Author: Peter J Patrick
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Oscar Profile #368: Henry King
Born January 24, 1886 in Christiansburg, Virginia, Henry Edmonson King left school at 15 to go to work for the Norfolk and Western Railroad. He later became an actor with the touring Empire Stock Company. He married actress Gypsy Abbott, with whom he would have four children, in 1914. He made his first film as…
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The DVD Report #544
New This Week The Hitman’s Bodyguard contains a plethora of two things I loathe in modern movies, low comedy and CGI (computer generated imagery), yet it somehow works. Ryan Reynolds, who is once again employing the self-deprecating humor that has sustained his career from at least 2002’s Buying the Cow through last year’s Deadpool, is…
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Oscar Profile #367: Rex Harrison
Born March 5, 1908 in Lancashire, England, Reginald Carey Harrison was the third child and only son of William Reginald Harrison, a cotton broker and his wife Edith Mary (née Carey). A precocious child, he dreamed of going on stage because he liked the applause and changed his name to Rex because it was the…
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The DVD Report #543
New This Week Wind River is one of the year’s best films, a thriller about the murder of an 18-year-old Native American woman on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming east of Boulder Flats, an area as large as the state of Rhode Island policed by just one Indian Tribal Police chief and his…
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Oscar Profile #366: John Alton
Born October 5, 1901 in Sopron, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary) as Johann Jacob Altmann, the son of an American-born father, legendary cinematographer John Alton was raised on films steeped in German Expressionism during his European childhood, which informed his later use of low light, his motto being “it’s not what you light…it’s what you don’t light.”.…
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The DVD Report #542
New This Week The Glass Castle is based on Jeanette Walls’ best-selling 2005 memoir about growing up in a nomad family led by an alcoholic father and a delusional artist mother. The film version is co-written by Destin Daniel Cretton, who also directed. It’s his first film since his 2013 breakout hit Short Term 12,…
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Oscar Profile #365: Viola Davis
Born August 11, 1965 in St. Matthews, South Carolina, the fifth of six children whose father was a horse trainer and whose mother was a maid. Two months after she was born, her parents moved her and three of her siblings to Cedar Falls, Rhode Island, leaving her two oldest siblings with her grandparents. She…
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The DVD Report #541
New This Week Lady Macbeth is not based on Shakespeare’s famed Scottish play. It is an adaptation of an 1865 Russian novel called Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Nikolai Leskov, which in its day was compared to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Transferring the tale to Jane Austen’s England makes the dark goings-on seem out-of-place, though some…
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Oscar Profile #364: Walter Lassally
Born December 18, 1926 in Berlin, Germany to a German father and Polish mother, Walter Lassally’s father was an engineer and industrial filmmaker. Although Protestant by religion, both parents were Jewish by heritage and his father was forced to stop working when the Nazis came to power in 1932. With his father imprisoned in 1938,…
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The DVD Report #540
New This Week The Old Dark House is a film with a fascinating history. Newly restored and presented at the 2017 Venice and New York Film Festivals, the Cohen Film Collection Blu-ray release is taken from that 4K restoration. Directed by James Whale between Frankenstein and The Invisible Man, top billing in the film’s original…
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Oscar Profile #363: Alan Ladd
Born September 3, 1913 to Ina Rawley and Alan Ladd, an accountant, Alan Walbridge Ladd was four when his father died. He was five when he burned his apartment, playing with matches. His mother moved them to Oklahoma City. He was malnourished, undersize and nicknamed “Tiny” at eight, when his mother married a housepainter who…
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The DVD Report #539
New This Week Spider-Man: Homecoming, directed by Jon Watts, is one of the better CGI superhero movies, featuring an engaging lead performance from Tom Holland (The Impossible), with nice support from Jacob Batalon, Zendaya, and other actors playing his high school classmates. Kudos to the filmmakers for leading the story in a different direction from…
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Oscar Profile #362: Richard Barthelmess
Born May 9, 1895 in New York New York, Richard Barthelmess was the son of stage actress Caroline Harris (1866-1937) and her husband, Alfred Barthelmess who died when Richard was just a year old. He had walk-ons in his mother’s plays from an early age. Educated at Hudson River Military Academy and Trinity College, he…
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The DVD Report #538
New This Week Baby Driver is a stylish thriller that I thoroughly enjoyed. Like this year’s other surprise critical and box-office hit, Get Out, it is a film that breathes new life into a tired genre. With Get Out, it was the horror film, with Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, it’s the heist and chase film.…
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Oscar Profile #361: Shelley Winters
Born August 18, 1920 in St. Louis, Missouri to Jonas Schrift, a designer of men’s clothing, and his wife Rose (née Winter), a singer, Shirley Schrift, would become the actress Shelley Winters. The family moved to Brooklyn, New York when Winters was 9. Her sister Blanche having married a Los Angeles theatre manager, Winters joined…
