Besides a keen interest in Vietnam, Oliver Stone is also a collector of Chinese art.

The Oscar-winning American director, whose George W. Bush biopic W. hits theaters Friday, has commissioned Christie's in Hong Kong to sell five of his modern Chinese paintings, the auction house said in a statement.

The paintings by Zhang Xiaogang, Liu Wei, Gu Wenda and Tang Zhigang have an estimated combined worth of $5.1 million.

They will be auctioned in Hong Kong on Nov. 30 and Dec. 1, Christie's said.

Stone worked as a schoolteacher in Vietnam and also served there with the U.S. Army from 1967 to 1968.

''Forty some years ago, I came to Asia as a young teacher in south Vietnam, and the region opened my eyes to a world I never knew. I was never the same again,'' Stone said.

NO HELP FOR SUPER DAD

Superman's dad has died. Again.

DC Comics has killed off Clark Kent's Earth father with a heart attack. In Action Comics #870, Superman can't hear his mom's cries for help in time to save Jonathan Kent.

The TV Jonathan -- played by John Schneider -- died long ago on CW's Smallville.

In the original Superman tales of the 1940s, Clark Kent's parents died while he was still a teen. And in the 1978 Superman movie that starred Christopher Reeve, Jonathan Kent, played by Glenn Ford, also died of a heart attack.

REAL FILM FANS

A Canadian and a German claim to have broken the world record for continuous movie watching, after seeing 57 films in 123 hours in a plastic-glass house in New York's Times Square.

A Guinness World Records spokesman said it appears Suresh Joachim of Toronto, and Claudia Wavra of Petersberg, Germany, have broken the record but said it will take two weeks to officially verify.

The attempt began Oct. 2 when eight challengers started watching Iron Man. Ten-minute breaks were allowed between films. After 72 hours, only two remained. The final movie, which they watched Tuesday: Thelma and Louise.

JOYS OF SMOKING

A phalanx of white-coated doctors endorses Camel cigarettes in an exhibit at the New York Public Library.

Movie stars and baseball greats are there, too, in tobacco ads dating from the 1920s to the 1950s. Even Santa Claus is there, puffing on a Pall Mall.

The exhibit, titled Not a Cough in a Carload: Images Used by Tobacco Companies to Hide the Hazards of Smoking, opened last week and will be at the library's Science, Industry and Business branch on Madison Avenue through Dec. 26.

It was curated by Dr. Robert Jackler, an associate dean of continuing medical education at Stanford University.

Jackler said he and his wife, Laurie, chose the images from about 5,000 tobacco ads he began collecting when his mother, a longtime smoker, was diagnosed with lung cancer. She died last year.

''For us, this was a memorial to her,'' Jackler said.

Many of the ads make claims that seem laughable now, when packs of cigarettes come emblazoned with warnings about ``serious risks to your health.''

The vintage ads claim cigarettes improve your disposition and aid your digestion. ''Scientific tests'' prove that Lucky Strikes and Chesterfields are milder than other cigarettes.

Jackler said the intent of cigarette advertising is the same now as it was half a century ago -- to induce people, especially young people, to smoke.

''You'd make a big mistake if you said they were bad then and they're good now,'' he said. ``The messages are exactly the same.''

VAN GOGH EXHIBIT

Before Vincent van Gogh could make what would become one of the world's most famous and beloved images, he had to figure out how to use color to paint the blackness of night -- and how to do it in the dark.

The story of the technical challenges behind The Starry Night and other nocturnal scenes, indoors and out, is the subject of a small, very beautiful exhibition on view at the Museum of Modern Art.

Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night, which runs through Jan. 5, features just 23 paintings and 10 works on paper by the tortured Dutch genius, as well as excerpts from his letters and the poetry and literature that inspired him.

The problem for a painter whose work was based on observation of the natural world was how to paint landscapes at night, in the dark.

Eventually, he solved the problem by setting up his easel under the outdoor gas lamps of a cafe in Arles. The lamps lit the canvas enough for him to paint a street scene below the twinkling stars, which became the masterpiece Cafe Terrace at Night.

The most famous of his night scenes, however, was painted while he was in a mental hospital, forbidden to go out at night. That was the now iconic Starry Night.

''The sight of the stars always makes me dream,'' Van Gogh wrote. ``Why should the spots of light in the firmament be less accessible to us than the black spots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon, we take death to go to a star.''

The next year, van Gogh committed suicide at age 37.

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