Category: Home Viewing with Peter

“Bon apetit!” exclaims Julia Child. “Bon apetit!” echoes Julie Powell. The feel good movie of the summer, Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia tells the dual tales of Mrs. Child’s eight year long struggle to write and have published her first cook book and Mrs. Powell’s year-long struggle to make every recipe in the book and…

“Bon apetit!” exclaims Julia Child. “Bon apetit!” echoes Julie Powell. The feel good movie of the summer, Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia tells the dual tales of Mrs. Child’s eight year long struggle to write and have published her first cook book and Mrs. Powell’s year-long struggle to make every recipe in the book and…

See what’s coming out this week on DVD! The Pope has been murdered and the four prominent Catholic Cardinals considered most likely to replace him have been kidnapped, their planned murders to take place an hour apart beginning at 8 P.M. as the conclave of Cardinals meets to elect the next Pope. So begins Dan…

The Pope has been murdered and the four prominent Catholic Cardinals considered most likely to replace him have been kidnapped, their planned murders to take place an hour apart beginning at 8 P.M. as the conclave of Cardinals meets to elect the next Pope. So begins Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons, the novel he wrote…

The most successful film in Hollywood history in terms of tickets sold is now 70 years old. To celebrate, the 70th Anniversary Ultimate Collector’s Edition of Gone With the Wind has been released on both Blu-ray and standard DVD. Only 150,000 editions of each have been produced. The Blu-ray set contains three discs, the standard…

See what’s coming out this week on DVD! The most successful film in Hollywood history in terms of tickets sold is now 70 years old. To celebrate, the 70th Anniversary Ultimate Collector’s Edition of Gone With the Wind has been released on both Blu-ray and standard DVD. Only 150,000 editions of each have been produced.…

One of the most satisfying animated features of all time, as well as a front-runner in this year’s Oscar race, Pixar’s Up is a film that pulls you in from the first frame and doesn’t let you go until the last. It begins with a starry-eyed 15-year-old boy becoming transfixed with the career of an…

See what’s coming out this week on DVD! One of the most satisfying animated features of all time, as well as a front-runner in this year’s Oscar race, Pixar’s Up is a film that pulls you in from the first frame and doesn’t let you go until the last. It begins with a starry-eyed 15-year-old…

I’ll have DVD reviews of Up, Star Trek and the 70th Anniversary Edition of Gone With the Wind soon, but for now let’s take a little detour into the world of CDs. Now that downloads of songs have become the thing to do, CDs that you can actually hold in your hand may well be…

Christmas comes early on Blu ray with the release not only of the holiday classics, A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life, but with the releases of 50th Anniverary Edition of North by Northwest, the long sought after release of Forrest Gump and Criterion’s first subscriber voted release, Howards End, as well. Charles Dickens’…

It’s a sad commentary on the current state of movie affairs when a by-the-numbers romantic comedy is hailed as the “best comedy of the year”, but The Proposal is nevertheless a pleasant time-killing experience thanks to the charm of its stars. Sandra Bullock is a cold fish publishing executive whose Canadian visa has expired. In…

Paramount has re-mastered Roman Polanski’s 1974 classic, Chinatown in high definition but has released it only on standard DVD, presumably to make more money when they get around to producing a Blu-ray in another year or two. The perfect film noir, it was made thirty years after the genre peaked but with situations and themes…

Today’s kids are raised on full length animated features on DVD practically from birth.They tend to develop favorites at an early age without any understanding of a particular film’s place in history.After all, what parent is going to entertain an infant with films in proper chronological order? I was fortunate enough to have seen Snow…

Things change. The world today is not the same as we knew it even just a few years ago. One thing that remains constant is old movies. Everyone, I suppose, remembers the first time they saw The Wizard of Oz. For me, the year was 1949. I was five year old, the film was already…

The quality of TV drama has never been better than it is right now, but the ways in which people watch their favorite series have changed dramatically over the years. From the late 1940s through the 1970s, three major networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, dominated broadcast TV in the U.S. Although PBS and local channels…