Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week The Vietnam War lasted from November 1, 1955 to the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. It followed the first Indochina War which began in 1949. U.S. involvement began in what was then known as French Indochina in an advisement capacity in 1950. Involvement increased in the early 1960s when the…

New This Week This year’s Oscar winner, The Artist, is an unusual film in more ways than the one. The obvious is that it is a black-and-white silent film made in Hollywood by a French director with French stars with title cards in English. More than that, however, it is told from the perspective of…

New This Week Stage versions of Disney’s films have been a Broadway staple since Beauty and the Beast opened in April, 1994. The Lion King has been playing on The Great White Way since October, 1997, Mary Poppins since October, 2006. In addition to The Lion King and Mary Poppins, there are currently three other…

New This Week When I lived in Manhattan in the 1970s I attended many films on their opening day, often spotting celebrities in the crowd. Only once, however, did I attend a premiere with the star of the film sitting to the left behind me and commenting on the film for its entire running time.…

New This Week All DVDs discussed this week are Blu-ray upgrades of previously released films. The centerpiece of this month’s Universal 100th Anniversary upgrade is 1973’s The Sting which was nominated for ten Oscars and won seven. The film, which has been restored to its original luster, really didn’t deserve all those Oscars – it…

New This Week Generally dismissed by critics, Man on a Ledge, the feature film debut of director Asger Leth, is an efficient thriller. You may question the many coincidences and general credulity of it once it’s over, but during the film’s intense 102 minute running time you’ll be too busy wondering what’s going to happen…

New This Week Mary Norton’s 1952 novel, The Borrowers was previously filmed three times, twice for TV in 1973 and 199,2 and once for the big screen in 1997. Now Japan’s master animator, Hayao Miyazaki, has adapted it as an animated feature under the title of The Secret World of Arrietty. Although the direction was…

New This Week The story of Glenn Close’s thirty year struggle to bring Albert Nobbs to the screen dominated last year’s pre-Oscar nomination talk for almost the entire year. So much so, that by the time the film opened, its mixed reviews seemed to suggest that the talk was much ado about nothing. Nothing could…

New This Week I tend not to read other people’s reviews of films before rendering my own opinion of them so as not to allow other people’s thoughts to influence my own. This week, however, I made an exception and checked out Rotten Tomatoes’ reviews of The Vow. I had been under the impression that…

New This Week Mixed martial arts star Carla Garano stars as a betrayed super-agent in Steven Soderbergh’s spy thriller, Haywire. Backed by cast of big names including Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Michael Angarano, Bill Paxton, Channing Tatum, Antonio Banderas and Michael Douglas, the story is one we’ve seen a thousand times before. What distinguishes it,…

New This Week “It’s May, it’s May, the lusty month of May” or so begins one of the songs from Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot, the Broadway show that defined both the once and future king Arthur and the once and future presidency of John F. Kennedy. Kennedy had been elected but not yet taken office…

New This Week The Blu-ray release of Elia Kazan’s 1951 film of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, which retains the special features of the 2006 Special Edition DVD, doesn’t give us anything new, but what it does give us is another opportunity to take a look at one of the screen’s great masterpieces. The…

New This Week The DVD release of Meryl Streep’s Oscar winning The Iron Lady gives us a chance to take a look at how the Best Actress Oscar is bestowed these days. While backstories have traditionally played almost as important a factor in deciding who gets the Oscar, in recent years the backstory seems to…

New This Week The film I looked forward to seeing the most last year was War Horse, Steven Speilberg’s film based on a popular children’s novel. The stage version, which takes a different approach than the film, won the 2011 Tony for Best Play and remains popular. The film, which uses live horses instead of…

New This Week The opening scene of Tom Hanks in free-fall, his character’s son’s vision of the actor falling from the Twin Towers on 9/11 in Stephen Daldry’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, is as unsettling an opening scene as any film in recent memory. Following scenes in which Hanks’ character is portrayed as “the…