[bolgenmod]

For those of you wondering what poker will be like in the future, I can report that I have seen the future of poker, and it is not pretty. In a hundred years, we will still be playing poker on spaceships, but it will be five card draw, and the chips will not even be dice chips: they will be the crappy interlocking plastic Hoyle-type chips! And of course, one will not be wearing sunglasses or a baseball-cap when one plays, but instead a cheesy green clear plastic eyeshade.

How do I know? Well, last night I watched the amazingly prescient sci-fi flick "Silent Running." It tells me that 100 years in the future (actually only about 65 years now, since it was made in 1971), we will have destroyed all the plant life on earth, except for what they put into Buckminster Fuller-type domes and preserved by shooting them into space. These domes are tended by pyscho-hippie-monk Bruce Dern to the dulcet strains of Joan Baez singing about flowers and ferns and children playing in the sun (kill me now).

(WARNING: I AM ABOUT TO SPOIL THE WHOLE PLOT, such as it is.) Of course, Bruce goes nuts when they are told to destroy the domes, kills his crewmates, and then shoots through the rings of Saturn to get away and tend to his forest with some double-amputees dressed up in plastic robot costumes. Until they find him. To protect the forest, he shoots the dome off into space with one of the drones to take care of it (using a battered child-sized tin watering can, just what you need to water A WHOLE FOREST), which kind of defeats the purpose since the forest will still be alive, but never seen again. And then he blows himself up to more Joan Baez treacle. (There's also the compelling sub-plot: the forest starts to die. And of course, this genius botanist can't figure out why, frantically taking soil samples and looking at leaves under a microscope, until he finally realizes that it's dark and plants need light to grow! Astounding insight!!)

I saw this movie around the time it was released (can't remember exactly because I was pretty young), and I swear I cried. Recently, the boyfriend and I have been having a little 70s sci-fi Netflix film festival, both those we've seen and those we'd not (I never saw Logan's Run before this!). He too remembers being moved by this film (won't admit to crying though!). And we were indeed moved watching it again -- moved to tears of laughter and much sarcastic banter.

But the poker scenes: the first is before Bruce kills his crewmates, and it is just fabulous! Bruce is all green-eyeshade, big-stack, eyes darting about like he's already planning to kill them if they take his crappy chips. One guy bets 50 (and all splash the pot, of course), and you know what's coming: "Fifty. (Splash the pot, pause, eye dart, reach for more chips.) And one hundred." (Just as he is calling, the BF yells out "string bet" -- I love that man!) Of course, Bruce has a boat, aces full of threes. And he totally slow-rolls them: "Well, boys, there's a three, and there's another three, (long pause), and there are three big bullets!" I guess you don't want to call a man out for slow-rolling when you realize he is probably capable of murdering you with a shovel.

Later, after he kills them (only one is shoveled to death), and it's just Bruce and the drones (who really are double-amputees walking on their hands inside plastic robot suits), he decides to program the drones to play poker with him. This is after he's given up playing some kind of pool on a round table with a gigantic pool-playing robot, which is basically a huge pillar of steel (bigger than the table) with a robotic claw to pick up the balls and another arm with a cue. (Earlier, they show this wonderful machine missing a shot -- you make a pool-playing robot who MISSES??!! I don't get it...) This machine is so advanced, that when it's time to rack up the balls, it first drops the balls remaining on the table into the pocket, then picks them up ONE AT A TIME to drop them in the rack. Ah, the technology of the future!! At this point, Bruce is understandably frustrated. I guess what's coming and yell: "No one to play with?" And indeed they next show him "Rules of Card Games" in hand, writing a new program.

He's probably as great a programmer as he is a botanist, since on the very first hand, one of the drones discards three kings. (Earlier he programmed the drones to perform surgery, but clearly poker is harder to learn than surgery.) Bruce is angry: "We're not playing for 3-in-1 oil here, you know, we're playing for money." (Do drones get paid?) The very next hand -- after some table talk between the two drones which Bruce forbids "Not fair, now no more talking!" since it is an English-only table -- one of the drones beats him with a full house, jacks over nines. (There doesn't seem to be any betting on this hand, but Bruce does try to cheat and see the drone's hand before the showdown. I TOLD you he was a psycho!) When it tables the cards (no slow-rolling for the drone), Bruce laughs and laughs: "The man [sic] had a full house, and he knew it!!" (So why didn't it bet it?) Wow! Such sparkling dialogue. And such a touching moment. (In the "Making of" documentaries, this scene is referred to as a beautiful scene that humanizes the drones. Whatever you say.)

Anyway, you can tell that the movie is a classic. And it has go-carts, which many sci-fi movies seem to include (in the future, we can fly through space, but we will still have go-carts! Or golf carts, as in WestWorld: we can build realistic robots that you can kill and have sex with, but we will still use golf-carts!) One thing I noticed about the future besides the go-carts is that there is no internet in the future, only computers that make geometric shapes that must mean something. And that jumpsuits in primary colors seem to be all the rage.

If you too have Netflix (which I love btw, especially in a small town. But I gave a subscription to my mother in NYC, where I hear they have more video stores than here, and she loves it also) I would recommend renting this movie, if only for the cheese-factor, which is clearly very high. (I give it four-and-a-half wheels.) And it's only an hour and a half, which is MORE than enough.

(Sorry for the length: I hope SOMEONE enjoys reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it!)