Author: Peter J Patrick
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Oscar Profile #286: Tom Cruise
Born July 3, 1962 in Syracuse, New York, Thomas Cruise Mapother IV, better known as simply Tom Cruise, was the son of a special education teacher and electrical engineer, the only boy out of four children. The family moved to Canada where his father took a job working for the Canadian Air Force. After his…
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The DVD Report #462
New This Week The 2015 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, Laszlo Nemes’ Hungarian film Son of Saul, is a devastatingly grim account of two days in the life of a Jewish prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp who survives by working for the Nazis. His job is to calm new arrivals to the…
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Oscar Profile #285: Hal Ashby
Born September 2, 1929 in Ogden, Utah, (William) Hal Ashby was the fourth and youngest child in a Mormon family. He had a rough childhood that saw the divorce of his parents when he was 6, his father’s suicide when he was 12 and two marriages and divorces of his own before the age of…
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The DVD Report #461
New This Week One of the most highly anticipated films of 2015, Alfonso G. Annaritu’s The Revenant, lived up to the advance hype, winning numerous awards including three Oscars out of twelve nominations. For cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, it was his third consecutive win behind Gravity and Birdman, a first in his category. For Inarritu, it…
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Oscar Profile #284: James Hilton
Born September 9, 1900 in Leigh, Lancashire, England, James Hilton was the son of John Hilton, headmaster of Chapel End School in Walthamstow. He was educated at the Leys School in Cambridge and then Christ’s Church in Cambridge, where he wrote his first novel at the age of 20. Hilton’s first novel, Catherine Herself was…
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The DVD Report #460
New This Week In late 2014, TCM released a bare-bones Blu-ray of Howard Hawks’ 1939 classic Only Angles Have Wings. Now less than a year and a half later Criterion has released a superior 4K restoration of the film on Blu-ray with the many extras that Criterion is renowned for. Hawks was one of the…
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Oscar Profile #283: Ernest Haller
Born in Los Angeles, California on May 31, 1896, Ernest Haller AKA Ernie B. Haller was one of the great cinematographers of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Leaving his job as a bank clerk, 18-year-old Haller went to work as an actor at Biograph Studios 1914. Within a year he found his true calling behind the camera.…
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The DVD Report #459
New This Week After three poorly received prequels to the original Star Wars trilogy, Lucasfilm has gone back to the originals to give us a seventh film that takes place three decades after 1983’s The Return of the Jedi. J.J. Abrams, who directed the rebooted Star Trek in 2009 and its less successful sequel 2013’s…
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Oscar Profile #282: Luchino Visconti
Formally known as Count don Luchino Visconti di Modrone, the multi-talented Italian theatre, opera and cinema director as well as screenwriter was born on November 2, 1906 in Milan, Italy, one of seven children of the Duke of Modrone, the head of one of Northern Italy’s richest families. A descendant of the 13th Century ruling…
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The DVD Report #458
New This Week The title of Quentin Tarantino’s eighth film, The Hateful Eight, is a play on words just as Federico Fellini’s eighth full film 8 1/2 was. Fellini, whose film took shape as it went along, had a severe case of writer’s block after the success of La Dolce Vita and wrote the screenplay…
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Oscar Profile #281: Patty Duke
Born December 14, 1946, Anna Marie Duke was the youngest of three children of a cashier and her husband, a handyman and cab driver. When she was 8 years old, her mother threw her alcoholic father out of the house and turned Anna over to talent managers John and Ethel Ross who were looking for…
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The DVD Report #457
New This Week Inspirational sports films are not something I generally look forward to seeing. After all, not every film can be a Pride of the Yankees or Bang the Drum Slowly, both of which were about baseball, or Knute Rockne All American or Brian’s Song, which were about football. Over the past thirty years,…
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Oscar Profile #280: Julie Walters
Born the youngest of five children to an English builder and an Irish postal clerk on February 22, 1950 in Birmingham, England, Julia (Julie) Mary Walters began her career as a comedienne. Often paired with fellow comedienne Victoria Wood, they were known collectively as Wood and Walters. Striking out on her own, she made her…
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The DVD Report #456
New This Week Two of last year’s best films, romantic love stories both, took place in the New York City of 1952. Brooklyn begins in the fall of 1951 and ends during the summer of 1952. Carol takes place in late 1952 and early 1953. Irish writer Colm Toibin’s 2009 novel Brooklyn is the source…
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Oscar Profile #279: Pat O’Brien
Born November 11, 1899, “Hollywood’s Irishman in Residence”, William Joseph Patrick “Pat” O’Brien was American through and through having been born in Milkwaukee, Wisconsin to first generation American parents. All four of his grandparents, however, came from Ireland. As a boy, he wanted to become a priest and a cop before settling on acting, but…
