Berlin in November 1978, and spent ma

Artifacts as Ambience: Art, Antique and Artifacts in the Nation's Capital

For many visitors, the nation's capital has two notable and distinct aspects. On the one side there is the business of government, and on the other a wealth of art and historical museums. However, like everything else in Washington, the distinctions often get blurred. All three branches of government have extensive art, antique and artifact collections—with curators in charge of them, to boot—that probably add more ambience than cultural enlightenment to visitors. But, of course, who expects the

A 'Prisoner' With New Questions

Ian McKellen had already read the script of a new version of the late-1960s cult television series “The Prisoner” when he met the author, Bill Gallagher, last year at a London restaurant to discuss the project. As Mr. Gallagher recalls their first encounter, Mr. McKellen hugged him, then gently patted him on the head and asked, “What goes on in that mind of yours, Bill?” Don’t be surprised if television viewers have a similar reaction when the resulting six-part mini-series, “The P

The secret life of Hitler

WHEN intimate colour film of Adolf Hitler cuddling a pet dog and smiling tenderly like a baby was shown for the first time at the Cannes Film Festival 36 years ago, a scuffle broke out in the audience and the screening had to be abandoned. The documentary, Swastika, contained extraordinary, never-before-seen footage of Hitler entertaining friends, family and his inner circle — including Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels. Much of it was shot by his girlfriend, Eva Braun, at Hitler'

Nabokov's Lost Novel Reviewed

Should Dmitri Nabokov, son of Vladimir, have published his father’s final, unfinished work, The Original of Laura? “In many respects, the release of a rudimentary version of his last novel does a disservice to a writer who deeply cherished precision and was practiced in the art of revision,” Michiko Kakutani writes. “Yet, at the same time, these bits and pieces of Laura will beckon and beguile Nabokov fans, who will find many of the author’s perennial themes and obsessions percolating through th

'Mayan 2012 apocalypse theory' not true, Nasa says

The latest big screen offering from Sony Pictures, "2012," arrives in theatres on Friday , with a $200 million production about the end of the world supposedly based on theories backed by the Mayan calendar. The doomsday scenario revolves around claims that the end of time will come as an obscure Planet X - or Nibiru - collides with Earth. The mysterious planet was supposedly discovered by the Sumerians, according to claims by pseudo-scientists, paranormal ac

Film From the Frontlines: New Glimpses of a War

When the Wehrmacht hanged 18 civilians in a World War II reprisal killing in Serbia, tugging on the victims’ ankles to hasten death, a German propaganda cameraman dutifully recorded the grisly sequence on color movie film. When Russian partisans executed a suspected German spy deep in the forest, that killing, too, was caught on camera. Nearly 65 years after the Allied victory, long-lost or overlooked film footage — some in unexpected color and almost all raw and unedited — continue

Japanese Manga Comes to London's British Museum

Japanese manga artist Hoshino Yukinobu has brought his popular character Professor Munakata to London's British Museum, featuring some of the collection's most famous treasures in his drawings. In a single-room display near the entrance to the famous museum, a giant picture of folklore expert Munakata donning his trademark bowler hat and black cape includes the Sutton Hoo helmet dating from the 7th-century. One reason the British Museum wanted to work with Hoshino was