Author: Peter J Patrick
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Home Viewing with Peter #861
At the end of a year or the beginning of the next one is a time to look back over the previous year’s crop of releases. Traditionally for me, that means two things. The first is looking over the past year’s home video releases which have dwindled to a precious few and have been covered…
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Oscar Profile: Nedrick Young
Born March 23, 1914 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Nedrick Young was an Oscar winning writer and actor who began his acting career in film and on the New York stage in 1942. He served overseas with the U.S. Army during World War II. Young made his film debut in 1942’s Bombs Over Burma. Other pre-1949 films…
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Home Viewing with Peter #860
One of the most highly anticipated films of 2023, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, now streaming on Netflix, has been in the works for years. Actor-writer-producer-director Cooper first became enamored of conducting an orchestra at the age of 8, 40 years ago. He co-wrote the screenplay about the most famous of modern conductors, Leonard Bernstein (1918-2000), with…
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Oscar Profile: Bradley Cooper
Born January 5, 1975 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to a mother of Italian descent and a father of Irish descent, Bradly Cooper’s mother worked for the local NBC TV station, his father was a stockbroker. He moved to New York after graduating with top honors from Georgetown University in 1997. Studying drama at the Actors Studio,…
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Home Viewing with Peter #859
The Home Video Santa has been busy. The Criterion Collection has released Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio on 4K UHD a year after the film released briefly in theatres and then on Netflix. Fortunately, unlike most films that go straight to Netflix with or without a brief theatrical showing, this one has earned a much-deserved Criterion…
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Oscar Profile: Christmas Movies Revisited
With a plethora of lame Christmas movies available on TV at this time of year, it’s rare to find one that compares favorably to the classics that were produced by Hollywood of old, most of which are still available on DVD and Blu-ray. While no film with Christmas as its main theme has ever won…
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Home Viewing with Peter #858
Three classics from the 1970s through the 1990s have just been released on 4K Ultra HD while a fourth, recently given a 4K restoration, has been newly released on standard Blu-ray. Nominated for 14 Oscars, tying All About Eve’s then 47-year-old record, winning 11, tying Ben-Hur’s then 38-year-old record, James Cameron’s 1997 film, Titanic, also…
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Oscar Profile: Joseph MacDonald
Born May 26, 1906 in Mexico City, Mexico, Joseph (Patrick) MacDonald was initially trained as a mining engineer at the University of Southern California. Turning his interest to film work, MacDonald served a lengthy apprenticeship, starting as assistant cameraman at First National in the early 1920s before eventually graduating to first camera operator by the…
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Home Viewing with Peter #857
Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers is currently streaming on pay-for-view where you can find this highly anticipated film that takes place at a Massachusetts prep school during Christmas break in December 1970. Although the film received mostly glowing reviews from the critics, some objected to the film as not being indicative of a 70s movie, which…
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Oscar Profile: Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Born May 29, 1897 in Brunn, Moravia, Austria-Hungary, now Brno, Czech Republic, Erich Wolfgang Korngold was a child prodigy. The son of a well-known music critic, young Korngold accompanied his father in playing four-handed piano arrangements by the age of five. By the age of eleven he was appearing before enthusiastic Vienna audiences that included…
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Home Viewing with Peter #856
Universal has released Oppenheimer on 4K UHD, standard Blu-ray, and DVD. The 2023 film is a rare intellectual thriller that was also a box-office phenomenon. Although the biographical film presents an overview of the American theoretical scientist’s life, it concentrates on his time as director of the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory during World War…
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Thanksgiving Day Movies
Thanksgiving Day is here again. Time for Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, gatherings with family and friends, and if time permits, revisiting Thanksgiving Day films. Holidays have been celebrated in films since their inception. There have been films about virtually all of them. 1942’s Holiday Inn with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire is in fact a…
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Home Viewing with Peter #855
Five months before her 90th birthday, Paramount has released a 4K UHD Blu-ray upgrade of 1983’s Terms of Endearment, the film for which Shirley MacLaine won her only Oscar on her sixth and final nomination to date forty years ago. The legendary actress made her film debut in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 comedy-thriller, The Trouble with…
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Oscar Profile: Barbara Harris
Born July 25. 1935 In Evanston, Illinois, the youngest of four children, Barbara Harris was the daughter of a pianist mother and an arborist father who later became a businessman. She began her stage career as a teenager at the Playwrights Theater in Chicago. Her fellow players included Paul Sills, Ed Asner, Mike Nichols, and…
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Home Viewing with Peter #854
With so many of this year’s films coming up short, it’s nice to find one that exceeds expectations. Such is the case with Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s The Miracle Club which stars Laura Linney, Kathy Bates, and Maggie Smith all doing their best big screen work in years. It’s out now on Blu-ray and standard DVD. O’Sullivan,…
