Suitedjustice's Ongoing Mid-life Crisis

I really did laugh out loud at the train in a tunnel shot. And I did not know about the spider. Seems like Hitch could be a cruel but funny bastard at times. Also, thanks for reminding me to add Vertigo to the list.

All right, Rope is on the list, and it's his first film in Technicolor, so that's a big plus. So now I have four Hitchcock movies on the list, and that's one too many, imo.

Notorious
[strike]Rear Window[/strike]
Rope
Vertigo

I think I'm going to cut Rear Window, as I know the basic plot outline from the Simpsons episode, and Rope already has Jimmy Stewart.

Thanks Nat!

Look, I was the enforcer goon for #teamneverlimp for several years, but I've been watching a lot of Bart Hanson lately, and he says that occasional checks and completes in the blinds are okay at tables where big raises like $17-$22 often go 4-6 ways to the flop, and that's Springfield MGM in a nutshell.

I will often raise 54s and 64s, because they can stand multiway action, where A6o cannot. Holding A6o or K9o and pretending that we have pocket aces bloats the pot and does not get 5 people to fold nearly as often as we'd like.

The Trouble With Harry features not only Shirley McClain, but Leave it to Beaver -- and was shot in color.

The next movie is Blow-Up by the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, set in London in 1966. The movie is also spelled as either Blowup or Blow Up, which says something about the style of the movie: informal, indefinite, and with more than a touch of nihilism to it.

I talked about the Hays Code in the Hitchcock review. The Code was on its last legs in the mid-60s, when foreign films like Blow-Up were showing nudity and drug use and the public order was not breaking down due to that. Ultimately, the Hays Code would be replaced by the MPAA rating system in 1968.

The naughty parts of Blow-Up are old hat to us nowadays, what persists are some of the avant-garde blocking and shot composition choices:

Thomas, the main character played by David Hemmings, is a high-talent professional photographer. The movie's often stylized shots can be seen to mirror his viewpoint.

Thomas himself is hard to watch, as he is arrogant, entitled and misogynistic. He spends his work hours berating and inappropriately touching the high-end fashion models who make up his main source of income. He treats them like annoying, poorly-programmed beauty robots, but he gets results, as can be seen from the new Rolls Royce Silver Cloud that he drives like a complete ass all over London.

When things start to go a little wrong for Thomas in the third act, I felt like cheering. That's when I realized that Antonioni was up to some interesting and unconventional things with the movie. Thomas is not supposed to be a protagonist in the conventional sense, nor is he an anti-hero. We're not meant to root for or against him, or hope that he succeeds or fails in his journey. Thomas's journey, the plot of the movie, is a red herring.

The plot, such as it is, has Thomas taking pictures of an amorous couple sharing a private moment in a park, and the woman, played by Vanessa Redgrave, catches Thomas taking snaps. She follows him home and attempts to get him to give her the negatives.

Thomas pretends to give those to her, but he keeps copies for himself. Later on, he develops the prints and blows them up, and he spots what appears to be the preparations for murdering Redgrave's lover in the park.

This part of the story seems to play out conventionally until we hit the third act and we realize that Thomas isn't a protagonist; he's not here to solve the mystery. He's merely curious about it. He takes a few vague stabs at it, but ultimately he acts more like a real-life person might. He doesn't call the cops because he doesn't seem to want to get implicated in an investigation where the details are amorphous. He tries to tell his friends about it, but all they're too deeply embedded within the new Swinging Sixties London culture to be bothered with it. None of them deem Thomas's vague accusations to be important enough to peel themselves away from their fabulous new lifestyles.

I believe that Antonioni had a few things to say in Blow-Up about the personal relativity of importance. I posted the Yardbirds video earlier in the thread, but now skip to around 2:25 below, when Jeff Beck smashes his guitar and throws its neck out into the crowd, creating an instant frenzy for it. After a scrum, Thomas ends up with the guitar neck and escapes the building with it. Watch what happens once he's free.

In addition to being a statement on the inconstancy of importance, it stands also a sort of pantomime for the overall mystery plot. I'm guessing that the lack of resolution in the third act bothered a lot of moviegoers, but I believe that that was Antonioni's point. We are not protagonists in real life. We're not the special chosen ones bound to go on a hero's journey. All we can do is to love what we do. Thomas loves to take pictures. His avocation briefly intersects him with a murder mystery, but that doesn't obligate him to turn into Hercule Poirot and solve it.

I appreciated Blow-Up for its great camera work and for highlighting stale movie tropes and conventions by flouting them, and for being a solid piece of postmodern art making some deep philosophical points, but in the end, it wasn't for me. I'm a story guy. Tell me a story and give me someone to root for.

As always, your mileage may vary.

I have seen over 30 Hitchcock movies, and I consider Rear Window to be one of his best. Besides, Rope doesn't have Thelma Ritter.

And Rear Window has Grace Kelly and Raymond Burr, IIRC.

Looks like there'll be a Hitch film festival after all.

A snippet from David Foster Wallace's very long list of things you learn while in recovery, from his Infinite Jest novel:

That nobody who's ever gotten sufficiently addictively enslaved by a Substance to need to quit the Substance and has successfully quit it for a while and been straight and but then has for whatever reason gone back and picked up the Substance again has ever reported being glad that they did it, used the Substance again and gotten re-enslaved; not ever.

That one will be hitting a little close to home in a few months. I may need to scroll back and find it.

Yesterday I found a rare play on a Hexbreak3r machine and, as per usual, it bit me in the ass. Overall, I am more than moderately down on that machine, but I've only made a total of around a 20 plays on it, so that can easily be explained by variance and a small sample size. Still, the irrational feeling of being snakebit by the machine is hard to shake.

Gambelina found this piece on Twitter about how pairs of Las Vegas scammers are enticing tourists who are inexperienced with video poker to play and build up Ultimate X machines for them, with one scammer asking the tourist to watch his machine while he "grabs more money from his wife", while the second scammer, sitting next to the machine, lies about the mechanics of the game and gets the tourist to build up the bonuses, until the first scammer conveniently returns to the machine to reclaim it, along with the bonuses that the tourist has built up on the second scammer's "advice."

Casinos aren't going to stand for this business, and I wouldn't be surprised if honest slot grinders start getting eighty-sixed alongside of the scammers.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 8 hours
+$96.00
MGM Springfield Slots: 2 hours
(-121.60)

2024 Running Poker Total: 199 hours, +$2271.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 110 hours, +$5218.47

2024 Grand Total: 309 hours, +$7489.47

Imagine being the kind of loser that hustles people into building up Ultimate X multipliers.

I’ve kind of started something similar but watching Sam Peckinpah movies.

I've only seen one of his movies, which was Convoy, which 8-year-old me thought was the cat's pajamas.

Give me one (1) more Peckinpah movie to add to the list.

Last night I was card dead for a great part of the session, except for when I would wake up every 30-60 minutes with a good hand that I bet for value across two streets, only to see it crushed on the river, so the few hands I played were very expensive.

Towards the end of the night, I found myself going against my own advice from a few posts back by trying to force C-bets with air past 4-5 players on the flop. The flops in question were very dry: Q♣7♦3♠ and K♦3♥2♠ and the like, but that did not matter. With that many players, somebody always had something good that they were never going to fold.

Check. The. Flop.

Realizing that I was playing poorly, I cut the session short at 7 hours and added an hour of slots, as the machines did not seem to be heavily monitored for the first time in a while. At the very end of the slot run, I made a 5-cent royal flush on a non-bonus hand for $200, which was the first royal I've hit on anything in many years, so that was nice.

In sports: the Red Sox were awful last year, and a few days ago they stood at 80:1 to win the World Series, so I made a $20 bet to win $1600 if they ship it, purely for entertainment value. It ought to be a nice long sweat; they've started the season 7-3.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 7 hours
(-$458.00)
MGM Springfield Slots: 3 hours
+219.73

2024 Running Poker Total: 206 hours, +$1813.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 113 hours, +$5438.20

2024 Grand Total: 319 hours, +$7251.20

That’s easy, The Wild Bunch.

Forget about the Red Sox. The division is way too strong.

All right. It's on the list.

Baseball in the early spring is all about the renewal of hope, even if it's only a Charlie Brownish kind of hope.

Spoiler

Show

On my workdays, I usually put in a 6 hour poker session, then I have dinner, then I work a 2 hour session. In both sessions yesterday I found myself down almost $200 early, and in both instances I kept my wits about me and won it back and went on to post wins. I also got to watch my favorite college basketball team win their second national championship in a row.

It was a very nice day. I didn't do any eclipse viewing, because I didn't have any special glasses, and I knew that if I went outside I would try to take a quick peek in spite of knowing better, and risk damaging my eyes, which aren't in great shape to begin with, so I stayed in. I'm off today (Tuesday) and back on Wednesday.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 8 hours
+$392.00
MGM Springfield Slots: 2 hours
+42.44

2024 Running Poker Total: 214 hours, +$2205.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 115 hours, +$5480.64

2024 Grand Total: 329 hours, +$7685.64

The room has run this promo before. The top player usually finishes at around 350 hours, or 80+ hours/week for the whole month. I am shooting for 125 hours and 20th place. That would give me $700, which is a nice little bonus.

I have 34 hours in so far.

I'm sorry, but it just isn't possible that you haven't seen The Wild Bunch.

I didn't have cable TV for like the last 30 years. Not because I'm a snob, but because I'm cheap in some ways. I never saw Dumb and Dumber until just a few weeks ago.

Rolling Stone's 471st Greatest Album of All Time: Surrealistic Pillow by Jefferon Airplane (1967)

Surrealistic Pillow came out in February of 1967, two months before the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band debuted. Getting there before that Beatles' juggernaut seems an important milestone for a psychedelic rock album, because everyone went psychedelic after Sgt. Pepper's, so Jefferson Airplane deserves some credit for being there early.

Not to claim that they were there first; The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds was almost a year old, and The Byrds had albums out as well, not to mention that The Beatles' Rubber Soul and Revolver from the previous 2 years both had psychedelic elements to them, but Surrealistic Pillow was the first major psychedelic rock album to come out of San Francisco, and that helped to kick off a hell of a scene in that city later on that summer.

As far as the album goes, I'm much more a fan of Grace Slick's smooth, powerful, urgent vocals than Marty Balin's more pedestrian folk singer fare, yet Balin's voice prevails on most of the album's songs. At that point, Grace Slick was fairly new to the band, while Balin was a founding member, so that may have been the explanation for Balin's predominance. It may also be that my preference for Slick was not shared by everyone.

It's the album's two well-known hits—both of them led by Grace Slick—that for me stand far and above the rest of the tracks.

The lyrics for Somebody to Love always, always do it for me. Four verses: each starting with a terse, emo falcon punch to the gut, followed by the same exhorted solution: find some love, man. And given Slick's urgent delivery, do it now, or you'll live in regret.

When the truth is found to be lies
And all the joy within you dies
Don't you want somebody to love
Don't you need somebody to love
Wouldn't you love somebody to love
You better find somebody to love

And White Rabbit: what can I say? It's a masterclass in the buildup of tension, from start to finish. Once the song begins, I am compelled to never leave it until Slick screams FEED YOUR HEAD twice to me at the end.

White Rabbit was one of the favorites of the great writer: Hunter S Thompson, and he included it in his masterpiece novel, originally published in Rolling Stone magazine.

From Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas

First Lennon, now this, I thought. Next we’ll have Glenn Campbell screaming “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

Where indeed? No flowers in this town. Only carnivorous plants. I turned the volume down and noticed a hunk of chewed-up white paper beside the radio. My attorney seemed not to notice the sound-change. He was lost in a fog of green steam; only half his head was visible above the water line.

“You ate this?” I asked, holding up the white pad.

He ignored me. But I knew. He would be very difficult to reach for the next six hours. The whole blotter was chewed up.

“You evil son of a bitch,” I said. “You better hope there’s some thorazine in that bag, because if there’s not you’re in bad trouble tomorrow.”

“Music!” he snarled. “Turn it up. Put that tape on.”

“What tape?”

“The new one. It’s right there.”

I picked up the radio and noticed that it was also a tape recorder – one of those things with a cassette-unit built in. And the tape, Surrealistic Pillow, needed only to be flipped over. He had already gone through side one – at a volume that must have been audible in every room within a radius of 100 yards, walls and all.

“‘White Rabbit,'” he said. “I want a rising sound.”

“You’re doomed,” I said. “I’m leaving here in two hours – and then they’re going to come up here and beat the mortal **** out of you with big saps. Right there in the tub.”

“I dig my own graves,” he said. “Green water and the White Rabbit … put it on; don’t make me use this.” His arm lashed out of the water, the hunting knife gripped in his fist.

“Jesus,” I muttered. And at that point I figured he was beyond help – lying there in the tub with a head full of acid and the sharpest knife I’d ever seen, totally incapable of reason, demanding the White Rabbit. This is it, I thought. I’ve gone as far as I can with this waterhead. This time it’s a suicide trip. This time he wants it. He’s ready. …

Rolling Stone Says:

Grace Slick’s vocal showcases — “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love” — made Surrealistic Pillow a commercial smash during San Francisco’s Summer of Love, and Marty Balin’s spectral “Today” is still the greatest ballad of that city’s glory days.

The Wiki said that Today was a big college radio hit for many years. I wasn't terribly impressed, but maybe I've been harsh on Marty Balin for no good reason. Here it is, for your own perusal.

the odds must be slim picking to catch some crisscrossed alias pecking keys to wax poetic love paragraphs about grace slick who also never played cards until dawn on the hacienda

don't you worry, i won't turn my back on ya

I recall seeing bits and pieces wheb I was growing up and then finally saw it as an adult recently. Really great film. Warning maybe just me but it does make me want to drink. I’ve noticed when streaming movies recently with smoking there’s a warning about smoking in the film along with violence, sexual conduct etc. Wild Bunch should have one on heavy drinking.

*snaps fingers in approval*

Fine. Fine. I'll add it, but only because Bob Dylan is supposed to be uniquely awful in it.

No worries about the booze references. I just got through the last 9 seasons of Archer. If that didn't turn me, then nothing will.

I racked up a big loss on Wednesday, then took yesterday and today off, with no poker study, or poker videos, or online tournaments. I took a complete rest from it. I'll hit the casino tomorrow, posting the numbers in the morning before I go.

Meanwhile, the Fallout TV show came out, and as a huge fan of the later video games in the franchise: Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 4, I've really enjoyed the TV show so far. I'm about to watch the 4th episode of the first 8.

The show has matched the tone of the games perfectly, with its balancing of dark humor, multiple quest lines, casual gore flinging, and horrific creatures. I love it.

Speaking of casual gore, my random number generator picked The Wild Bunch as the next movie from the list.

William Holden stars in this 1969 ultraviolent Western. I enjoyed him a lot in 1975's Network, where he played a pensive older middle-aged executive having his last guilty fling with a mid-30s Faye Dunaway. Here, a few years earlier, he was almost unrecognizable as the sociopathic outlaw leader in The Wild Bunch, showcasing Holden's great range.

His voice, however, was always his recognizable element across roles. It's the reassuring male macho voice of the Greatest Generation. John Wayne had it as well, but Wayne exaggerated it into an affected drawl, whereas Holden lived inside of it.

***SPOILERS AT THE END***

I appreciated Peckinpah's decisions to shoot in Mexico and to use Mexican actors, instead of going with White actors in brownface like a lot of Westerns back then. The bleak, unrelenting violence—even from the kids and their pitting of a bed of scorpions against an army of red ants—reminded me of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and also of the Red Dead Redemption video game, the latter of which took place in the 1910s around the same time as The Wild Bunch. Blood Meridian was set in 1849, just after the Mexican-American war.

Of course, the movie came before the novel and the video game, and I wonder how much the latter two were influenced by the movie.