One of my favourite movies was Casino, with Jose Pesci, DeNiro and Sharon Stone. That cast is pretty amazing, but one of the best scenes I have ever seen in my life was when Joe Pesci deals with the big guy by handling a pen into the poor guy’s eye.
It reminds me of a joke by George Carlin, when he was talking about religion, and he was saying how silly it was to pray to an invisible man in the sky, it would actually make more sense to pray to Joe Pesci, since he was real, and he seemed like the kind of guy that could actually get stuff done.
But actually, I once listened in a podcast that there is this well known anecdote with Joe Pesci that involves him getting cheeky (very much like he does in that scene in Good Fellows, when he goes ballistics against the poor bartender guy) and then reality hits him hard in the face when the target of his ire replies to him something to the effects of “this is not a movie MF…”
Word is Joe crawled back to his cave and hid. He realized that he was in fact not in a movie and that big guys in real life didn’t find him intimidating.
Anyways, another cool movie that involves gambling and New Zealand casinos has to be the one where a group of highly talented maths students coached by their professor (Kevin Spacey) go to Vegas to count cards at Black Jack tables. Then you have the one where Justin Timberlake involves himself in the underworld of online gambling. And yes, how could I forget about Matt Damon playing poker?