Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week Not since Steel Magnolias more than twenty years ago has there been a film in which the women are all strong and the men, for the most part, all weak as in The Help. Maybe it’s a Southern thing as both films are set in the Deep South. Granted, the main thrust…

New This Week One of the most exciting talents to come out of the 1970s was writer/director Terrence Malick who made two stunning films, 1973’s Badlands and 1978’s 1973’s Days of Heaven1973’s and then disappeared from the scene for two decades. His much anticipated return, 1998’s The Thin Red Line, unlike his two earlier film,…

New This Week My DVD Report for more than a year has been basically about what is and isn’t available on DVD by Oscar year. Although these reports have been sprinkled with my personal opinions here and there, they have mostly been of historical, rather than critical, perspective. Now it’s time to get back to…

New This Week 2010 at the Oscars was the year an old-fashioned tribute to pre-World War II British resolve beat the up-to-the-minute expose of the founding of modern social media to win the Best Picture Oscar. What happened? Was it that the Academy refused to allow the preponderance of precursors to dictate their own choice…

New This Week 2009 was the year the Academy went to a ten nominee best Picture slate, a practice which lasted a mere two years. Beginning this year the new rule is a minimum of five nominees and a maximum of ten with the caveat that each film nominated must receive at least five percent…

New This Week If the Academy Awards have taught us anything over the years it’s that they don’t like to be typecast. They proved that once again with the 2008 winner, as unlikely a Best Picture winner as they have ever given us – a Bollywood-style film called Slumdog Millionaire. Forget the phrase “art imitating…

New This Week The 2007 Academy Awards were rather unusual in that the front-runners for Best Picture were both ultra-violent films, the type that they said could never win a Best Picture Oscar, yet one of them did while the other took home the Best Actor trophy. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men…

New This Week Long a critics’ favorite, veteran director Martin Scorsese had six previous Oscar nominations under his belt when Oscar finally smiled on him for his rousing crowd-pleaser, The Departed, a smash hit remake of the Hong Kong hit Infernal Affairs with the location switched to Boston. Featuring an all-star cast headed by Leonardo…

New This Week Winner of 79 international awards, Ang Lee’s film of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain with a screenplay by Larry McMurtry (The Last Picture Show, Hud) and Diana Ossana, was as sure a bet to win 2005’s Best Picture Oscar as any film in history. But it didn’t. Was it backlash against the film’s…

New This Week For me, two intriguing, if greatly different, films were the highlight of the 2004 Oscar year. They were Alexander Payne’s sly comedy, Sideways and Clint Eastwood’s modern tragedy, Million dollar Baby. Sideways entered the Oscar race with five nominations and won one. Million Dollar Baby came in with seven nominations and went…

New This Week The third time proved to be the charm for Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings as The Return of the King, the third film in the J.R.R.R. trilogy which became the third film to win eleven Oscars, tying with Ben-Hur and Titanic as the all-time biggest winner. Everything comes together in…

New This Week For the first time in 24 years a musical won the Oscar for Best Picture. Rob Marshall’s innovative film version of Kander and Ebb’s Chicago was catnip for Oscar voters in that it was about two of their favorite subjects: show business and the newspaper business, as well as being set in…

New This Week Everybody’s favorite child actor of the early 1960s, little Ronny Howard directed his first theatrical film, a short, at the age of 15. By his late twenties and now known as “Ron” Howard, he had become an accomplished A-list director. By the time of 1995’s Apollo 13 he was already a seasoned…

New This Week 2000 was the year in which such eagerly awaited films as All the Pretty Horses; Pay It Forward; Unbreakable and The Legend of Bagger Vance disappointed critics and fizzled at the box office, causing studios to scramble for titles to promote for the year’s top Oscars. It might have been the perfect…

New This Week 1999 is remembered as the year the suburban expose, American Beauty,won the Oscar, but the film’s road to victory was an uncertain path. The National Board of Review began awards season with Sam Mendes’ film at the top of their list, but gave their Best Director prize to Anthony Minghella for their…