The FAR reheats some classic movies scenes, settings, and trivia, thinks about the currents state of television and muses on an old song. Grab your plate and take your fill.

Thanks to Casper for contributing this week, the big slice of pie is hers. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and have a Happy Friday!

For Polygon, Jake Kring–Schreifels reveals the work and preparation that went into turning the poker scene in Casino Royale from a dull read on the page into gripping drama on the screen:

Campbell cracked it. The roughly 30-minute casino sequence plays as a masterful microcosm of the movie — it has its own narrative arc, interspersed with punctuations of combat and death-defying shocks, and shows off Bond’s mental prowess and mortality. More importantly, it proved Craig capable of daredevil thrills and martini-sipping refinement, and leveraged his skills into one of the best depictions of poker in movie history. “I think the sequence was pretty convincing,” Campbell says. “What you realize is, it’s not just the card games — it’s the stakes. It’s also two guys eye-fucking one another, basically. That was the secret.”

Crooked Marquee’s Emmy Potter compares and contrasts the similarly set but differently gendered Dead Poet’s Society and Mona Lisa Smile:

If you attended high school at any point in the last 30 years, your English teacher probably wheeled one of those boxy TVs to the front of the classroom and announced “Today is going to be a little different” before hitting play on Dead Poets Society, Peter Weir’s 1989 drama about an unconventional teacher at an elite, all-male prep school in 1950s New England, who encourages his students to “seize the day” and not fall prey to the dangers of conformity. It’s less likely your English teacher decided to show you Mona Lisa Smile, Mike Newell’s 2003 drama about an unconventional art history professor at the prestigious, all-female Wellesley College in 1950s New England, who encourages her students to “have it all” and not fall prey to the dangers of conformity. The two films are similar enough to raise eyebrows, yet it’s the one centered on men that garnered more acclaim and earned a permanent spot on your high school English syllabus, while ironically, the one centered on women has become semi-forgotten with time.

At Vulture, Kathryn VanArendonk takes on the struggle of network televisions to portray (or ignore) the pandemic:

I’m still not sure how to feel about what’s happening on network TV this fall. My anxiety over the past year has totally reshaped my internal system of alarms; my brain registers masks on the faces of strangers in the same way I once registered characters obviously driving around in fake cars, totally ignoring the road. I’m instantly distracted, and whatever fictional suspense I was living in totally collapses. It would be lovely to turn off the alarm in my mind that shrieks at the sight of all these beautiful TV people striding around their workplaces with their nakedly exposed mucus membranes. I can’t; it’s all I can see.

Courtesy Constance Grady and Vox – the true story of Arlo Guthrie’s rambling song “Alice’s Restaurant”:

In my own hometown of Philadelphia, WXPN’s Helen Leicht plays it every year at noon, and in non-pandemic years my family gathers around the radio like we’re in an old-timey Norman Rockwell painting, ripping apart bread for the stuffing and singing, “Had a Thanksgiving dinner that COULDN’T BE BEAT!” Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” was originally released in 1967 as “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” and it’s only nominally about either Thanksgiving, Alice, or her restaurant.

We’re all tired, so let’s just sack out on the couch and learn some facts about Planes, Trains and Automobiles from Mental Floss:

In John Hughes: A Life in Film, Kirk Honeycutt wrote that one actor, who played a truck driver, was only supposed to have one line and work for one day. Hughes chose to keep him on standby. The actor ended up working enough days while the crew waited for the snow to come that he was able to make a down payment on a house. It’s very possible this was Troy Evan’s, who was uncredited, as the shy truck driver in the movie. He went on to appear, credited, on ER for the show’s final five seasons as Frank Martin.