Ed. Note: This article was written by Sonya Harvey.

Guns. Knives. Ammo. Mexico. Prisoners. Hunchbacks. Hermanos. This is the stuff of spaghetti-Western legend in the making, which can only be thought up by Johnny Falstaff and Hank Schyma.

The Honky Tonk Blood brothers and Houston musicians are up to their old movie-script tricks again, this time trading in their six-strings for six-shooters. Their latest offering, The Hunchback of Mexico, is set in the 1840s Wild West, just south of the border.

The film was shot in the barren wastelands of West Texas and Arizona, with a plot that goes something like this: A highwayman flees to a remote Spanish mission where a prisoner has escaped. With a hunchback in tow, the highwayman goes off in hot pursuit hoping to redeem his mangled past.

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Marc Wathieu via Flickr

In today's recording industry, it is essential to be multifaceted. How can you knock a person spiting ill bars over their own beat in the video they directed?

Indeed, most rappers are exploring many different avenues and mediums these days. Some are actually finding additional success; while others are wasting valuable time that could be better spent in a recording booth banging out hits.

In the last decade or so, plenty of rhyme-spitters have let their acting aspriations loose through the camera lens. While Hollywood is not in short supply of talented actors posing as waiters until the right gig comes along, plenty of hip-hop artists are producing, directing, and staring in full-length films.

Minimal acting ability is no requirement for a lead role anymore, especially when the record label finances the movie.

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FOB (friend of Bieber) Mike Tyson

You or I may not be a fan of Justin Bieber, but you know who is? Mike Tyson, that's who. As Iron Mike explained a little while ago, he thinks Bieber is "pretty awesome." Apparently the ex-heavyweight champ got turned into a Belieber through his wife, who hooks Tyson up with most of his music.

This is certainly not the weirdest thing Mike Tyson has ever said or done, but it definitely lends itself to the sort of comedic teddy-bear image he's been cultivating recently. He even offered some mentorly advice to the young Bieber, much like he offers his fans regularly on his Twitter feed.

While it would be strange if the two celebrities actually started hanging out in public together, maybe even collaborating (we know Mike can sing from his stellar appearance in The Hangover 2), it's not the unlikeliest pairing of celebrities from two different worlds we've ever seen. Such as these bizarre actor/musician combos.

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On March 24, HBO premieres Phil Spector, a biopic centered around the years leading up to the legendary producer and madman's 2009 murder conviction. Al Pacino steps into the shoes of Spector, whose production credits read like the Rosetta Stone of modern pop music.

Judging by the trailer -- released this week -- it looks like director/writer David Mamet went all-out in depicting Spector as a crazed, gun-toting ladykiller (literally), and Pacino went along for the ride with wigs and howls galore.

Other big names in the cast include Helen Mirren and Jeffrey Tambor.

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That's Mr. LaBeef in the top left corner, we presume.

It's a toss-up whether actors or musicians will go to greater lengths to make rent, but some musicians have even found themselves so hard up they've been forced to take an acting gig. Such is the case with the haystack-sized Sleepy LaBeef, who in 1968's The Exotic Ones appeared as the "Swamp Monster," a creature abducted from the Louisiana swamps to a French Quarter strip joint. After that, everything is fine until another dancer crosses Sleepy's favorite stripper and he starts killing people; whoever is sitting on the DVD rights to this masterpiece needs to reissue it right away.

The 25th person inducted into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame and dubbed "rock and roll's last living myth" by Rolling Stone in 2009, in his lifetime the 77-year-old LaBeef has also worked as a lumberjack, land surveyor and semi-pro wrestler. Luckily for us, he stuck to music and plays the Continental Club Friday night with the Wagoneers.

Just off the top of our head, it seems like the following musicians took their roles more for the opportunity to do something different rather than to put food on the table. Still, a hideous swamp monster is about in the same class as some of the parts these moonlighters have taken over the years -- but whether to amuse or torture themselves, we may never know.

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Over our extended weekend, we celebrated the birthday of Reverent Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But one other eventful birthday I'd like to bring to your attention was on January 20, this past Sunday. That's the birthday of acclaimed director David Lynch. The visionary filmmaker turned 67 years old.

In celebration of that fact, I decided to take a look back at some of the greatest musical moments in Lynch's filmography. As an occasional musician himself, Lynch knows just how to work music into a scene to evoke a powerful visceral response on the part of the audience.

In a way, many of his greatest scenes are defined by the songs they use and the jarring effect which those songs create within their context.

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You may not have noticed, but American Idol started a new season last week. If you're like most people, you apparently didn't watch, because the ratings are way down.

This could be for any number of reasons. Idol has been on the air for what feels like forever, with pretty much the same formula all these years; it hasn't produced any major stars in some time; and it has now lost most of its original judges' panel. Some critics are even saying it should just be canceled already, and have been since last season.

I might agree with that, but in the interest of entertainment, I think that the show should stay on. All it needs is a little sprucing up. What do most TV shows do when they get old and ratings go down? The best of them go batshit crazy. Remember some of those later-season Seinfeld episodes? The season of Roseanne where the family won the lottery?

Exactly. There is a way to fix American Idol, but the show would need to be willing to take some risks. If anyone from Fox is reading this (and why wouldn't they be?), I have a few good suggestions to save the show.

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The fictional Twylight Zones from Not Fade Away

Not Fade Away, Director David Chase's period piece about a burgeoning rock band in the '60s, is still playing on limited screens in New York and Los Angeles, but this week preview copies of the soundtrack hit mailboxes. It is a sprawling double-disc, double-LP collection featuring vintage Rolling Stones, Elmore James, and James Brown cuts.

The L. A. Times seems to be saying good things about the film. Rolling Stone's Peter Travers likes it too.

The movie centers around The Twylight Zones, a fictional group from the Jersey suburbs who set out to make it big in the mid-'60s rock scene. The Zones' music is performed by a supergroup helmed by Steven Van Zandt and featuring Max Weinberg and Gary Tallent. You may recognize those names from another little band from New Jersey. In all, they contributed six Zones cuts, mostly covers.

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I'm keen to catch The Hobbit soon. If nothing else, the Seventh Doctor apparently goes full-on wizard battle against the Witch-King in it, and I would have paid just to see that scene alone. The rest of it looks cool too, though.

In the meantime, I have to wait for an overnight babysitter to free up so I can catch the three-hour flick. I'm tiding myself over replaying the PS2 Hobbit game and listening to Hobbit songs.

You might think that there hasn't been much said in song about Hobbits since Leonard Nimoy and Charles Randolph Grean's "Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" gave us arguably the greatest music video of all time, but you'd be wrong. There's been plenty of Hobbit love in pop music... though I really should have gone with another turn of phrase there.

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facebook.com/soundcitymovie

While the Foo Fighters have been on hiatus, lead singer Dave Grohl has been putting the finishing touches on his cinematic love letter to Sound City Studios in Los Angeles.

Today the full trailer for Sound City was released online.

You can check out the studio's discography here. The studio's dumpiness seemed to create magic for the artists recording there, and its console -- a Neve 8028 -- is a hallowed piece of rock history. Grohl's purchasing the Neve led him to the idea for the film.

Since 1970, Sound City has been recording ground zero for acts like Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young, Tom Petty, Nirvana, Tool, Foo Fighters, Queens of the Stone Age, and Mastodon, among many others.

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