Gary Cahall
Trapped in a world he never made...Movies Unlimited...since 1982, Gary's knack for mocking customers' tastes in films quickly moved him from the rental counter to the catalog department, where he still serves as co-writer/editor, playing by his own rules in a deadly game of cat and mouse. A lifelong fan of Alfred Hitchcock, the Marx Brothers and Three Stooges, Universal and Hammer horror films, and all things dinosaur- and superhero-related, his 2001 bantering with Regis Philbin pops up now and again on GSN. Gary's not ashamed to admit he cried at the end of Kevin Costner's The Postman, after realizing he had just wasted three hours of his life.
Gary's Posts
Gary Cahall | Staff Notes
I'm sorry to disappoint you, but that racy-sounding headline that drew your attention here merely means that I am both a stamp collector and a movie buff (boy, hard to believe I'm still single). These dual obsessions interests don't at first glance seem like they'd have much in common, and up until the past quarter-century or so in this country you'd be right in thinking that. But over the last several years, there's been a noticeable increase in overlapping. As the U.S. Postal Service has seen its revenues dry up due to the rise of e-mail, text messages and other forms of instant communication, they've searched for new ways to drum up business, and one of those ways is to release more pop culture-friendly items featuring entertainment notables (as in the 1993 Elvis Presley stamp and the "young Elvis/old Elvis" poll that preceded it).
Gary Cahall | Staff Notes
The royal messenger in medieval costume dramas; the Pony Express rider from all those B-westerns; the telegraph delivery boy in most every type of ‘30s and '40s movie: All are ways that filmmakers have depicted communication through the ages. A once-common site on street corners around the world--the venerable pay telephone booth--is on the brink of joining these now-obsolete modes, a victim of technological advances and the omnipresent cell phone.
Gary Cahall | Staff Notes
Think it's not easy to replace a legend? Try having to stand in the shadows of two successive legends. It's a hazardous experience that some manage to pull off (Jim Rice playing left field for the Boston Red Sox after Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski) and some don't (Gary Cherone following David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar as Van Halen's lead singer). A cinematic example of this dilemma can be found in the rotund form of veteran stage and screen funnyman Joe Besser, who was tapped in 1956 to join Moe Howard and Larry Fine as one-third of the Three Stooges and co-starred in the team's final 16 two-reel comedies for Columbia Pictures. As evidenced in a poll recently featured on this site, Joe's tenure with the slapstick trio is hardly held in the same regard as those of the two men he replaced, Moe's brothers Curly and Shemp. Most fans, in fact, consider the Besser era beneath their notice, and non-fans (as well as self-confessed aficionados like Howard Stern) often wind up confusing him with '60s member "Curly Joe" DeRita. With this week's release by Sony of these films--part of its eighth and final volume of complete chronological Three Stooges shorts--the time is right to ask if they truly deserve their bad reputation.
Gary Cahall | Scene Stealers
Last week on this site an article examined the career of SCTV regular-turned-movie dad Eugene Levy, so now let's turn to a look at his distaff counterpart, a gifted comic actress from the Great White North who's also gone on to big-screen notoriety for a parental role, albeit one who was a little more forgetful than Levy's American Pie pop. A passing mention of a woman suddenly sitting up in her airplane seat and yelling out "KEVIN!" should be enough for filmgoers to know that I'm talking about Home Alone mother Catherine O'Hara.
Gary Cahall | Staff Notes
There's a scene near the end of Ed Wood, Tim Burton's hilariously touching ode to the grade-Z "worst director of all time," where the title character (Johnny Depp) is seated in the balcony during the Hollywood premiere of his 1959 sci-fi opus Plan 9 from Outer Space. As Wood sits there, mouthing along to his dialogue and watching the audience, he says to himself, "This is the one. This is the one I'll be remembered for." It's a wonderful moment (albeit, as with several in the film, an historically inaccurate one), but it does demonstrate a point that moviegoers in this age of instant blog reviews and pseudo-ironic commentary sometimes forget; There are precious few, if any, filmmakers out there who get into the business because they want to shoot crap. Everyone I can think of, from D.W. Griffith, Alfred Hitchcock and Ed Wood to George Lucas, Quentin Tarantino and, yes, Michael Bay, did what they did because they they had a vision...financial as well as artistic, perhaps, and maybe a bit blurred at times, but a vision nonetheless.
Gary Cahall | Scene Stealers
The world of cinema has given audiences a goodly number of touching father-son moments over the years, from Mickey Rooney as typical teenager Andy Hardy and Lewis Stone's as his wise pop, Judge Hardy, in the 1930s- '40s MGM series, to the devotion shown by Godzilla to his less-than-gargantuan offspring Minya in Son of Godzilla, to the familial games of catch that ended the '80s baseball dramas The Natural and Field of Dreams. For the last decade or so, however, the most popular paterfamilias among moviegoers has probably been "Jim's Dad" in the American Pie films, a role that introduced a new generation of fans to one of the stars of the brilliant SCTV comedy series, Eugene Levy.
Gary Cahall | Staff Notes
In the 1989 film Batman, Jack Nicholson's Joker asks rhetorically of his caped nemesis, "Where does he get those wonderful toys?" A better question might be, where do maniacal movie bad guys like the Joker find flunkies willing to follow their every whim, knowing that flubbing an order or just looking at their boss the wrong way could cost them their lives? Wherever they come from, the cinema landscape is all the more colorful for their selfless--and occasionally fatal--loyalty. In last week's opening salute to movie henchmen/henchwomen, we covered the 1930s to 1975, so let's continue with the era that saw the rise of the summer action/sci-fi blockbuster and, consequently, some great employment opportunities for would-be underlings...
Gary Cahall | Staff Notes
You're familiar, I'm sure, with the old saying, "Behind every great man there's a great woman." Well, in the movies, behind every great villain there seems to be an easily replenished supply of underlings ready to be abused and berated by their boss, usually right before they run off to battle--and ultimately lose to--the movie's protagonist. From white-smocked lab assistants in secret lairs, to trigger-happy cowboys and gangsters who die protecting the head man in shootouts with the law, to the faceless minions who fill the ranks of Cobra, SPECTRE and other world-dominating cabals, these nameless nasties apparently exist only to follow orders and expire in the most photogenic manner they can, often with an optional Wilhelm scream. There are, however, actors whose performances not only allowed them to rise above the usual ranks of lackluster lackeys, but who often threatened to upstage their employers/masters/dark lords. These are the men--and the occasional woman--whose dedication to their work is the focus of this retrospective.
Gary Cahall | Staff Notes
Great minds think alike, the saying goes. Well, replace the word "great" with "Hollywood" and, not surprisingly, it still applies. It also explains why every so often the studios come out with similarly-themed movies within a few months or so of each other: 1997 gave us the parallel lava stories Dante's Peak and Volcano, while the following year featured dueling insect cartoons Antz and A Bug's Life along with twin asteroid actioners Armageddon and Deep Impact. Beyond these apparent acts of coincidental scripting, of course, are the copycat pictures that try to ride the coattails of a hit film (From horrormeister William Castle's 1961 pseudo-Psycho shocker Homicidal and the 1977 Jaws rip-off Orca from Dino De Laurentiis to the various failed attempts at creating a Harry Potter-like fantasy series in the past decade, for example). In the world of home video, one company has taken these various practices to new levels of...if not originality, let us say focused creativity...and in the process raised the bar for the industry in the field of the "high-concept" (able to be summed up in one quick sentence) movie.
Gary Cahall | Staff Notes
"The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game; It's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again."
The above quote comes, of course, from the 1989 diamond fantasy Field of Dreams (and let's not even get into why James Earl Jones' character would wax nostalgic for an era when he would have been denied the opportunity to play pro ball because of his skin color). By the time motion pictures began, baseball was already firmly entrenched as the national pastime, and the years that followed have offered many classic movies about the sport, from dramas (Bang The Drum Slowly, The Natural) to comedies (The Bad News Bears, Major League) to musicals (Damn Yankees, Take Me Out to the Ball Game).
Gary Cahall | Staff Notes
Last week I began exploring one of the more infuriating aspects of the home cinematic experience: when you're looking forward to watching a particular movie, only to find out that what's on TV or what you've purchased is another, totally different film with the same name. It's a little-known fact that titles--be they for films, songs, books or what have you--cannot be copyrighted, although the Motion Picture Association of America has a registration bureau so its members can avoid stepping on each other's ideas. So while you probably cannot go out and shoot a movie about space marines who infiltrate a pastoral world of tailed, blue-skinned aliens, it's perfectly legal to make, say, a comedy about reincarnation and call it Avatar (please bear in mind that I'm not an attorney and James Cameron is very rich and can afford high-priced legal teams).
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