The songs you posted are alright. I like some gangsta rap, so I thought I'd give the three singles on the album a listen as well. It turns out "Ha" ain't my thing, but I liked "Back That Azz Up" a lot better. "Follow Me Now" is kind of a funny one, I don't mind it.

interesting edit, the song mostly fits
here's the original video recorded thirty years after the movie

It's interesting how the popularity of gangsta rap has endured for almost 4 decades across all cultures and throughout the world. There's apparently something very human about rooting for and identifying with the underdog criminal archetype, Jung's Trickster figure made manifest.

I love this song. It's an old American folk song. In 1949, Bill Landford And The Landfordaires did the first version I ever heard. Moby did a remix of it on one of his albums.



There's also a Marilyn Manson version that's not his best work, imo.

And there's also Panzerfaust.

The random number generator movie-picker landed on Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, from 1973, so I watched it.

James Coburn played Pat Garrett, real-life outlaw turned lawman and killer of Billy "The Kid" Bonney. Coburn was one of those men with the manly voices from the Greatest Generation...



...although he was technically born into the very beginning of the subsequent Silent Generation, and his daughter-in-law claimed that his real sympathies fell in with the Hippies.

In addition to a commanding, irascible voice, Coburn also possessed just a hint of the ratface that always seemed perfect for Western badass bad guys.

In Peckinpah Westerns, everyone and no one is the bad guy, so Pat Garrett sort of gets the black hat label by default, as our sympathies lie with that doomed Trickster Billy the Kid, played by Kris Kristofferson, who was a super-hot acting commodity in the early and mid 1970s, until he starred in 1980's Heaven's Gate, a flop so colossal that it helped bring down the entire Auteur concept for making studio movies.

I'm okay with Kristofferson; I liked him without reservations as Rubber Duck in Peckinpah's Convoy, but I was 6 years old when I saw that, and tastes change over time. At age 8, I thought that Greg Evigan made acting look easy in the BJ and The Bear show, but that show is pretty damn painful to watch nowadays.



Also notable was Slim Pickens as a conflicted (and doomed, of course) sheriff. Pickens and his wonderful Texas drawl (by way of Kingsburg, CA) starred in two of my favorite scenes of all time, both of them from 1964's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Here's the first, one that includes a young James Earl Jones as one of the bombers.



Trivia note: Pickens originally said, "Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Dallas with all that stuff," but the city was changed in post to Vegas due to the movie being filmed soon after the Kennedy assassination, which of course occurred in and somewhat traumatized Dallas.

The second, and greatest Slim Pickens scene is not one that I'm going to post. It's at the very end of Dr. Strangelove, and it's a huge spoiler. So... no. Go see Dr. Strangelove if you haven't. You'll thank me.

Speaking of spoilers, for Pickens's sheriff's death in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, the film's music composer wrote a special song for the event. That composer was Bob Dylan, and that song was Knocking on Heaven's Door. Can you imagine having Dylan write and perform freaking Knocking on Heaven's Door for your character's death scene?

I mentioned upthread that I wanted to see how awful Bob Dylan's acting was in the movie, but he really wasn't that bad. I've seen much worse from others in feature films.

Dylan played a character who was sort of an interloper who got caught up in the events of the movie, who was in way over his head, and who was treated with kid gloves when he should have ended up on the floor during his very first scene. So he was basically playing Bob Dylan who wandered onto the set of this Sam Peckinpah film, and found himself in the movie—perfect.

solid review

I’m actually not a big Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid fan but the Slim Pickens death scene with Bob Dylan’s Knocking On Heaven’s Door was amazing.

The whole concept of the Bob Dylan’s character was sort of us the moviegoer who’s along for the ride and rooting for the Kid. Seen this in other movies but this is the earliest example I can think of it being done.

Thanks, REDeYeS00!

I can see that.

You can also see him as a VIP tourist/contest winner. Give him something fun to do, like read off the labels in the pantry (beans, beans, spinach, beefsteak, beans) while the big boys have their standoff.

The plan was to get up early and do my taxes (MA residents have until 4/17 due to a state holiday on Monday), then head off to the casino.

Last night at midnight, a fun-looking turbo $0.55, $50 gtd NLO8 tournament popped up on ACR, and I said, "Ah, what the hell; it's a turbo."

Every time I think that an Omaha tournament looks like fun, it's not. It's never been fun. This "turbo" finished up at 5:30AM after a 45-minute heads up battle, and I took 2nd place for a measly $8.97.

Needless to say I did not get up early. Taxes took forever. I usually hand them over to somebody who knows what they're doing, but I procrastinated this year and it took me forever. I had to google everything, as well as pay Turbotax a premium for the privilege of reporting gambling income; that was basically one of their several versions of DLC.

So, no poker today. Back tomorrow.

By no poker I meant no live poker.

Yesterday was a long, slightly losing day. I felt fresh after the long break, but I'm going to need more than a fresh feeling to put food on the table. I need to book a lot of hours over the next 11 days, and I also need to run well for a change.

Back at it today.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 8 hours
(-$20.00)
MGM Springfield Slots: 3 hours
(-$0.10)

2024 Running Poker Total: 229 hours, +$1520.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 120 hours, +$5491.19

2024 Grand Total: 349 hours, +$7011.19

Another bad day at the tables. I ragequit after losing $300+ with AA vs KQo all-in preflop...a fairly standard beat, but I had been down for the entire day, and that hand would have put me back even. Instead, it tilted me.

No, I'll change that from passive tense to active and say that I tilted, in accordance with the Stoics, where nothing has meaning outside of the exact meaning that one ascribes to it. If I could go back in time and respond to that, I might ask those ancient Greek and Roman sages to jump off a cliff and scream me their positive spins re: their situations on their way down.

Gambelina gave me the wisest advice for this spot. I can go ahead and wallow in self-pity, as long as I set a firm expiration date on that process.

That date will be late tonight/early tomorrow, when I head out on a wee hour slot run, in search of some good plays and a big score.

Also, I did take 10th in another small online tournament for $120, so it's not all bad poker news.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 6.5 hours
(-$297.00)
MGM Springfield Slots: 3 hours
+$55.94

2024 Running Poker Total: 235.5 hours, +$1223.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 123 hours, +$5547.13

2024 Grand Total: 358.5 hours, +$6770.13

I’m in for you finding some juicy slot plays on your late night run.

Thanks Da_Nit!

Unfortunately, instead of taking a disco nap in the afternoon, when I should have, I worked on some film commentary. So I'm pushing the run forward until tomorrow.

Hitchcock and Fellini

On the leisure front: I watched two more movies from my list. The first was Hitchcock's Notorious from 1946. It's one of Hitch's earlier works, in black and white. The plot involves American and German-American spies played respectively by Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman infiltrating a post-WW2 Nazi enclave in Brazil and attempting to thwart their plan to smuggle uranium, ostensibly for a nuke.

Bergman appears to have dirty blond or light brown hair in the film, instead of being one of Hitchcock's platinum blondies, but she has all of the director's other typical leading lady attributes: being lovely, strong, mysterious, apt at dissembling, and not exactly a prude.


Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Now that I've seen Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart in back-to-back Hitchcock films, I'm noticing that his leading men might also be of a type:




Tall, dark and handsome. Or just dark and handsome in Bogart's case, as he was 5'8" (1.73 m), just a bit shorter than his leading lady Bergman.

I enjoyed Notorious. The acting was very good, the plot was tight, and the pacing and accumulating suspense were near-perfect. But I still prefer North By Northwest. That may have something to do with my preference for color over black and white film, but also I like that North By Northwest took more chances, and they happened to pay off: chances like staging a throwing-knife murder at the UN and framing the hero for it, like attacking the hero with a crop-duster airplane, and arranging for a big fight on Mt. Rushmore.

It feels like the director thought he had to prove himself to the studios with Notorious before he could play a little bit looser and more expansive later in North By Northwest. Then again, it could have been a matter of budget sizes. Still, Notorious is worth a watch as an exemplar in plot and pacing.

The second movie was Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 from 1963. I didn't know what to expect from this film, but I loved it almost right away. I'll watch it again sometime, as I'm sure that I missed a lot; the movie is long and dense and heavy on symbolism and dreamlike sequences.

Also, Fellini has made me take back what I've written about black and white films. The director proves himself a master of the two colors in 8 1/2.





Here's a snippet at the beginning that's pretty representative of the film. The scene takes place near the beginning, at a Catholic Church-sanctioned spa/healing water retreat, and a few of the actors glance directly at the camera—normally a no no—and I don't think that it's a POV shot from one of the characters' perspectives. It seems to me that some of the people recognize us as the audience, and that they're glad to see us, and slyly inviting us into their film.



Fellini was one of Francis Ford Coppola's favorite directors, so it's possible that his Flight of the Valkyries music sequence in Apocalypse Now was an homage to the scene above.

Speaking of which: there's a dance sequence in 8 1/2 that makes me think of the one in Pulp Fiction.



Tarantino is a movie scholar, so that's another possible homage, though on second glance the two sequences aren't extermely similar.



More similar in tone and spirit than in movement, maybe.

As for the plot of 8 1/2: not really. No. It's a character piece centered around a famous and successful director in his middle-age who is busy making a hash out of both his personal life and his new movie, while he's supposed to be taking a quiet cure alone at a spa.

Everyone follows Guido Anselmi, the director—played by Marcello Mastroianni as a dashing but aging womanizer—to the spa and pesters him constantly, vying with one another for small snippets of his wandering attention.

This constant, rolling, needy chaos doesn't vex Guido; he seems to thrive on all the attention. He even invites his wife to the spa when his mistress is already present, knowing that the two will see each other and that sparks will fly in some direction.

Whenever Guido is left alone for short intervals, he seeks the dream solace of company in the form of family or old Catholic schoolmates or, in one sequence, all of the women in his life, past and present, organized into a semi-rebellious harem living for his pleasure and diversion.

As for the movie he's trying to make: it's a mess. Every time he reveals any details of his film to anyone, whether it's his producer, set designer, his actresses, his mistress, his wife, or his writing partner, they universally let him know that they hate it.

Guido's writing partner is especially prominent with his opinions, as he viciously deconstructs and belittles every idea, theme, character trait, plot item, metaphor, simile and analogy in the movie, from start to finish, and then the writer moves on to insult Guido's intelligence, personality, creativity, culture and integrity.

The thing about the writer is that his criticisms seem to apply not just to Guido's movie but to Fellini's 8 1/2, and that's when it's implied that the movie within the movie is meta. It's about Fellini, the famous middle-aged director, trying to make a movie, i.e. 8 1/2. I take the nasty writer character to be Fellini's own interior critic, because I know how horrible and deflating mine can be. The symbolism, though, is vague enough that your mileage may vary on that interpretation.

In any case, I would recommend 8 1/2. It is a beautiful film to look at, with some surprising and unique images. There's plenty of pithy commentary on the cost of prior success, and on art and creativity and the fine line between genius and failure, all of which could be interpreted in several ways depending on the viewer. And there's some unexpected humor where the movie doesn't take itself too seriously. I laughed out loud in a few spots.

I might just add another Fellini movie to the list. Coppola's favorite is I Vitelloni, from 1953.