Author: Peter J Patrick
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Oscar Profile #219: Barbra Streisand
Born Aril 24, 1942, Barbra Streisand is one of the best-selling music artists of all time with more than 72 million albums in the United States and 245 million records sold worldwide. She is the best-selling female artist on the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) Top Selling Album Artists list, the only female recording…
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The DVD Report #394
New This Week DVD discs have been around since 1995, Blu-ray discs since 2006, yet there are still important films that have never been released in either format and a number of prior DVD releases that cry out for the superior picture and sound of Blu-ray that have yet to be upgraded to the newer…
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Oscar Profile #218: Ronald Neame
Born April 23, 1911 in London, England to early British film director Elwin Neame and his wife, silent screen star Ivy Close, Ronald Neame was one of the true renaissance men of the movies, working as an assistant director, cinematographer, producer, writer and ultimately director. Neame was only 18 when he worked as assistant director…
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The DVD Report #393
New This Week It’s time to say goodbye to 2014 in DVD. This year there was no single DVD release that stood head and shoulders above the rest, but there were a number of very fine releases, mostly in the area of stunning Blu-ray upgrades of classic films from the 1930s through the 1990s. The…
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Oscar Profile #217: Octavia Spencer
Born May 25, 1970 in Montgomery, Alabama the sixth of seven children, Octavia Spencer had her first brush with Hollywood as an intern on 1990’s The Long Walk Home with Sissy Spacek and Whoopi Goldberg filmed in her hometown. She was a staff assistant on 1996’s A Time to Kill with Matthew McConaughey and Sandra…
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The DVD Report #392
New This Week I’ve never been a big fan of films starring Saturday Night Live alumni including those of Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, but The Skeleton Twins, in which the two star, is worthy of exception. Winner of the newly named Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, this comedy-drama co-written…
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Oscar Profile #216: Harvey Weinstein
Born March 19, 1952 in Flushing, Queens, New York, New York, Harvey Weinstein is the best known film producer of the modern era. He is especially skilled at getting his films and the a actors in his films nominated for Oscars, for which there have been numerous wins over the years. Usually billed as a…
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The DVD Report #391
New This Week The camera focuses on a middle-aged Irish priest sitting in the confessional listening to a distressed parishioner who is opening up for the first time about being raped and sodomized on a daily basis for five years as a child by a now-deceased priest. Too late to prosecute the bad priest and…
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The DVD Report #390
New This Week Arguably the third greatest movie of Hollywood’s greatest year behind Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, no one who didn’t get to see Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington shortly after its release in October 1939 has seen the film as it was originally intended. The film was…
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Oscar Profile #215: Dana Andrews
Born January 1, 1909 in Covington County, Mississippi, (Carver) Dana Andrews was one of thirteen children of a Baptist minister and his wife. The family later moved to Huntsville, Texas where his younger siblings, including actor Steve Forrest, were born. Educated at Sam Houston State University, he moved to Los Angeles in 1931 seeking employment…
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The DVD Report #389
New This Week Among Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray releases are three from Robert Altman, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us and the never on DVD Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. 1973’s The Long Goodbye starred Elliott Gould as an early 1970s incarnation of Raymond Chandler’s private detective, Philip Marlowe,…
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Oscar Profile #214: Claudette Colbert
Born Emilie Chauchoin on September 13, 1903 in Saint-Mandé, Val-de-Marne, France, the actress Claudette Colbert was one of the great stars of the golden age of Hollywood. Her family emigrated to the U.S. in 1906, settling in New York where Colbert grew up aspiring to become a painter but was encouraged to go into acting…
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The DVD Report #388
New This Week Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises was the recent honorary Oscar winner’s third film to be nominated for a Best Animated Feature Oscar behind Spirited Away (for which he won) and Howl’s Moving Castle. It was also the 73-year-old animator-writer-producer-director’s avowed last film. Few artists have ended their careers with such a towering…
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Oscar Profile #213: Warren Beatty
Born March 30, 1977, (Henry) Warren Beaty (later Beatty) is the younger brother of actress/dancer/writer Shirley MacLaine. Their mother, Kathlyn (née McLean) was a Canadian born drama teacher, their father, a school administrator. Both Warren and his sister were taught to excel from an early age. A star football player in high school, Beatty turned…
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The DVD Report #387
New This Week On stage, the still-running 2005 Broadway musical Jersey Boys is a crowd-pleasing jukebox musical in which the hit songs of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons take center stage with background information supplied by each of the four actors playing Valli and the other members of the group. On film, the background…
