Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. 1977 was the year it all changed. We didn’t know it then, but the youth influenced success of George Lucas’ blockbuster science fiction epic, Star Wars,was to eventually drive movie marketing almost to the exclusion of everything else. I say almost, because there has/will probably…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. It’s a commonly held notion that All the President’s Men; Network and Taxi Driver were the Oscar front-runners and that Rocky came out of nowhere to win the 1976 Oscar for Best Picture. That wasn’t at all the case. Rocky, whose artistic reputation has not…

New This Week The on-line prognosticators who seem to spend all their waking hours handicapping current Oscar races act as though the world is coming to an end because early critics’ favorite The Social Network has suddenly been usurped by The King’s Speech at certain Guild Awards presentations. This is not the first time, allowing…

New This Week Released in June, 1974, Roman Polanski’s modern noir, Chinatown, released by Paramount,was the best reviewed and most talked film released for most of the year. Then in December, Paramount released Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II, the second film in his Godfather trilogy, which became an even bigger hit than Chinatown.…

New This Week I’m taking a little break this week from the chronological history of Oscars on DVD to talk about the availability of current Oscar nominees. It used to be that the year’s best films were distributed throughout the year, with the most prestigious films sometimes being given Oscar qualifying runs in Los Angeles…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. (Editor’s Note: Due to the Oscar nominations, The DVD Report is being posted a day early) Oscar went retrograde in 1973 and gave the Best Picture award to the rousing caper film, The Sting, set in the 1930s with the music of an earlier time,…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. Nowadays it would be extremely unlikely, if not outright impossible, for the year’s two “best” films to open in the first quarter of the year. Yet that’s exactly what happened in 1972. Cabaret opened on February 13th, nine days before the previous year’s Oscar nominations…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. The 1971 Oscars continued the trend of the previous few years in trying to walk a fine line between the innovative and the tried and true. On the one hand, the Best Picture nominees included Stanley Kubrick’s fabulously futuristic A Clockwork Orange and Peter Bogdanovich’s…

New This Week Twenty-five years after the end of World War II, Patton seemed to be the last major Hollywood film we’d see about World War II. Little did we know, then, that forty years later they would still be making them. It seemed then, that this would be the last time to honor a…

Featured CLICK HEREfor other featured releases this week. The DVD business is not dying. Sales have slowed due to the rotten economy, but rentals are strong and booming year-end sales of HDTVs and Blu-ray players bode well for the near future. The day when streaming videos become our only source of old movies is not…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. The battle lines were drawn at the 1969 Oscars between the Old Guard, represented by Anne of the Thousand Days and Hello, Dolly! and the Young Turks, represented by Midnight Cowboy and Z, with the middle-of-the-road Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid seen as the…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. Movie musicals go back to the birth of the talkies in 1927, which was also the year of the birth of the Oscars. At the first Oscar ceremony, honoring the movie year 1927/28, the first talkie (The Jazz Singer)earned Warner Bros. an honorary Oscar “for…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. The April 1968 presentation of the 40th Annual Academy Awards had to be delayed a week due to the assassination of Martin Luther King. Fittingly, Oscar’s Best Picture award went to Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night, a murder mystery that was also…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. The screen adaptations of Broadway’s 1962 and 1963 Best Play winners battled it out for the 1966 Oscars. Paul Scofield repeated his Tony award winning role of Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons and nabbed an Oscar for his brilliant…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. Conventional wisdom says that The Sound of Music was such a huge hit in 1965 because everything else around it was dark and dreary and generally disappointing. Maybe so, but that doesn’t explain the film’s enduring popularity with succeeding generations in all parts of the…