Author: Peter J Patrick
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The DVD Report #754
New This Week Paramount has re-released 1981’s Reds on Blu-ray from a brand new 4K transfer. Whereas the previous release was spread across two discs with extras, the new one presents the entire 3-hour, 16-minute film on one disc, with extras, including a two-hour long making-of documentary on the film hosted by writer-producer-director-star Warren Beatty,…
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Oscar Profile #576: Stephen Sondheim
Born March 22, 1930 in New York, New York, Stephen Sondheim was raised in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where his close friendship with Oscar Hammerstein II’s son led to his apprenticeship to Hammerstein under whose tutelage he began his legendary musical theater career. This is, of course, well-known to anyone who has followed his career, or…
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The DVD Report #753
New This Week Disney has released the Fox Searchlight film The Eyes of Tammy Faye on Blu-ray and standard DVD via its 20th Century Studios subsidiary. The film from director Michael Showalter (The Big Sick) stars Jessica Chastain as the televangelist and Andrew Garfield as her husband, fellow televangelist Jim Bakker. Chastain rose to prominence…
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Oscar Profile #575: Thanksgiving 2021
For the first time in years there is a new film about Thanksgiving on screens in celebration of the holiday, the film version of the 2016 Tony award-winning play, The Humans. 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…
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The DVD Report #752
New This Week Milos Forman’s 1981 film of E.L. Doctorow’s kaleidoscopic 1975 novel Ragtime has been given a stunning 4K transfer by Paramount for its 40th anniversary Blu-ray release. Nominated for 8 Academy Awards including Best Supporting Actor Howard E. Rollins (A Soldier’s Story) and Best Supporting Actress Elizabeth McGovern (Ordinary People), the film was…
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Oscar Profile #574: Fred Astaire Revisited
Born May 10, 1899, Frederick Austerlitz became Fred Astaire when he and his older (by 18 months) sister, Adele, became vaudeville tap stars when he was just five years old. As their skills improved, they became bigger stars and broke into Broadway in 1917 with a show called Over the Top. Smash hits including Lady…
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The DVD Report #751
New This Week Fritz Lang’s first and best Hollywood film, 1936’s Fury, has been given a Blu-ray upgrade by Warner Archive. The Austrian born director of the German classics Metropolis and M would go on to make such well regarded Hollywood films as The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, and The Big Heat, but…
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Oscar Profile #573: Classics That Oscar Failed to Recognize
When I think of classics from Hollywood’s Golden Age that Oscar failed to recognize, I’m not talking about films that like The Wizard of Oz and It’s a Wonderful Life, modest hits that were nominated for Best Picture Oscars but failed to win the top prizes, but films that weren’t even nominated for those awards.…
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The DVD Report #750
New This Week The Randolph Scott Collection on Blu-ray from Mill Creek, featuring 12 of the actor’s films for Columbia, with prints provided by Sony, was supposed to have been released in April of this year but was held up for six months. The holdup was presumably so that they could add commentary to the…
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Oscar Profile #572: Robert Z. Leonard
Born October 7, 1889 in Chicago, Illinois to a theatrical family, Robert Z(igler) Leonard was the second cousin of the legendary actress and singer Lillian Russell. Although he studied law at the University of Colorado, his first love was the theatre. An accomplished singer, he settled in Hollywood in 1907 after singing in 100 light…
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The DVD Report #749
New This Week Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg are actors so associated with Boston, Massachusetts, the city of their birth, that it’s interesting to find them both expanding their repertoires to play characters from western states in their latest films. Damon plays an out-of-work oil worker from Stillwater, Oklahoma who travels to Marseilles, France to…
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Oscar Profile #571: Sessue Hayakawa
Born June 10, 1886 in Chikura, Japan, Kitano Hayakawa was the son of an imperial Japanese naval officer who planned to follow in his father’s footsteps until he ruptured his eardrum in a deep-sea dive at the age of 18. The despondent teenager attempted suicide by stabbing himself in the abdomen thirty times, but his…
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The DVD Report #748
New This Week With Halloween upon us, this is the season for scary movies. Warner Archive has released Blu-ray upgrades of one of the seminal horror films from the 1930s and two from the 1940s. Criterion has released a Blu-ray upgrade of one of the best remembered science fiction horror films of the 1950s. The…
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Oscar Profile #570: Karl Freund
Born January `16, 1890 in Königinhof, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary, now Dvur Kralove, Czech Republic, future Oscar winner Karl Freund moved with his family to Berlin when he was 11. In 1905, when he was 15, he went to work as a projectionist. Two years later he was a newsreel photographer. He was then drafted into the…
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The DVD Report #747
New This Week The Criterion Collection has released a content-loaded two-disc 4K digital restoration of Raoul Walsh’s seminal 1941 actioner High Sierra on Blu-ray. Marking the moment when the gritty gangster films of the 1930s began giving way to the romantic fatalism of 1940s film noir, to quote the notes on the Blu-ray case’s back…
