Category: Movie Comedies (Page 131 of 195)

RIP Henry Gibson

September 16, 2009 /

I was going to cover some of the usual folderol I cover here today, but, sadly, we have another passing to note with the death at 73 of Henry Gibson from cancer.

Gibson — whose stage name derives from an early character he did with roommate Jon Voight — was a personal favorite of mine. Not a large man, he was the kind of actor who might have one or two scenes in a movie, but was pretty much guaranteed to bring something detailed and memorable to his usually hilarious scenes; a relatively recent case in point was his great turn as the befuddled shocked clergyman towards the end of “Wedding Crashers.” He’s also familar to fans of “Boston Legal” as one of the show’s recurring judges.

With his eccentric but unassuming air, he gained his greatest fame as a cast member on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” a faster paced, but more shtick-laden late sixties/early seventies forerunner of SNL. His signature bit involved him reciting absurd, vaguely counter-cultural, poetry in his ultra deadpan style while holding a giant flower and bowing with exaggerated politeness at the end. (He was famously spoofed on the show by John Wayne, who brought his own unique socio-political sensibilities to his verse.)

Numerous movie and TV roles followed, including probably the closest Henry Gibson ever got to a leading film role, cast brilliantly against type as a controlling and hypocritical country music patriarch in Robert Altman’s masterpiece, “Nashville.” Later, he’d play out-and-out villains, but usually in more comical contexts. Fans of eighties comedies have a special affection for his commanding role as the patriarch of a very strange family who loom in Tom Hanks‘s fevered imagination in Joe Dante’s comedy horror homage, “The ‘Burbs.” He was also the head neo-Nazi in “The Blues Brothers.”

All in all, the loss of Gibson at the relatively young age of 73 is a sad one and hit me personally a bit harder than expected. I’ve loved Gibson’s work since childhood and, whether he was playing a Napoleonic villain or a gentle preacher totally out of his depth, there was an abiding soulful quality to his work that made him all the more funny. Truly original performers like him are few and far between.

****

My friend, Zayne, has a very nice remembrance of Mr. Gibson at More a Legend than a Blog, and Edward Copeland shares my appreciation of his work as country music legend Haven Hamilton.

There’s less of him than I’d like on YouTube, but I did find a few fine moments of Gibson, which you can check out after the flip.

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Actors, External Entertainment, External Movies, External TV, Movie Comedies, Movie Dramas, Movies, News, TV, TV Comedies, TV Sci-Fi

Overall, not the best day in the world

September 14, 2009 /

I’ve been just a bit distracted and sleepy today and didn’t even hear about Kanye West’s little display at the VMA’s last night until just now. Of course, I’m strictly a movie blogger, more or less, so I don’t have to weigh in on — or even watch — last night’s no doubt mega-embarrassing spectacle. A small mercy.  Also, as I started to write this, we got the very sad news of the passing of film and television star Patrick Swayze from pancreatic cancer. Just below this post, Will Harris remembers him in high style.

Fortunately, not everything going on today is as really bad or really sad. Still, because I’m an irresponsible member of the media, I’m going to lead with the bad.

Megan Fox in * In political blogging, it’s common to refer to something called Godwin’s Law. The original version simply held that the longer an online discussion went on, the greater the possibility, or near certainty, that someone would invoke Hitler or Nazis. Over time, however, it’s use has extended and inapt Nazi/Hitler comparisons are held up for ridicule on Godwin grounds. Quoth the Wikipidians:

Godwin’s Law applies especially to inappropriate, inordinate, or hyperbolic comparisons…Whether it applies to humorous use or references to oneself is open to interpretation, since this would not be a fallacious attack against a debate opponent.

Well, I don’t think she was being particularly humorous (I guess you could call that the “Soup Nazi exception”), so I have to say that Megan Fox was definitely somewhere in Godwin’s Law territory when she compared controversial blockbuster director Michael Bay to, yes, Hitler last week. Now, I’m anything but a Michael Bay admirer, but on his long list of unfortunate qualities as a public figure, “genocidal mad man” simply isn’t there. He belongs in movie jail, not the Hague.

Anyhow, that would have been the end of it, but unnamed members of Michael Bay’s crew have, for whatever reason, gotten into the act and have written an unnecessary but nevertheless rather hilarious attack on Ms. Fox, which you can read all of over at Nikki Finke’s place. Apparently wanting to keep the peace with Fox, Michael Bay has gotten into the act to distance himself from the crew comments. He refers to Megan Fox’s “crazy quips.” I don’t think he understands what the word “quip” actually means. I guess he belongs in word usage jail, also.

Christoph Waltz in * Casting stories can get tedious, but awhile back I made a big deal about the casting of Taiwanese singer-kick-butt martial artist Jay Chou in Seth Rogen’s upcoming “The Green Hornet.” Now, the movie is starting to look even more fun with the placement of Christoph Waltz in the role of the bad guy. Waltz, of course, is the multilingual German TV actor turned international flavor of the month with his universally lauded, thoroughly enjoyable performance as the “Jew Hunter,” Col. Hans Landa, in “Inglourious Basterds.”

Not since Alan Rickman damn near stole “Die Hard” from Bruce Willis has a previously unknown actor playing a villain — particularly a more or less completely unredeemable villain — gotten anything resembling this kind of attention. Even Rickman didn’t get anywhere near this much praise, as important as he was to the massive success of that borderline-classic action flick.

It’s safe to say we’ll be hearing from Waltz a lot. I just hope he can find some really good leading man roles, too. If anyone deserves to suddenly become a full-on international superstar at age 52, he might be the guy.

* I’ve been guilty of ignoring the Toronto International Film Festival (aka TIFF). The favorite major festival of geeky cinephiles (a rep that was perhaps harmed slightly by a kerfluffle this year over blogger press credentials) is now well underway. The high profile films this year include Jason Reitman’s “Up in the Air” which wowed ’em at the Telluride Film Festival just a few days back, and the Coen brothers’ “A Serious Man.” Anne Thompson and Karina Longworth are covering their ends of the festival very nicely.

Actors, Actresses, External Entertainment, External Movies, Movie Comedies, Movie Dramas, Movies, News, test

The Duke and the Dude

September 13, 2009 /

An item about a possible casting choice I missed last week, as per Cinematical’s Elisabeth Rappe:

At first glance, [Jeff] Bridges seems a pretty offbeat choice for Rooster Cogburn [in the Coen Brother’s planned remake of 1969’s “True Grit“]. But having just rewatched the John Wayne original last week, I think it might just be casting heaven. Rooster is a killer, but he’s also a fall down drunk, full of sarcastic quips, and surprisingly tender-hearted.

Why not? Bridges is, after all, an actor even if he’s rarely played someone you could call a bad-ass. Below, a comparison –and since the second video is from “The Big Lebowski” you can safely trust that it is NSFW for language, including an ethnic epithet along with a world of painful f-bombs.

Action Movies, Actors, External Entertainment, External Movies, Movie Comedies, Movies

A Larry Gelbart memorial movie moment

September 12, 2009 /

In honor of the late comedy writer, below is a trailer for his first motion picture credit, the 1962 comedy “The Notorious Landlady.” Though this piece of movie advertising is about as leering and puerile as “Mad Men” era trailers can get, this appears to be a decent little movie from veteran director Richard Quine and two writers very much on the way up: Gelbart and Blake Edwards (“Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “The Pink Panther,” etc.). Having Kim Novak (“Vertigo“), Jack Lemmon, and Fred Astaire in it probably doesn’t hurt either.

Actors, Actresses, External Entertainment, External Movies, Movie Comedies, Movies

RIP Larry Gelbart

September 12, 2009 /

large_LarryGelbart photo web

An important chunk of entertainment history left us yesterday with the death of Larry Gelbart at 81. Gelbart was gifted both working alone and as a collaborator with other writers. It probably helped that relatively early in his career he labored alongside Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Neil Simon on comedian Sid Caesar’s classic early variety shows. In the sixties he graduated to Broadway and the movies. With Burt Shevelove, he cowrote the book for the Broadway musical/Zero Mostel vehicle, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (later filmed by Richard Lester) and the hard to find all-star cult British comedy, “The Wrong Box.” A Chicago-born graduate of L.A.’s Fairfax High (right across the street from Cantor’s Deli), he lived in England for a time, working with another nice Jewish boy named Marty Feldman at the height of his English television fame.

He became much better known in the seventies as the primary writer during the early, funnier and more politically pointed days on the television version of “M*A*S*H.” I get to write about him because he made a mark in movies that’s too important to ignore, writing several good ones, and some not so good. He’ll probably be most commonly remembered for his work on “Oh, God” with George Burns in the title role, and what is probably Dustin Hoffman’s best performance in “Tootsie,” which is something of a comedy classic. He also co-wrote with Sheldon Keller the vastly underrated and all but impossible to see spoof of early Hollywood (specifically Warner Brothers) films, “Movie, Movie,” directed by Stanley Donen and starring George C. Scott, Eli Wallach, Trish van Devere, and Barry Bostwick. (A likely model for “Grindhouse,” in that it was also a double-feature complete with fake trailers.) It more than made up for the regrettable but profitable “Blame it On Rio,” written by Gelbart and also directed by Donen, which starred Michael Caine, Joseph Bologna and an extremely young Demi Moore.

In the nineties, he divided his time between Broadway plays like “City of Angels,” a musical spoof of classic hard-boiled detective novels, and pointed TV movies like “Barbarians at the Gate” — a tongue in cheek version of a nonfiction book about the buyout of Nabisco — and 1992’s “Mastergate,” an unbelievably witty parody of the hearings that invariably follow major Washington scandals.

Mr. Gelbart never stopped writing until almost the end, and was easily one of the most respected and beloved writers in all of show business. 81 isn’t exactly young, but we could’ve used a few more years of his presence. It’s a sad weekend for the world of funny.

Below, a great moment from “Tootsie.”

More about Mr. Gelbart’s illustrious career here, here, here, and here.

Actors, Actresses, External Entertainment, External Movies, External TV, Movie Comedies, Movies, News, TV, TV Comedies

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