Author: Peter J Patrick
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The DVD Report #612
New This Week Green Book is an Oscar-winning film in the tradition of Wings, It Happened One Night, In the Heat of the Night, Midnight Cowboy, The Sting, Chariots of Fire, Rain Man, Driving Miss Daisy, Chicago, and The King’s Speech in which two disparate characters bond over unusual circumstances. As was the case with…
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Oscar Profile #435: Diane Cilento
Born October 5, 1933 in Queensland, Australia, Diane Cilento was the daughter of distinguished medical practitioners, Sir Raphael Cilento and Phyllis, Lady Cilento. She wanted to become an actress from an early age, and after being expelled from school in Australia, was educated in New York while living with her father. She later won a…
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The DVD Report #611
New This Week The Favourite is quirky, charming, and hilarious. It is brilliantly acted, superbly directed and beautifully designed, costumed, and shot. Just how much of it is accurate, however, we may never know. Queen Anne ruled England, Scotland, and Ireland for a little over seven years from 1707-1714 from the age of 42 to…
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Oscar Profile #434: Rouben Mamoulian
Born October 8, 1897 in Tiflis, Georgia, Russian Empire to Armenian parents, Rouben Mamoulian’s mother was a director of the Armenian Theatre and his father was a bank president. Educated in Tiflis and Paris, he founded a drama studio in Tiflis in 1918. He relocated to England and started directing plays in London in 1922.…
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The DVD Report #610
New This Week Mary Queen of Scots was one of last year’s most anticipated films. Oscar prognosticators were beside themselves predicting back-to-back nominations for Lady Bird‘s Saoirse Ronan and I, Tonya‘s Margot Robbie. Then, as they say, the movie came out. Its only Oscar nominations were for Makeup and Hairstyling and Costume Design. Ronan received…
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Oscar Profile #433: Viggo Mortensen
Born October 20, 1958 in New York, New York, Viggo Mortensen (Jr.) was the first of three brothers born to Grace and Viggo Mortensen, Sr. The family moved to Venezuela, then Demark, then Argentina, the boys and their mother returning to New York when Viggo was 11 after their parents’ divorce. After graduating from St.…
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The DVD Report #609
New This Week A Star Is Born is a tale as old as the movies, the talking ones anyway. It made its first appearance under the title of What Price Hollywood? (1932), directed by George Cukor, in which waitress Constance Bennett becomes a star under the tutelage of a washed-up alcoholic director, the real-life alcoholic…
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Oscar Profile #432: Donald Sutherland
Born July 17, 1935 in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, Donald Sutherland survived rheumatic fever, hepatitis and polio as a child to study engineering in college but gave it up to study drama in England’s London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) in 1957. He later spent a year and a half in a…
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The DVD Report #608
New This Week Bohemian Rhapsody isn’t a terribly profound film, but it’s a highly enjoyable one for what it is – a typical Hollywood tribute to a great artist with an emphasis on the joy he or she brought to the world. As such, it works. It is, after all, already the highest grossing biographical…
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Oscar Profile #431: Margaret Rutherford
Born May 11, 1892 in London, England, Margaret Rutherford was the only child of William Rutherford Benn, a journalist and poet and his wife, Florence. Her parents were married in 1882. In 1883, her father murdered his father, a Congregational Church minister, was declared insane and admitted to Bethnal House Lunatic Asylum where he spent…
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The DVD Report #607
New This Week Widows was one of the most highly anticipated films of 2018, widely predicted to be a box-office smash and a major Oscar contender in numerous categories including Best Picture, Directing, Adapted Screenplay, Actress, Supporting Actress, and more. It ended up being a box-office flop and getting no Oscar or Golden Globe nominations.…
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Oscar Profile #430: Nicole Kidman
Born June 20, 1967 in Honolulu, Hawaii, Nicole Kidman was raised in a suburb of Sydney, Australia by her Australian parents who were visiting Hawaii on educational visas at the time of her birth. Young Kidman’s first love was ballet, but she soon gravitated toward drama and made her film debut in the 1983 Australian…
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The DVD Report #606
New This Week In the Heat of the Night has been given a beautiful 4K digital restoration for its Criterion Blu-ray release that finally gives this Oscar-winning masterpiece its due. Although it was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won five, it has long been critically held in the shadow of two other iconic 1967…
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Oscar Profile #429: Glenn Close Revisited
Born March 19, 1947 in Greenwich, Connecticut to Bettine (née Moore) and William Taliaferro Close, a doctor who ran a clinic in the Belgian Congo and served as personal physician to the Congo’s president, Glenn Close has long been considered one of our greatest actresses. Her paternal grandfather was first married to cereal heiress Marjorie…
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The DVD Report #605
New This Week First Man was one of the most eagerly anticipated films of 2018, and by extension, one that was expected to do well with various year-end awards, yet by the time the Oscar nominations came out last week, it was only nominated for four minor awards, Best Visual Effects, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing,…
