Who Was that Masked Rider?

On Friday I finally watched The Last Gun, an early European western that, to my pleasant surprise, featured a masked vigilante. I thought I knew his secret identity; I thought they had made it obvious, but when it was revealed at the end, I had it wrong. Then I read other people's reviews of the film online, and apparently I was the only viewer in the world who had it wrong. Very strange. I wonder if it's because I watched the first ten minutes two weeks before I saw the rest of the movie. Everyone else seemed to see a slightly different film than what I saw, except one person who questioned how the vigilante could have been that person every time due to an apparently very fast costume change.

Most of the reviews I found of The Last Gun were negative, but I enjoyed it very much. Did that ten-minute splice make such a difference? Anyway, the guitar player that I thought was the vigilante, but wasn't (at least not the whole time), was so pleasant, cheerful and fun that I was inspired. I tried to be like him the rest of the weekend, but I lost my cool a few times. I've made up for it since then, I hope. I do want to be more like him consistently.

And I do think he was the vigilante much of the time, and the Spaghetti Western DataBase seems to agree: "The mysterious legendary masked rider, Jim Hart, reappears to protect the locals and a guitar playing, gun-toting balladeer, who like Jim Hart shoots left-handed, coincidentally arrives with the bandits." I didn't even notice the left-handed thing!

We also watched The Bishop's Wife (1947) that evening--two movies in one day!--which I thought I'd seen before, but I definitely hadn't. I'm a big fan of both Carey Grant and David Niven, and that was one great movie. I think it's one of Tara's favorite Christmas movies now, and mine, too.

Last night occurred the Christmas Chocolate Laundry Disaster of Two Thousand Eleven, for which I was entirely responsible. Santa gave me a piece of chocolate at the mall, which I never removed from my shirt pocket. Now a bunch of our clothes, including two of my most expensive shirts, have chocolate stains, which they got in the dryer. So I stayed up an extra hour and am still working on getting stains out of all those clothes. I slept an extra hour this morning but managed to get some guitar practice in. I played all the way through my new song once without looking at my chord/rhythm sheet. Progress!

Tomorrow will be my last time to work on music for a while, since we're leaving for Alabama on Friday and will be gone for two-and-a-half weeks. But one never knows how creative one can get on the road, and I will have my laptop. I'll probably leave my guitar at home, though.