Author: Peter J Patrick
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The DVD Report #507
New This Week Films about American first ladies are rare, yet there have been more than two hundred theatrical films and TV productions made about just four of them. There have been 38 each featuring Eleanor Roosevelt and Martha Washington and 86 featuring Mary Todd Lincoln. Jacqueline Kennedy (Onassis) is in the middle with just…
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Oscar Profile #330: Natalie Portman
Born June 9, 1981 in Jerusalem, Neta-Lee Hershlag, known professionally as Natalie Portman, was the only child of an Israeli doctor and an American homemaker. She holds dual American and Israeli citizenship. The family relocated the U.S. when she was three years old. Portman began taking dance lessons at the age of four. At ten,…
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The DVD Report #506
New This Week At the 1984 Academy Awards, a befuddled Laurence Olivier, nearing the end of his storied career, came out to present the Oscar for Best Picture. Instead of reading the names of the films nominated for the award, he immediately announced the name of the winner as Amadeus. What wasn’t known at the…
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Oscar Profile #329: Casey Affleck
Born August 12, 1975 in Falmouth, Massachusetts, Caleb Casey McGuire Affleck-Boldt, known professionally as Casey Affleck, like his older brother, Ben, began his career as a child actor. Affleck made his film debut at the age of 12 in 1988’s Lemon Sky. Two years later he was playing Robert Kennedy from 12 to 15 in…
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The DVD Report #505
New This Week Sustained grief is something we don’t encounter very often in American movies. You’d have to go all the way back to Robert Redford’s 1980 film Ordinary People to find a popular film as mired in the subject as Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea. Both films, though their approaches are different, give…
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Oscar Profile #328: Lee Grant
Born October 31, 1926 in Manhattan, New York City, Lyova Haskell Rosenthal was the only child of a Romanian Jewish immigrant educator father and a Russian Jewish immigrant actress mother. A precocious child, she made her stage debut at age 4 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, playing the abducted princess in “L’Orocolo”.…
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The DVD Report #504
New This Week Nominated for 8 Academy Awards, Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival is the French-Canadian director’s fourth film to factor into the Oscar race, but the first for which he himself is nominated for Best Director. Villeneuve’s first flirtation with Oscar came with the nomination of 2010’s Incendies, which was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.…
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Oscar Profile #327: Robert Surtees
Born September 8, 1906 in Covington, Kentucky, Robert Surtees was raised in Ohio. After graduating high school, he got a job as a photographer and re-toucher at a portrait studio in Cincinnati. He moved to California in 1925 intending to go to college, but was offered a job as a camera assistant at Universal based…
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The DVD Report #503
New This Week One of the few shocking things about this year’s Oscar nominations is that Jeff Nichols’ Loving is only nominated for one Oscar, albeit one of two that should have been slam dunks. One of 2016’s most highly anticipated films, Loving was expected to be a film that focused on the landmark 1967…
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Oscar Profile #326: Oliver Stone
Born September 15, 1946 in New York, New York, Oliver Stone’s father was a non-practicing Jewish stockbroker and his mother a German-east European non-practicing Catholic war bride. Stone was raised Episcopalian in Manhattan and Stamford, Connecticut. He is now a Buddhist. Stone graduated New York University with a Bachelor in Fine Arts degree in 1971.…
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The DVD Report #502
New This Week Warner Archive has released a sparkling Blu-ray upgrade of Vincente Minnelli’s 1960 film Bells Are Ringing, the last musical from prolific MGM producer Arthur Freed. Minnelli’s first musical since his Oscar win for 1958’s Gigi, the film is a faithful, albeit nicely opened up, transposition of the 1956 Broadway musical that won…
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Oscar Profile #325: Guy Green
Born November 5, 1913 in Somerset, England, Guy Green was a true renaissance man of the movies. His love for movies began at an early age, leading to his first job a projectionist aboard the ocean liner The Majestic, which brought him to America for the first time in 1929. He worked in London as…
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The DVD Report #501
New This Week One of 2016’s most anticipated films, Derek Cianfrance’s The Light Between Oceans, disappointed most critics who found it too long, too slow, too sentimental, and so on. Balderdash! It’s a nice old-fashioned post-World War I romance that plays out nicely at 133 minutes. Disney should have given the film a limited release…
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This Day in Oscar History: January 31 (2017)
Here’s what happened today in Oscar History. Born Died Oscar Nominations
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Oscar Profile #324: Anna Magnani
Born March 7, 1908 to Marina Magnani and an unknown father in Rome, Italy, Anna Magnani was raised in poverty by her maternal grandparents with whom her mother left her. Although it was first said that Magnani’s father was Egyptian, she later claimed that he was from Calabria, Italy, although she never knew his name.…
