tunesday (david lander, rip)

 

David Lander, RIP.

David Lander, best known as Squiggy on Laverne and Shirley, passed away last week at the age of 73 after a long battle with multiple sclerosis. This song, which he performed as Squiggy (with Lenny, portrayed by Michael McKean), is among my favorites of his bits.

cinema history class: the magnificent obsession of michael reeves

Session: Documentaries, Week 2
Movie: The Magnificent Obsession of Michael Reeves (2019)
Directed byDima Ballin 

As I did last year for documentary month, I am temporarily abandoning my usual format.

Michael Reeves grew up obsessed with movies and dreamed of directing American-style epics.  He directed three movies, two of which are considered highly-influential in British cinema). Less than a year after the third, Reeves died of an accidental overdose at age 25.

We've actually seen two -- the influential two -- of the movies in class,* but I hadn't put them into context. I hadn't realized that they were from the same director, and I certainly didn't realize how influential Witchfinder General was. That, despite remembering the famous stories of how Reeves butted heads with Vincent Price. This documentary did a good job of driving the point home.

Whereas The Search for Weng Weng, which we saw in week 1, never really got us beyond viewing Weng Weng as a 2'9" object, Magnificent Obsession did a really good job of giving us a full picture of Reeves as a real person -- with talents and foibles, passions and weaknesses. It did that by featuring extensive interviews of people who knew the man -- people who worked with him and who considered him a friend.

I was particularly surprised to learn that Reeves wasn't actually into horror or violence. He was making horror movies because he felt that it was the best way to establish himself as a reliable director who's movies would make money. His goal was to make Hollywood movies. This makes it all the more poignant that he died at 25 before he could realize that dream. And a couple of the people interviewed for the movie talked about the high promise that his career had.

All that having been said, I am actually skeptical about whether he would have achieved the wider-recognized greatness that others expected of him. To Baker, who had worked with him, described their last meeting, two months before Reeves' death. Reeves had clearly had some kind of mental break. Between that and his need for medications, I think it's perfectly plausible that his best work was behind him. Of course, that is something we'll never know for sure.

Because this documentary didn't skimp on clips, and because of its emphasis on people who knew tyhe subject personally, this was much better than the prior week's documentary.

___________________________

*I wrote about The Sorcerers here. We saw Witchfinder General before I started this blog, so I didn't write about it.

one...two...three...guts!

"Quarter guts!"

That was probably my favorite call -- or maybe my favorite was "baseball, follow the queen, down." But this post is about guts. Only because I twote to a friend that I'd write a post about it. I didn't tell her that I'd write about baseball follow the queen down. This was, by the way, occasioned by my daughter's newfound interest in poker.

We're pretty much talking about the mid 1980's through the 1990's when my friends and I would get together at least once a week to play poker. Our card games were the kind of thing that would make serious players cringe. We played all sorts of crazy variants, with wild cards, cards that could become wild, or become tame in the middle of a hand. And we were loud and rambunctious. Usually it was in good fun, though I do recall one time when a Super Big Gulp went flying across the room.

We played for low stakes. Generally, a nickel ante. Five cents would buy more then than it does now, but even then it was a low ante. With a small ante like that, I could generally play for hours and end the evening up or down only a few dollars. I figured that, if I lost that was the price for an evening of entertainment. Cheaper than a movie. And if I won, all the better. Guts was the one game that would regularly have a higher ante. In the case of "quarter guts," it was twenty-five cents.

Guts was a simple game. Everyone was dealt three cards. There were no flushes or straights, so three aces was the high hand. We also never had wild cards, though I don't know why. Anyway, we would each look at our own hand, decide whether to stay in and then hold our cards in the air. The dealer would count, "One. Two. Three. Guts!" Those who were staying in would hold onto our cards. Those who were dropping would...drop. Of those who stayed, the high hand won the pot.* Everyone who stayed in and didn't win had to match the pot for the next round. We played round after round until only one person stayed in. That person won the pot and the game ended.

Now, if only one person stayed in in the first round,  the game ended pretty quickly. But if three or more people stayed in, the pot could grow -- a lot. When three people stayed in, the pot would double. When four stayed in, it would triple. Sometimes it would actually top $10, which was huge for our game. And I do recall one time when it actually topped $100. And during the earlier years, when we were still college students, that was big money.**

By the way, Vin, if you're reading this: I apologize for that stretch where, every game, I would use the bathroom, and turn that shelving unit around backwards. And I apologize for denying it was me when you called me out for it.

_________________________

*This leaves the question of what to do if the game was tied and the pot was not evenly divisible by the number of winners. I remember the first time I asked what would happen. The dealer picked one of the guys and said "Jon gets the extra nickel." That didn't sit well with me, since it was no longer a fair game, but one that gave Jon an unfair advantage. Yeah, I guess that was kind of petty of me. Anyway, I don't remember how we resolved it that first time -- or the next. I may have sat out a game. Eventually we fell into a standard rule that the extra nickel stays and gets added to the next pot.

**There was one particular guy who had less money than the rest of us. Or so it seemed. Let's call him "Goldman," after Oscar Goldman from The Six Million Dollar Man. Outside of our game, when someone had a nervous decision to make, it would be likened to "Goldman holding a pair of kings in guts with a $25 pot."

happy zmedsday!! (xcv)

 

happy tunesday: "girl of my dreams"

 

"Girl of My Dreams" was a hit for Bram Tchaikovsky's only Top 40 hit in the US. I happen to be a big Bram Tchaikovsky fan, so I'm probably much more familiar with the song than my reader is. On the surface, it sounds like just another of the many simple love songs that have made the charts over the years. But it was actually about something a little less wholesome. I blogged about that here.

It is my Tunesday song today because of a news item that's been making the rounds. It seems that Kazakhstani bodybuilder, Yuri Tolochko, has gotten married. You can read about it here.

In case you want to see, Mr. Tolochko shared a snippet of wedding video on Instagram.