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

New movie, Katyn, receives high praise from Stanley Kauffmann

The Polish director Andrzej Wajda, who has had a sixty-year career, crowns it with a consummate film. Katyn seems to be the work that he has been moving toward all of his busy life. Katyn Forest is the place, or the main place, where more than twenty thousand Poles were massacred in 1940. Most of them were army officers, some of them were intelligentsia--professors, lawyers, doctors, scientists. Wajda's father was one of the officers. Katyn is thus something other than just one more film

Singing Group: O'Bama is as Irish as JFK

New York Museum Opens National Center for the History of Electronic Games

New York's Strong National Museum of Play will tomorrow open the National Center for the History of Electronic Games, dedicated to the preservation and exhibition of video games and video game-related materials. The Rochester-based museum, which bills itself as "the only museum anywhere devoted solely to the study and interpretation of play," has long kept collections of electronic games, but it had not previously maintained a self-contained organization dedicated to them

Rare project saves Hemingway papers

An important collection of papers belonging to the American writer Ernest Hemingway has been saved for posterity, thanks to a unique joint rescue mission involving communist Cuba and the United States. The letters, manuscripts and documents offer fresh insights into the man, his work and his colourful life. For decades they had been gathering mould and dust in the basement of the Nobel Prize winning author's former home on the outskirts of Havana. The Cu

China to bring Das Kapital to life on Beijing stage

You've read the book, attended the seminars and pondered the accumulation of surplus value – now see the musical. Chinese producers are attempting to transform Das Kapital from a hefty treatise on political economy into a popular stage show, complete with catchy tunes and nifty footwork. Whether Karl Marx would approve of his masterwork being served up as entertainment for China's new bourgeoisie is a matter of speculation. But the director He Nian – best known for his

Kung fu master Chow Yun-Fat to bring Confucius to the silver screen

Chow Yun-Fat is better known as a flying kung fu master in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, as the king in the latest movie ofThe King and Ior as a Hong Kong gangster in any number of films. Now he faces a cinematic challenge of a very different order: to bring Confucius to the silver screen. China’s decision to make a film of the life of its greatest philosopher is the latest step in the rehabilitation of the thinker vilified during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. For that decade,

Egypt Set to Open Pyramid for First Time to Tourists

Travelers to Egypt will soon be able to explore the inner chambers of the 4,500-year-old "bent" pyramid, known for its oddly shaped profile, and other nearby ancient tombs, Egypt's antiquities chief announced Monday. The increased access to the pyramids south of Cairo is part of a new sustainable development campaign that Egypt hopes will attract more visitors but also to avoid some of the problems of the urban sprawl that have plagued the famed pyramids of Giza.

Shah Abbas, The Remaking of Iran at the British Museum: review

Tucked away towards the end of the British Museum's exhibition Shah Abbas: The Remaking of Iran, devoted to the mighty Muslim ruler who transformed Iran while Elizabeth I was on the throne in England, is an extraordinary example of Islamic art. Painted in 1627, using watercolour, ink and gold on paper, it is one of only two extant portraits of the great shah painted during his lifetime (the other, a tiny, glowing watercolour study by an artist from Mughal India, begins the show), and it presents

BBC rejects play on Israel's history for impartiality reasons

The BBC has declined to broadcast a radio version of Caryl Churchill's controversial new stage play about Israeli history, claiming it needed to remain impartial - the same reason given for declining to air the Gaza emergency appeal. In a move likely to resurrect the row over the BBC's refusal in January to broadcast the appeal to help the people of Gaza, Radio 4 rejected an unsolicited manuscript of the play, Seven Jewish Children, which recently finished a short run at the Royal C

Museums lose nearly 200 artifacts

Details obtained under the freedom of information act show that museums including the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, the Imperial War Museum and the Royal Armouries have lost 198 items since 2000. Items that have disappeared from the museums include a Victoria Cross (VC) medal belonging to one of the Second World War's most decorated soldiers, dozens of antique rifles and pistols, a painting worth £200,000 and a collection of 14 microscopes worth £157,000.

Hindus reject statue of 'Christian' Charlie Chaplin

The 67 ft statue was to be erected as a tribute in a film sequence by a Bollywood director. But the installation was halted after protests from members of the nationalist BJP party who claimed it "hurt Hindu sentiment". Activists in Udupi, near Bangalore, told the director, Hemant Hegde, that they would not allow the statue because Chaplin was a Christian, and that any statue would have to honour the Hindu guru Swami Vivekananda instead. Mr Hegde is shooting

Queen not amused by 'inaccuracies' in The Young Victoria film

The Queen has expressed her disapproval of historical inaccuracies in The Young Victoria and said some of the costumes were too German. The monarch made her comments after special screening of the drama, whose producers include Martin Scorcese and the Duchess of York. It tells the story of the young Queen Victoria and her romance with Prince Albert. A source told the News of the World: "She thought the film had a lot of good points but she is a stickle

Is it or is it not Shakespeare?

We know so little about Shakespeare that we don’t even know for sure what he looked like. Scholars have been quarreling over various purported portraits of him for years. The latest, the so-called Cobbe portrait, was unveiled last week by the Shakespeare expert Stanley Wells, who claimed that it was the only authentic likeness to have been painted in Shakespeare’s lifetime, igniting yet another fuss among the dissenters. This much is certain: the portrait is painted on wood from the

Rare Audio Of Literary Heroes (video)

The voices of legendary authors such as Virginia Wolfe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and J.R.R. Tolkien have been collected and stored in a British library. CBS News? Elizabeth Palmer reports from London.

Interview with the director of "Z"

What are your emotions about the rerelease of "Z," 40 years after it was made?Well, it's an amazing thing. To learn that 40 years later they are showing my movie again. I was very moved to learn that the Rialto people decided to release it again, and I'm very curious to see how the audience will react.That's an interesting question. At least in some ways, "Z" is very specific to its time and place. You were reacting to a very specific situation in G

400-year-old map collection for sale

The work, Islandia, was published by Abraham Ortelius in Antwerp in the 16th century. It carries a price tag of £7,500 and is among a catalogue valued at nearly £3 million. The sale includes a globe by Mattaeus Greuter, produced in 1632 and priced at £90,000, and a decorate double-hemisphere map of the world by John Speed. The latter was first published in London in 1627 and is the earliest world map to show the misconception of California as an island. It is on sale fo

2 exhibits feature art from Babylon

They came, they conquered, they crushed. Time and again over the centuries, new rulers imposed their own might and myths alike on Babylon, one of the most powerful, mystical and elusive of ancient cities. Two exhibitions — one at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, the other at London’s British Museum — provide new insights into the power and reach of ancient Babylon, while proving rather more coy in commenting on the sensitivities of the more contemporary events for which their two cou

Was this Britain's first black queen?

Queen Charlotte died nearly two centuries ago but is still celebrated in her namesake American city. When you drive from the airport in North Carolina, you can't miss the monumental bronze sculpture of the woman said to be Britain's first black queen, dramatically bent backwards as if blown by a jet engine. Downtown, there is another prominent sculpture of Queen Charlotte, in which she's walking with two dogs as if out for a stroll in 21st-century America. Street after street is nam

For Berlin Museum, a Modern Makeover That Doesn’t Deny the Wounds of War

BERLIN The Neues Museum briefly reopened here last weekend (was reborn, seems more like it), and local newspapers reported that more than 35,000 Berliners, many of them waiting hours in the cold in lines stretching nearly half a mile, filed into the still empty building over three days to see it. The art that will go inside (Egyptian and pre- and early history, as in the prewar years) won’t be installed until the fall. This little preview was cooked up as a kind of civic ceremony.

Iran’s Protocols of Harry Potter

It was high time that anti-Semitism would find something hipper than those dusty Protocols of the Elders of Zion, concocted sometime between 1895 and 1902 by Russian journalist Matvei Golovinski and then used by the pro-Tsarists to discredit reforms in Russia as a Jewish plot. Egyptian and Syrian state media have turned the Protocols into television series, trying to modernize the plot and bringing it forward into the 20th century. Iranian TV has beaten them hands down with “Harry P