Author: Peter J Patrick
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The DVD Report #597
New This Week Searching, which won the Audience Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is a first-rate suspense film about a Korean-American father (Film Independent Spirit Best Actor nominee John Cho) who searches for his missing daughter on the internet while the police do the legwork. Filled with Hitchcockian level suspense, the film starts…
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Oscar Profile #420: Byron Forbes
Born July 26, 1926 in Stratford, England as John Theobald Clarke, actor-writer-producer-director Bryan Forbes was evacuated to Cornwall during World War II. In 1943, a neighbor who was a BBC producer put 17-year-old Clarke into BBC Radio’s The Will Hay Programme. He spent four years in the Intelligence Corps from 1944-1948. Upon completing his military…
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The DVD Report #596
New This Week We the Animals has been nominated for five Film Independent Spirit awards, the most of any film this year. The nominations are for Best First Feature, Film Editing, Cinematography, Supporting Male (Raul Castillo), and Someone to Watch (director Jeremiah Zagar). Documentary filmmaker Zagar’s first narrative feature is an adaptation of the 2011…
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Oscar Profile #419: Thanksgiving Day Movies
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 celebration of all of the U.S. holidays. We have had films that celebrate those we honor on their birthdays – George Washington (1942’s George…
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The DVD Report #595
New This Week The Children Act was shown at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival and subsequent film festivals before finally being given a theatrical run in the U.K., France, and elsewhere in August 2018 and the U.S. in September. It has now been released on DVD only by Lionsgate with little fanfare, which is…
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Oscar Profile #418: Charles Brackett
Born November 26, 1892 in Sarasota Springs, New York to New York State Senator Edgar Truman Brackett and his wife Mary, nee Corliss, Charles Brackett’s American family heritage could be traced back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629. A 1915 graduate of Williams College, he earned his degree from Harvard University. A member of…
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The DVD Report #594
New This Week BlacKkKlansman is easily Spike Lee’s best film in decades. Taken from Ron Stallworth’s 2014 memoir of his experiences as an undercover black detective in Colorado Springs, who in 1979 posed as a white man in order to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan, the action in the film is moved back to 1972…
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Oscar Profile #417: Winona Ryder
Born October 29, 1971 as Winona Laura Horowitz in Winona, Minnesota, the actress chose her professional last name of Ryder while listening to an album by Mitch Ryder. Her mother is an author, video producer and editor, and her father an author, editor, publisher and antiquarian bookseller. He also worked as an archivist for psychedelic…
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The DVD Report #593
New This Week The Big Parade, the screen’s first great war film as well as anti-war film, was released just seven years after the end of World War I. As we commemorate the 100th anniversary of the war to end all wars on November 11, 2018, let’s pause to remember and plan to watch at…
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Oscar Profile #416: King Vidor
Born February 8, 1894 in Galveston, Texas, King Wallis Vidor was the son of a prominent businessman and his wife. He became freelance newsreel cameraman and cinema projectionist before becoming a filmmaker himself. The city of Vidor, Texas, was named after his father Charles Shelton Vidor who founded the Miller-Vidor Lumber Co., which the town…
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The DVD Report #592
New This Week Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is one of the year’s biggest surprises, a totally enjoyable sequel to a film whose popularity I never quite got. While 2008’s Mamma Mia! from the Broadway hit was entertaining with its stolen plot from Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell, it seemed little more than an excuse…
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Oscar Profile #415: Cher
Born May 20, 1946 in El Centro, California, Cherilyn Sarkisian, known professionally as Cher, has been a star in multiple mediums for over five decades. The daughter of a truck driver and a housewife, she left school at 16, had a brief relationship with Warren Beatty and met future husband Sonny Bono that same year.…
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The DVD Report #591
New This Week Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a prime example of a film whose word-of-mouth has long outlived its poor marketing. Officially released in February 1956, Don Siegel’s science-fiction masterpiece did not open in New York until Friday, April 27th of that year as part of a double-bill with World Without End at…
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Oscar Profile #414: Nicolas Cage
Born January 7, 1964 in Long Beach, California, Nicolas Kim Coppola, known professionally as Nicolas Cage, is the son of literature professor August Coppola and his wife, dancer/choreographer Joy Vogelsang. He is the nephew of Oscar-winning director Francis Ford Coppola and Oscar-nominated actress Talia Shire. Inspired to become an actor by watching James Dean in…
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The DVD Report #590
New This Week Three Identical Strangers is an amazing documentary that plays like the best of fictional detective stories. The story begins in 1980 when 19-year-old Robert (Bobby) Shafran begins college in a small town in upstate New York. Greeted by many young people on campus as “Eddy,” it is obvious that he is being…
