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
"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." "Here's looking at you, kid." "I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse." "Schwing!" Where would Hollywood and its fans be without these and other timeless quotations? Well, back in the days of silent pictures, I guess (of course, even back then there were some notable phrases to be read on the title cards). Here's another one; "It's long been said that motion pictures are a visual medium, but true movie lovers know that there's nothing like a memorable line of dialogue." That quote comes from Movies Unlimited founder and president Jerry Frebowitz, by way of his introductory letter to the 2011 edition of the company's DVD catalog (seen on the left and available here), which pays tribute on its cover and throughout its 800-plus pages to some of the best-loved film lines from the last eight decades or so.
Gary Cahall | Staff Notes
Confession time; I was originally planning to write a review of the new Green Hornet movie, starring Seth Rogen as the verdant-masked crimefighter and Taiwanese actor/pop singer Jay Chou as his aide, martial arts expert Kato, here. And since I had already convinced myself I wasn't going to like it, I had the oh-so-clever headline "Seth, Where Is Thy Sting?" ready to go. As it turns out, the film was pretty much as bad as I had anticipated. Rogen's performance is just too goofy to be taken seriously as an action hero; the tongue-in-cheek tone meant to emulate Robert Downey, Jr.'s Iron Man turn doesn't work; and how good can a Green Hornet movie be when the soundtrack features Digital Underground's "The Humpty Dance" and Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise" more prominently than it does the 1966 TV series theme by Billy May and Al Hirt? However, at least two publications beat me to the punch with the aforementioned witty headline, and the film's $34 million opening weekend box office shows that anything I might say at this point would be superfluous. What I can do, though, is offer neophytes and those too young to recall the Hornet's heyday as a radio, comic book, movie and TV star a little bit of background.
Gary Cahall | Scene Stealers
"Oh yes, I'm grateful in a way for this face, now that I've gotten used to it. I know it's brought me this success. I know it's given me the chance to make and save enough money so I won't spend the end of my days in an old ladies' home somewhere. But all the same I'm a woman, and what woman doesn't long to be beautiful?" Well, her visage may not have been the kind that made the covers of movie fan magazines, but filmgoers in the 1930s looked forward to the on-screen appearances of Edna May Oliver, the dour-faced performer whose grand dame attitude served her equally well in dozens of comedic and dramatic turns, usually as a spinster or sarcastic busybody.
Gary Cahall | Staff Notes
Most of you, I assume, are familiar with the story of the frog and the pot of boiling water. For the uninitiated, it states that your average frog, when placed in an average pot of 212-degree water, will wisely and immediately hop out. But, the anecdote continues, if you put that same amphibian in a pot of room-tempeature water and slowly raise the heat, the poor critter won't notice any change until it's too late and your boiled frog legs are ready to enjoy. Now, I've never tried this theory myself (I've never tried frog legs, either, but that's a matter for another time) nor do I recommend doing so, but regular viewers of cable TV's Independent Film Channel must be feeling a little croakish themselves over the last two weeks. That's when the channel, which debuted in 1994 as a place to watch non-mainstream American and foreign movies uncut and uninterrupted, made the decision to start having commercial breaks in its films.
Gary Cahall | Re: Animation
By way of introduction, this is the premiere installment in what I hope will be a regular series of columns discussing the latest animated releases on home video, as well as new titles on the big screen and TV, along with some general thoughts and ramblings about cartoons past and present. As a fiftysomething pop culture junkie whose weeks once revolved around Saturday morning television and who still spends a goodly portion of his free time watching Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, Disney and their affiliated channels, I like to think that I am peculiarly particularly qualified for this project.
The biggest news in theatrical animation recently was a Los Angeles Times article running last week, just before the release of Walt Disney Pictures' 50th cartoon feature, Tangled. In the piece, Disney/Pixar honcho Ed Catmull said that the Rapunzel revamping would, for the time being, be the studio's final foray into the fairy tale/"princess" genre that began over seven decades earlier with its very first feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Gary Cahall | Scene Stealers
Suppose for a moment you were an actor. What would you do if, in the opening credits of what's arguably the biggest film you'll ever be in, the studio misspelled your name? Would you get flustered and sputter to yourself in a moment of comical bluster? If so, then you've matched the typical on-screen reaction to such anxieties by the person that incident actually happened to. I'm speaking of Hungarian-born character actor and Casablanca waiter S.Z. Sakall, whose teddy bear physique, jowly face and "Mittle European" accent made him an audience favorite and earned him the nickname "Cuddles"...a name that he wasn't thrilled with, but tolerated with his trademark exasperation.
Gary Cahall | Staff Notes
Since the beginning of motion pictures, there have been directors and actors whose creative collaborations have provided filmgoers with some of the screen's most magical moments: Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, John Ford and John Wayne, Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, Woody Allen and Mia Farrow (okay, so off-screen it was a different story), and Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, just to name a few. One of the most fascinating of these cinematic pairings, and also one of the first, was between a director who ran away to join the circus as a teenager and was forever shaped by life under the big top, and an actor who served as his deaf parents' link to the hearing world and learned first-hand the life of an outsider. The parallel hardships and tragedies in the lives of Tod Browning and Lon Chaney helped to make several of the 10 films they made between 1919-1929 among the strangest and most fascinating of the silent era.
Gary Cahall | Staff Notes
He's been called "Zero Marx," "the Missing Marx Brother" and "the Rodney Dangerfield" of the foursome. He was part of the screen's greatest comedy team, yet--ironically--is now a footnote in Hollywood history, and on those rare occasions his name is brought up it's usually to denote something that isn't all that funny or someone considered superfluous, as in the Cheers episode where Lilith says her favorite Marx brother is Zeppo ("The way he just stands there without expression or reaction. Boy! That cracks me up!") or when Buffy the Vampire Slayer sidekick Zander is referred to as "the Zeppo" of the gang. In fact, one of the best books ever written about the Marxes was even entitled "Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo." If Groucho, Harpo and Chico are indeed revered as giants in the world of movie funnymen, where does that leave youngest brother Zeppo, who cavorted alongside his siblings on the vaudeville and Broadway stage and in their first five films, and just how important was his presence to the act's success?
Gary Cahall | Staff Notes
"I made more lousy pictures than any actor in history." So said the man who would eventually be voted number one in an American Film Institute poll of the greatest screen actors of all time. It may have been Humphrey Bogart's typically self-effacing brand of humor talking, or a by-product of both his honesty and Bogie's weariness after decades of fighting with studio executives, but whatever the reason, rare is the movie fan who would agree with him. Neither would Warner Home Video, who this week released Humphrey Bogart: The Essentials Collection, a 13-disc set featuring 24 of the quintessential screen tough guy's most memorable films.
Now, since this is a Warner release, it's not that surprising that some of the actor's key later pictures for other studios--The African Queen, Beat the Devil, The Caine Mutiny and The Desperate Hours among them--are not included in the set, but it does offer a good overview of Bogart's 1935-1948 body of work. What's also missing, however, are some of those so-called "lousy pictures" that he made in the first decade of his Hollywood career. Bearing in mind that the worst Bogart movie still offers a performance more interesting than some of today's top actors' best--I'm looking at you, Ashton, Julia and Keanu--here are a few films that Bogie probably had in mind when he made the above quote:
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