"Deleted Scenes, Deleted For a Reason." Or, "Christ Re-Re-Crucified, Re-Rewind."

Time for a roundup of the recent DVD extras:

1. Rounders (Dir. John Dahl, 1998)

I watched this strictly average movie about poker because I like poker and I'd heard that it had a certain cachet in the world of "high stakes poker players". This is faulty logic. Since when (I should have reasoned) were "high stakes poker players" the least bit doyennes of the arts? Would I read a novel recommended to me by Annie Duke?

Let me be clear: I do not accept anybody's novel recommendations at this stage in my life.
Life is at too great a premium to waste your time muddling through some middlecore fudge cause one of your big palsy-walsy bum-chums thinks it's a hoot. Fnack that dust.
I love my friends but their tastes are routinely seriously off-kilter and I wouldn't want to be them for all the tea in China.
The lives these people live!

(I should say, however, that I was in Trader Joe's on La Brea & Third last night and I was exhausted and holding in one hand the standard "water cracker" and in the other the "Golden Rounds" packet of crackers. My dull skull trying to do the arithmetic to work out which had the less calories. As I did it, and as my wife was putting in her two penn'orth on the subject of crackers, a complete stranger offered the unsolicited recommendation of the Pita Bite Cracker with sea salt. Thinking for a moment to take offense, I instead decided to follow his recommendation, reasoning that "wisdom cries out in the street." That is, however, as far as my taking of recommendations commonly goes.)

Rounders is an all right film, if you like watching Edward Norton really chew up the scenery, snort it like snuff and then sneeze all over his fellow members of the cast.
If not, it's not.

The DVD extras are quite interesting though because they feature some of the stars of the "real life" poker world giving their "insider" tips "for free of charge". I like this because alongside that ill-named, seasoned hack Fat Chris Moneymaker, we also get my preferred player, and proud possessor of a hare lip, the so-called "Poker Brat" Phil Hellmuth.

Phil's advice is superficial , as is Fat Chris's –– what did you expect though, that they'd really give you the golden ammunition to annihilate them at the table? –– and I'll pass over them without comment.

The advice I want to look at today is that imparted by Chris Ferguson, who is known in poker circles as "Jesus" (for his supposed resemblance to the Son of God). (This means he has long hair and a beard.)

Chris Ferguson says good words, right full of sound sense and mercifully free of the egotism or facetiousness commonly associated with the poker circuit. His recommendation to the "studio audience at home" is to play with your friends.

This might seem blindingly obvious at first, but then I re-examined it and found that Chris Ferguson's resemblance to Jesus had imbued his very soul and he sounded like the Son of Man in his casual poker advice now. It's like Christ Recrucified by Nikos Kazantzakis, the novel in which Manolios, the humble shepherd lad who plays Christ in the village pageant, takes on the mien and the saintly convictions of Christ as he increasingly "inhabits" his role. Just so with Chris Ferguson. Play with your friends, he bids us. Go among men and spread fellowship and equity.

Idea for a novel: Poker player with delusions he is Christ.

Gets crucified.