The DVD Report #205: April 25, 2011

With eleven nominations each for Amadeus and A Passage to India, it seemed like a pretty even race going into the 1984 Academy Awards, but it came out a bit more lopsided, with Amadeus winning eight Oscars and A Passage to India just two.

Based on Peter Shaffer’s Tony winning Broadway play, Amadeus is a fictionalized account of the life and death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart told in flashback by court composer Antonio Salieri, his alleged murderer. Hitherto unknown, and subsequently never in another major screen role, stage actor F. Murray Abraham won the Best Actor Oscar as Salieri while Tom Hulce was nominated as Mozart in the roles played on Broadway by Ian McKellen and Tim Curry. The film also won for Best Picture; Director (Milos Forman); Adapted Screenplay; Art Direction; Costume Design; Sound and Makeup. It had also been nominated for Best Cinematography and Editing.

Based on E.M. Forster’s famed novelabout cultural clashes in British colonial India, A Passage to India proved to be two time Oscar winner David Lean’s last film. Its Oscars were for Dame Peggy Ashcroft’s acclaimed performance as the inquisitive Mrs. Moore and for Maurice Jarre’s haunting score. It had also been nominated for Best Picture; Actress (Judy Davis); Director (Lean); Adapted Screenplay; Cinematography; Editing; Art Direction; Costume Design and Sound. Although Ashcroft’s Oscar was for Supporting Actress, there had been speculation prior to the nomination whether should would be nominated in that category for which she also won awards from the L.A. Film Critics and the Golden Globes, or in the more prestigious Best Actress category where she had been honored by the National Board of Review; the New York Film Critics and the BAFTAs.

Ashcroft’s designation in support left the way clear for Sally Field to win her second Best Actress Oscar for Places in the Heart, which had been nominated for seven Oscars. Director Robert Benton who had previously won Oscars for writing and directing Kramer vs. Kramer picked up another for his screenplay here. He had also been nominated for Best Director of the film about a struggling farm widow in the 1920s. The film’s other nominations were for Best Supporting Actor (John Malkovich); Supporting Actress (Lindsay Crouse) and Costume Design.

Malkovich also had a prominent role in The Killing Fields, which was nominated for seven Oscars and took home three for Best Supporting Actor Haing S. Ngor; Cinematography and Editing. The true story of Dirth Pran, the photographer trapped in Cambodia during Pol Pot’s bloody cleansing campaign, had also been nominated for Best Picture; Actor (Sam Waterston); Director (Roland Joffe) and Adapted Screenplay. Oscar winner Ngor’s own story was even more horrific than that of the character he played, having endured imprisonment and starvation in Cambodia during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. Even after his Oscar win, his life was not easy and he was murdered in a botched robbery in front of his Los Angeles home in 1996.

The fifth Best Picture nominee was A Soldier’s Story, which received additional nominations for Best Supporting Actor Adolph Caesar and Adapted Screenplay. Directed by Norman Jewison, the film starred Howard E. Rollins, Jr. as an African American officer investigating the murder of an African American Army sergeant in Louisiana in the 1940s. Denzel Washington had his first memorable screen role in support.

Other films that Oscar liked included Country; The River; The Bostonians; Starman; Under the Volcano; The Karate Kid; Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes; Swing Shift; The Natural; The Pope of Greenwich Village; Romancing the Stone; Ghostbusters and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but not Once Upon a Time in America; Paris, Texas or Mass Appeal.

Sally Field’s character in Places in the Heart wasn’t the only farm woman in the Best Actress race. Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek who played similar characters in Country and The River were also in the running along with the previously mentioned Judy Davis in A Passage to India and Vanessa Redgrave as a suffragette in The Bostonians.

Amadeus’ Abraham and Hulce’s competition consisted of the aforementioned Sam Waterston as a reporter in The Killing Fields; Jeff Bridges as an extra-terrestrial in Starman and Albert Finney as a self-destructive alcoholic in John Huston’s critically acclaimed film of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano.

Two wise old men, Noriyuki “Pat” Mortia as the martial arts master in The Killing Fields and Sir Ralph Richardson, nominated posthumously, as Tarzan’s grandfather in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes joined the previously mentioned John Malkovich in Places in the Heart and Adolph Casearin A Soldier’s Story in losing to Haing S. Ngor in The Killing Fields.

Peggy Ashcroft’s splendid performance in A Passage to India was going to win the Supporting Actress Oscar no matter who they nominated against her, but she had perhaps the weakest competition in Oscar history. In addition to the previously mentioned Lindsay Crouse as Sally Field’s sister in Places in the Heart, there were Christine Lahti as Goldie Hawn’s friend in the generally disliked Swing Shift; Glenn Close backlit as if she were the Madonna in the interminable baseball movie, The Natural and Geraldine Page, who chews up the scenery in her one scene as the mother of a recently deceased policeman in The Pope of Greenwich Village.

Box office hits Romancing the Stone; Ghostbusters and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom all received nominations in the technical categories, but only the latter went home with an Oscar, which it won for Best Visual Effects.

Sergio Leone’s epic gangster film, Once Upon a Time in America was cut to ribbons for American distribution, which hampered its Oscar chances, but not its Golden Globe or BAFTA chances. The Globes nominated it for two awards, while BAFTA nominated it for five and honored it with two wins.

The Globes and BAFTAs also recognized Wim Wenders’ acclaimed Paris, Texas, for which he won the BAFTA as the year’s Best Director.

By this point in his career Jack Lemmon had received eight Oscar nominations and two wins, some of them for questionable efforts, yet his strongest performance in years as a priest who hides behind his popularity in Mass Appeal, failed to bring him a nomination in a not very competitive year. Go figure.

All films discussed except Mass Appeal have been released on DVD in the U.S.

This week’s new DVD releases include the Blu-ray debuts of Blow Out and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

-Peter J. Patrick (April 25, 2011)

The DVD Report #204: April 19, 2011

1983 was what I would call an off-year at the Oscars. There were five good films nominated for Best Picture, but few would call any of them great. The winner, Terms of Endearment, was the kind of film that might elicit a Best Picture nomination in other years, but would not be given much of a chance of winning.

Writer-producer-director James L. Brooks, who had an extremely successful career in television, has made only six films in a screen career spanning almost thirty years. Terms of Endearment was his first. Only two of his subsequent films, 1987’s Broadcast News and 1997’s As Good As It Gets were hits. The other three, 1994’s I’ll Do Anything; 2004’s Spanglish and last year’s How Do You Know were unmitigated disasters both critically and commercially.

With Terms of Endearment, Brooks, who had been best known for TV’s The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Taxi, had the good fortune to be working from Larry McMurtry’s source novel. McMurtry’s Hud and The Last Picture Show had previously scored with Oscar voters and McMurtry himself would later win an Oscar for his adaptation of Brokeback Mountain.

Brooks also had the good fortune to be working with a superb cast headed by Shirley MacLaine Debra Winger, Jack Nicholson, Jeff Daniels and John Lithgow, all of whom, except for Daniels, received nominations for their performances. MacLaine and Winger, who from all accounts, had a volatile relationship off camera, used it to particular advantage, playing a mother and daughter who were never on the best of terms. MacLaine, who had been nominated for five previous Oscars without winning (four for acting, one for writing, producing and directing a documentary), was the odds-on favorite to win Best Actress and she did. Winger, who had been nominated for the previous year’s An Officer and a Gentleman, in which she didn’t get along with her co-star, Richard Gere, either, was probably her closest competition.

Jack Nicholson, playing a retired astronaut, won his second of three Oscars and his only one in support. He and MacLaine make an odd, yet endearing couple. In all, the film won five Oscars, including three for Brooks as writer, producer and director. It had received a total of eleven nominations.

The Best Picture nominee with the second most nominations was Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff, which was nominated for eight and won four for Editing, Score, Sound and Sound Effects. The film, which is breathtaking in its depiction of the early astronauts unfortunately treats peripheral characters, especially reporters and politicians, as buffoons, which I think is a huge mistake. It renders what could have been a transcendent work of art into what at times seems more like a parody than a serious exploration of the times. On the plus side it provided excellent acting opportunities for Oscar nominee Sam Shepard as legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager and Scott Glenn, Ed Harris, Dennis Quaid, Fred Ward and Lance Henriksen among the first astronauts. Harris plays John Glenn.

Veteran character actor Robert Duvall had one of his best roles as a broken down, middle-aged country singer in Tender Mercies, for which he won the year’s Best Actor Oscar on his fourth nomination. Horton Foote also won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. The film had received a total of five nominations including Best Director, Bruce Beresford.

An unusual film, Peter Yates’ The Dresser is a character study about an aging, not very likeable actor, played with his usual brilliance by Albert Finney and his valet, or dresser, played by Tom Courtenay. Both actors are superb and very much deserved their nominations for Best Actor. The film was also nominated for Best Director and Adapted Screenplay.

A gathering of friends for the funeral of one of their contemporaries was the story behind Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill, which in addition to its Best Picture nod received just two other nominations, for Best Original Screenplay and Supporting Actress, Glenn Close. Although Close was the one singled out, the film also provided fine acting opportunities for Kevin Kline, William Hurt, Jeff Golblum, JoBeth Williams, Tom Berenger, Meg Tilly and especially Mary Kay Place. Kevin Costner played the corpse.

Other films Oscar liked this year included Fanny & Alexander; Testament; Silkwood; Educating Rita; Heart Like a Wheel; Yentl; The Year of Living Dangerously; Cross Creek and  Return of the Jedi.   

Eight years earlier Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage was declared ineligible for Oscar consideration because it was shown on Swedish television the year before. No such controversy attached itself to Bergman’s last masterpiece, Fanny & Alexander because although made for Swedish television, the five hour TV cut, which was to be shown over four nights, was not shown until December, 1983. The three hour theatrical version was shown first in Sweden in December, 1982.

Nominated for six Oscars, this beautifully wrought film of the lives of children in turn-of-the-twentieth-century in Sweden won four, for Best Foreign Film, Cinematography, Art Direction and Costume Design. Bergman, nominated for the eighth and ninth time for Best Director and Screenplay, respectively, did not win, and in fact has never won a competitive Oscar. He did receive the Thalberg award at the 1971 Oscars.

A devastating film from Lynne Littman, who had won an Oscar for one of her documentaries, Testmaent was her first narrative film and one that cut to the bone. Jane Alexander in perhaps the performance of her career is beautifully nuanced as a mother facing the end of the world after a nuclear disaster has killed off most of the world’s population. Roxana Zal as her daughter is quite moving as well, and the supporting cast includes Lukas Haas, William Devane, Philip Anglim, Lilia Skala, Leon Ames, Lurene Tuttle, Rebecca De Mornay and Kevin Costner, all of whom are given a moment or two to shine as well. It’s a forgotten gem that deserves to be better known.

The already much lauded Meryl Streep picked up her fifth nomination for Silkwood, the true story of a worker at a plutonium plant who is deliberately contaminated, psychologically tortured and probably murdered to prevent her from exposing safety violations at the plant. Kurt Russell as her husband and Cher, Oscar nominated as her friend, were also memorable. The film received a total of five nominations including those for Best Editing, Original Screenplay and Director, Mike Nichols.

The fifth Best Actress nomination went to Julie Walters for the British comedy, Educating Rita, which was also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay and Actor, Michael Caine as the professor who brings insight to the housewife’s life.

Missing out on a Best Actress nomination, although the Globes nominated her for Best Actress-Drama, Bonnie Bedelia gave what was far and away her best screen performance as real life drag racer Shirley Muldowney. The film did receive a nomination for Best Costume Design.

Barbra Stresiand had been nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress- Musical or Comedy and won the Globe for Best Director for Yentl, her dream project of the young girl who poses as a boy in order to obtain an education. The forty-one year-old actress was a bit long in the tooth for the role, but she could still sing. The film won an Oscar for Best Song Score. It was also nominated for two of its songs, as well as for Best Art Direction and a surprise nomination for Amy Irving for Supporting Actress.

Peter Weir’s political thriller, The Year of Living Dangerously, won an Oscar for diminutive actress Linda Hunt as a half-Chinese male dwarf photographer in one of the most amazing performances of the era. She remains the only performer to win an Oscar for playing a member of the opposite sex.

Mary Steenburgen starred as author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings in Martin Ritt’s Cross Creek, but it was supporting players Rip Torn and Alfre Woodard who received the Oscar nominations for their performances along with nods for Best Score and Costume Design.

The last film in George Lucas’ original Star Wars trilogy, Return of the Jedi, was nominated for four Oscars, but its only win was a special achievement award for Best Visual Effects.

All films discussed have been released on DVD in the U.S.

This week’s new DVD releases include the most recent Best Picture Oscar winner, The King’s Speech as well as Oscar contender Rabbit Hole.

-Peter J. Patrick (April 19, 2011)

The DVD Report #203: April 12, 2011

It took Richard Attenborough decades to bring his dream film of the life of Mahatma Gandhi to the screen. The result is a passionate, if somewhat slow, albeit ultimately satisfying biographical film which won the lion’s share of the year-end awards including eight of the eleven Oscars it was nominated for.

In checking the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) as part of my research, I was struck by a question from someone wanting to know if Gandhi was a true story. I find it absolutely shocking that someone who would know how to use a computer, watches movies and knows how to find information about them, wouldn’t know about the father of modern India and his non-violent protests, let alone his assassination. It completely changed my opinion of the film, which I had thought these many years was somewhat over-rated. It’s not over-rated if it brings Gandhi’s story to people who never heard of him. What on Earth are they teaching in schools these days?

Anyway, Ben Kingsley’s Oscar winning performance is both reverent and real, and one can easily understand why he won the Best Actor Oscar over career high performances by screen legends Paul Newman in The Verdict and Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, as well as pretty good ones by two other legends, Jack Lemmon in Missing and Peter O’Toole, who had played a few historical figures of his own, in My Favorite Year.

Although I generally prefer historical epics to popcorn movies, this was one of those years where my favorite film of the year was the popcorn movie – Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, still one of the most charming family films ever made, and one whose sympathies were perfectly in tune with the teachings of Gandhi. The film won four of the nine Oscars it was nominated for, as well as numerous other awards.

Despite the fruits of Attenborough’s passion and Spielberg’s wonderment, I found myself torn between two directors with the same first name for the year’s top director’s prize. Both Sydney Pollack and Sidney Lumet had been nominated for Best Director, the former for Tootsie, the latter for The Verdict, and both their films were nominated for Best Picture. Pollack’s film, in which Hoffman plays a man pretending to be a woman, was easily the year’s best comedy, although it does slow down a bit in the third act. Lumet’s film was a crackling courtroom drama in which Newman takes on both the medical establishment and the Catholic Church. Tootsie was nominated for ten Oscars and won one for Jessica Lange as Best Supporting Actress. The Verdict was nominated for five, but failed to win any.

Among The Verdict’s nominees who went home empty-handed was veteran actor James Mason who played Newman’s opposing counsel in the film.

The fifth nominee was Costa-Gavras’ Missing, which was nominated for four Oscars and won one for Best Adapted Screenplay. Lemmon and Sissy Spacek had been nominated for their portrayals of the father and wife, respectively, of a missing writer in Chile during a right wing military coup.

Other films that Oscar liked this year included Sophie’s Choice; Das Boot; Victor/Victoria; An Officer and a Gentleman; The World According to Garp; Frances; Blade Runner and Poltergeist.

Meryl Streep won her second Oscar for her portrayal of the Polish concentration camp survivor in Alan J. Pakula’s Sophie’s Choice. The devastating film was nominated for five Oscars, of which Streep’s was the only win.

World War II from a different perspective, that of a German submarine crew, was the subject of Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot, whichreceived six Oscar nominations including two for Petersen for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Julie Andrews returned to the Oscar spotlight for the first time in seventeen years as a Best Actress nominee for husband Blake Edwards’ Victor/Victoria. Andrews was at her sparkling best as a down on her luck female singer who poses as a man who performs as a woman in a female impersonation show. The film was nominated for seven Oscars and won one for Best Song Score. Among its nominations were those for Best Supporting Actor Robert Preston as Andrews’ drag queen boss and mentor and Best Supporting Actress Lesley Ann Warren as a gangster’s moll.

An extremely popular romantic drama, Taylor Hackford’s An Officer and a Gentleman received six Oscar nominations including Best Actress Debra Winger. It won two, for Best Supporting Actor Louis Gossett, Jr. as Richard Gere’s tough drill sergeant, and for Best Song “Up Where We Belong”.

Veteran stage actress Glenn Close made a widely heralded screen debut playing Robin Williams’ feminist mother in George Roy Hill’s film of John Irving’s The World According to Garp. Close and John Lithgow as a transsexual were both nominated for their performances. Lithgow was one of four of this year’s acting nominees who played someone of the opposite sex, although the other three, Hoffman, Andrews and Preston, did so only on stage.

A star from an earlier time, Frances Farmer, was the subject of the harrowing biography, Frances, for which Jessica Lange received a Best Actress nomination and Kim Stanley a Best Supporting Actress nod. Lange’s amazing performance in this film is generally considered to be the reason she won the Supporting Actress Oscar for Toostie over Garp’s Glenn Close and her Tootise co-star, Teri Garr, who had also been nominated.

Ridley Scott’s ground-breaking science fiction film, Blade Runner, received two nominations for Best Art Direction and Visual Effects. Tobe Hooper’s equally ground-breaking horror film, Poltergeist received three for Best Score; Visual Effects and Sound Effects Editing.

All films discussed have been released on DVD in the U.S.

Among this week’s new DVD releases are Harrry Potter and the Deathly Hollows: Part 1 and the Blue-ray debut of The Incredibles, as well as the DVD only release of Tracy & Hepburn: The Definitive Collection. Include are all nine films made by the acting giants as a team, seven of which have been previously released. New to the collection, and sold separately, are Keeper of the Flame and Sea of Grass.

-Peter J. Patrick (April 12, 2011)

The DVD Report #202: April 5, 2011

The 1981 Oscars provides a good microcosm of the awards in general, representing as it does an amalgam of popular and critical favorites among the nominees.

On the popular front, we had both Raiders of the Lost Ark, which appealed to the younger generations and On Golden Pond, which appealed to the older ones. On the other hand we had Reds and Atlantic City, which appealed heavily to the critics. In the middle we had Chariots of Fire, with its popular theme augmenting the fervor with which the U.S. greeted the Olympics in light of the U.S. hockey team’s win at the 1980 winter games in Lake Placid, N.Y. and the anticipation of the 1984 summer games in Los Angeles.

Chariots of Fire, which centered on the 1924 Olympics, also had strong religious themes as its principal characters were a determined Jew and a devout Christian. But, and it’s a big but, the heroes were British, Americans were, if not outright villains, decidedly not the heroes, either. The film, though a runner-up on most critics’ lists, was not thought to be much of a threat to the two Oscar front-runners: the critics’ darling, Reds, and the popular favorite, On Golden Pond. In fact, the only award it was expected to win easily was Best Original Score for Greek composer Vangelis. It was quite a shock when the film won not only that award, but Best Costume Design: Original Screenplay and Picture as well. It had also been nominated for Best Director (Hugh Hudson); Supporting Actor (Ian Holm) and Editing.

Having been nominated for a whopping twelve Oscars, Reds was the prohibitive favorite, but ended up winning only three for Best Director (Warren Beatty); Supporting Actress (Maureen Stapleton) and Cinematography. It had also nominated for Best Actor (Beatty); Actress (Diane Keaton); Supporting Actor (Jack Nicholson); Original Screenplay; Art Direction; Editing; Costume Design and Sound.

The film, which was about the romance of John Reed (Beatty) and Louise Bryant (Keaton) set against the background of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath in America, featured Nicholson as Eugene O’Neill; Stapleton as Emma Goldman and more than thirty living survivors of the times called “witnesses” whose comments were inserted at various points. They included Henry Miller; Adela Rogers St. John; Rebecca West; Will Durant and Roger Baldwin.

With almost as many nominations as Reds, popular favorite On Golden Pond garnered ten including the first for screen legend Henry Fonda in forty-one years. Fonda, who saw his daughter Jane win two Best Actress Oscars, had finally been acknowledged by the Academy with a career achievement award the preceding year, but a competitive Oscar was what he really should have received for one of his great performances over the years. They finally gave him one on his deathbed, ironically, that one, too, accepted by daughter Jane.

The story line of On Golden Pond is somewhat hokey, but Fonda and Katharine Hepburn infuse their elderly characters with a lifetime of screen memories for the audience, making them seem more vital than they might have otherwise.

While Fonda’s Oscar was expected, Hepburn’s win of the Best Actress Oscar, her fourth, was totally unexpected, but nevertheless fitting. The two play off each other as though they have been together for fifty years or more, when in fact they had never met before filming. Jane Fonda as their daughter was nominated and the film picked up an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay as well. It had also been nominated for Best Director (Mark Rydell); Cinematography; Editing; Sound and Score.

A more somber exploration of old age was provided by Atlantic Citywith Burt Lancaster in a late career high triumph as a small time gangster with delusions of grandeur. Lancaster as always, commands the screen, but an emerging Susan Sarandon manages to out-sizzle him in every scene she’s in. Lancaster’s Best Actor nomination was expected, but Sarandon, thought to be a supporting actress contender, surprised with her nomination for Best Actress. The film was also nominated for Best Director (Louis Malle) and Original Screenplay.

Nominated for eight Oscars, Raiders of the Lost Ark was easily the year’s best popcorn movie, which provided star Harrison Ford with the role of his career as Indiana Jones, which he has reprised three times thus far. It was an easy winner for Best Visual Effects as well as for Art Direction; Editing and Sound. It also won a Special Achievement award for sound effects editing. Its other nominations were for Best Director (Steven Spielberg); Cinematography and Score.

Beyond the Best Picture nominees, Oscar also liked Arthur; The French Lieutenant’s Woman; Absence of Malice; Only When I Laugh; Excalibur and Ragtime, but not Gallipoli; Body Heat; Raggedy Man or Mommie Dearest.

Owing much of its success to its infectious theme song and John Gielgud’s line readings as an impervious butler, Arthur easily won Oscars for Best Original Song and Supporting Actor. It had also been nominated for Best Actor (Dudley Moore) and Original Screenplay.

Thought be un-filmable, John Fowles’ best-selling The French Lieutenant’s Woman nevertheless easily negotiated the parallel stories of modern actors (Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons) and the 19th Century characters they play in a film. It was nominated for five Oscars including Best Actress (Streep); Adapted Screenplay; Editing; Art Direction and Costume Design.

Guilt by association is the theme of the newspaper and politics thriller, Absence of Malice which earned Paul Newman his sixth Best Actor nomination, his first in fourteen years. The film was also nominated for Best Supporting Actress (Melinda Dillon) and Original Screenplay.

The acting was the thing in Neil Simon’s adaptation of his Broadway play, The Gingerbread Lady, re-named Only When I Laugh. It received nominations for Best Actress (Marsha Mason); Supporting Actor (James Coco) and Supporting Actress (Joan Hackett).

An exciting re-telling of the legend of King Arthur, John Boorman’s Excalibur received its only nomination for Best Cinematography.

E.L. Doctorow’s acclaimed novel, Ragtime, later made into a great Broadway musical, was a disappointing film that nevertheless garnered a highly respectable eight nominations for Best Supporting Actor (Howard E. Rollins, Jr.); Supporting Actress (Elizabeth McGovern); Adapted Screenplay; Art Direction; Cinematography; Costume Design; Score and Song.

Far more deserving of Oscar recognition than a Ragtime or an Only When I Laugh, Peter Weir’s magnificent World War I epic, Gallipoli, at least cleaned up at the Australian Film Institute, winning eight out the twelve awards it was nominated for including Best Picture and Actor, Mel Gibson.

Lawrence Kasdan’s scintillating Body Heat greatly advanced the career of William Hurt and introduced one of the 1980s most intriguing actresses, the scintillating Kathleen Turner. Alas, only the Golden Globes recognized her with a Best Newcomer nomination.

Sissy Spacek, under husband Jack Fisk’s direction, gave one of her most effective performances as young divorcee in Raggedy Man, but a Golden Globe nomination was all she, too, could muster, albeit in the Best Actress category.

Although she placed second in the New York Film Critics balloting for Best Actress, Faye Dunaway’s portrayal of Joan Crawford and the film Mommie Dearest are best remembered for their Razzies for Worst Actress and Picture. The film, which is based on Christina Crawford’s scandalous memoir, is actually a lot better than its critics would have you believe.

All films discussed except Only When I Laugh have been released on DVD in the U.S.

This week’s new DVD releases include Tron: Legacy and the Blu-ray debuts of Taxi Driver and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.

-Peter J. Patrick (April 5, 2011)