Author: Peter J Patrick
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Oscar Profile #338: Joseph Walker
Born August 22, 1892 in Denver, Colorado, Joseph Bailey Walker worked as a wireless telephone engineer, inventor and photographer of documentaries for the Red Cross during World War I before beginning his feature film career in 1919 with Back to God’s Country, a Canadian film that was filmed near the Artic Circle. He then freelanced…
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The DVD Report #514
New This Week La La Land, the movie critics and the Oscars went gaga over, is now available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD. The film was so popular that it is almost considered uncouth not to like it. Just the other day I read a review by an esteemed critic who said either you…
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Oscar Profile #337: Jonathan Demme
Born February 22, 1944 in Baldwin, N.Y., (Robert) Jonathan Demme was the son of Robert Demme, a public relations manager and his wife, Dorothy. The family later moved to Florida, where he graduated from Southwest Miami High School and the University of Florida. Demme had an early job as a film critic for a shopping…
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The DVD Report #513
New This Week Woman of the Year is one of the best Criterion Collection Blu-ray releases ever. Not only do we get George Stevens’ classic 1942 film, the first of nine films over a twenty-six-year period starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, we get loads of significant extras. The extras include a new on-camera interview…
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Oscar Profile #336: Simone Signoret
Born March 21, 1921 in Wiesbaden, Germany to French parents, Simone Henriette Charlotte Kamiker was a legendary French actress known professionally as Simone Signoret (her mother’s maiden name). Her mother was a French Catholic. Her father, who had Polish Jewish roots, left France to join General DeGaulle in England in 1940. Upon completing secondary school…
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The DVD Report #512
New This Week Nominated for a total of ten Oscars between them, Lion with six, Hidden Figures with three, and Toni Erdmann with one, all walked away empty-handed, but all three should add to their haul of fans now that they are available on Blu-ray and standard DVD. Garth Davis’ Australian film, Lion, is that…
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Oscar Profile #435: Martin Scorsese
Born November 17, 1942 in Queens, New York and raised in Manhattan’s Little Italy, Martin Charles Scorsese earned a B.S. in film communications in 1964 and an M.A. in the same field in 1966. Having made his own short films since 1959, he made his first feature film, Who’s That Knocking at My Door starring…
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The DVD Report #511
New This Week Taken on its own, Rogue One might prove confusing to the uninitiated, but in the context of the Star Wars saga, it makes perfect sense. It’s the missing link between the original three films in the franchise and the later prequels. Featuring a literate script by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy and…
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Oscar Profile #334: Russ Tamblyn
Born December 30, 1934 to actors Sally Triplett and Eddie Tamblyn, Russell Irving Tamblyn known professionally as Rusty, then Russ Tamblyn, was discovered by actor Lloyd Bridges for the play Stone Jungle at the age of ten. He immediately found work on radio and made his film debut in 1948’s The Boy with Green Hair…
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The DVD Report #510 – 10th Anniversary Edition
New This Week It was ten years ago this week that my first DVD Report appeared on CinemaSight. At the time, DVD was the king of home media, having been around for more than ten years and having long since supplanted VHS as the preferred format for renters and collectors. Ten years later, Blu-ray is…
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Oscar Profile #333: George J. Folsey
Born July 2, 1898 in Brooklyn, New York, George Joseph Folsey was one of Hollywood’s greatest cinematographers. He was director of photography on more than 160 films from 1919 to 1972, earning 13 Oscar nominations along the way. Folsey began in the film industry as an office boy in Jesse Lasky’s New York production company…
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The DVD Report #509
New This Week This isn’t a particularly good time for political films. With real life events involving crimes in high places taking bizarre turns nearly every day, it’s almost impossible to take a contemporary political thriller seriously on the big screen. Maybe that’s the reason last year’s highly anticipated Miss Sloane flopped at the box-office…
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Oscar Profile #332: Lee Remick
Born December 14, 1935 in Quincey, Massachusetts to Gertrude (nee Waldo), an actress and Francis Remick, a department store owner, Lee Remick was educated at Barnard College, where she studied dancing as well as acting. Remick made her TV debut at the age of 17 in an episode of Armstrong Circle Theatre. After several more…
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The DVD Report #508
New This Week August Wilson (1945-2005) was a celebrated Pittsburgh, Penn.-born African-American playwright who is best known for his Pittsburgh Cycle, ten plays he wrote about black life in his native city, two of which won him Pulitzer Prizes. The first was for Fences in 1987, the second for The Piano Lesson in 1990. Until…
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Oscar Profile #331: Robert Aldrich
Born August 9, 1918 in Cranston, Rhode Island, to the former Lora Lawson and newspaper publisher Edward Burgess Aldrich, Robert Aldrich was a long-time Hollywood director. He was the grandson of U.S. Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, nephew of John D. Rockefeller and cousin of Nelson Rockefeller. He was educated at the Moses Brown School in…
