Craig H

It's possible that someone else thought the same thing, but I thought I was pretty alone in thinking Tom Cruise basically turned himself into American Jackie Chan and was essentially going to kill himself for our entertainment. But that just doesn't involve crazy stunts, it's also how good he is at physical comedy. Both Fallout and Dead Reckoning had me laughing my ass off at times just based on Cruise's reactions to the environment around him and, again, how good he is at physical comedy. It's probably an even crazier thing to say, but I really think his work in the Mission Impossible movies from Rogue Nation forward is the best work of his career. I finally got around to watching A Few Good Men and I thought it was pretty hammy. I would rather see Cruise as Ethan Hunt stumbling around after he was just brought back to life in Rogue Nation, especially him trying to be slick by sliding over the hood of a car only to essentially tumble and eat shit. It worked even better that he had Simon Pegg to play off of in that scene and Rebecca Ferguson played a hell of a straight man for those bits. Man I fucking love the Mission Impossible movies. Except 2, which is just hilariously awful. It feels like it was made on another planet and on another timeline.

The Marina experiment needs to end. It's like a baseball team trotted out someone that sucks but they paid a lot for so they have to try and use them, except Marina probably isn't getting paid a ton.

I will say that TK is really, really, really missing the boat with Willow. She is fucking over. Give her some room to work. Again, you have 4 hours of TV a week. There is no reason why so many matches need so much time. Fuckin, uh, christ, some of these tag matches where it's one tag team vs a jobber team don't need to go through one commerical break. It's fucking dumb. You can trim down some of these other matches to get a Mercedes match and a Willow match or a Stat match or a Toni match ON THE SAME SHOW. Also, caught up in all of this, I just realized AEW has the Grizzled Young Vets and they've been nowhere to be seen. We're heating up FTR again, which is cool, but can we carve out some room to get the GYVs over or not stop start with whatever they're trying to do with "JetSpeed?"

Oh, and MJF will ultimately have to get through Lashley to get his title shot against Hangman. Hangman and MJF feels like the bigger story that’s currently simmering, but if Hanger wins the title, I don’t see him dropping it to MJF. Seems like it will wind up being a big match with a lot of history and a lot of ways to spin off MJF and Hangman afterwards. MJF to Lashley for a blowoff to their feud and Hangman to Ospreay most likely.

FTR being heated up again at the same time as this MJF and HB story made me think we’re going to get Lashley finally relenting and giving Max the thumbs up only for MJF to give him the thumbs down and his old Pinnacle running mates, FTR, beat the shit out of THB and stuff piledrive MVP. Plus you just had FTR talking about getting the tag titles back so that seems like the direction in my head maybe as soon as Beach Break.

Something else my friend and I talked about last night is how much this John Cena story fucking blows. This is going to wind just being a larger example so bear with me here…All of the Rock’s bullshit has left the station so it’s up to HHH to make this compelling. It’s pretty clear he’s struggling at the moment. Not to the point where a change is needed, but this isn’t unlike what Coach experienced. It’s like how a band’s first album is great and the follow up is often disappointing. TK, and probably HHH, had a year or two of stories completely mapped out. Everything went mostly according to plan and was great. But since then it has been a bunch of good starts that just kind of went nowhere. Look how hot the New Day were with their heel turn and now they don’t get close to the same heat. Charlotte comes back and is booked to win the Royal Rumble and then loses to Tiffy in a rough but ok match. Neither of them look any better coming out of that match though. The booking leading up to WM was a mess and despite knowing for a full year that WM would happen weeks later year, everything just dragged on and was bogged down. Cody now looks like a geek. Roman and Punk are off the reservation and once again we had a good start with Bron and Seth and then a week later the top heels are being cheered and Sami is getting lukewarm receptions. People who think Chicken Jockey is insufferable have never heard of Seth Rollins. There’s a ton more examples but I’m not going to belabor the point. HHH isn’t infallible when it comes to booking and is just as prone as TK to not knowing how to keep things compelling coming off of your hot streak. TK figured it out and HHH can too, but will HHH have the runway and latitude to get back on track working in a corporate scorpion pit?

All of this on the heels of Cora Jade revealing she was body shamed in WWE by her bosses and co-workers. I honestly couldn’t see HHH or HBK doing that now, but I could see some dumb fuck like Road Dogg or PS Hayes doing that. Everything from a week prior to WM to now has been nearly a dumpster fire. Like, Vince’s business failings stemmed from his insanity and just being out of touch to an unbelievable degree. This is all just typical corporate bullshit and cutting your nose off to spite your face. Someone, anyone there needs to grow a fucking brain to stop the train before it wrecks.

Toni Storm wasn’t a needle mover either until given the chance.

Hell yeah Jets.

Oh man. All the feels: https://youtu.be/gVvUuSYp7-s?si=VMJCpiDGX3K9F26t Fucking YouTube videos not embedding. It’s a Giant Bomb tribute video.

That’s why I think Shayna and maybe Kai would be good signings. Shayna is at the end of her career but can still go and she’s way more credible than Marina. And if Kai went with her then she has at least two friends in AEW if she’s still friends with them. Kai is a seasoned veteran, but I think she might just get lost in the shuffle with some of the other women. She might get a shiny new toy program to start, lose to Statlander, and then make an appearance every so often like with Deonna. But out of everyone I’d sign Shayna mostly because for “shooters” on the roster, Marina sucks and I don’t think she’ll ever get it.

Aged. Like. Milk. http://deathvalleydriver.com/forum/index.php?/topic/11303-aew-april-2025/page/4/#findComment-1426066

Yeah that’s awesome. Also, it’s hard to imagine Renner doing anything with Hawkeye again after his accident.

You have the opinions of a Texas book burner.

With the state of NJPW, and despite whatever partnership they have with CMLL, I don’t even know what Forbidden Door is any more. Forbidden Door was originally about Dream matches and cross promotional stuff. Outside of an Omega/Kidd rematch, I can’t think of any cross promotional match I’m dying to see. But I guess you have to keep watering the garden until stuff grows again.

Regarding your last point, Nextlander has carried the Giant Bomb torch very well, but they more or less just discuss the news and they don't report on it because it's just Brad, Vinny, and Alex. They don't have a Patrick or Grubb or anyone else to report on important shit. They're in the same boat as us though and so we all basically commiserate. I guess the Jeff Gerstmann Show and Kinda Funny and even Remap fill some of those spaces, but it's hard to listen to Jeff go on for 3 hours by himself like it's a stream of consciousness, Kinda Funny is very extra and is a little too loud for me, and Remap is kind of a downer and don't do the equivalents of Quick Looks for popular, random, old, or totally obscure games.

They had even better signs and funny ones too. I think one said "LESBIANS 4 KYLE FLETCHER," which made me think or wonder why lesbians would dig Kyle Fletcher. EDIT: It was actually nice that the people behind the announcers were funny, endearing, and goofy for once. The dad who looks like Mark Hoppus after chemo just totally dadding out with his kid and then his kid eventually relents and acts silly too got me pretty good. I don't recall what Bootleg Steven Miller between Ex and Tony was doing though.

I like Ospreay and all, but yeah, this ain't his time or moment. Hangman has been the most compelling character in all of AEW for about forever. Swerve comes close to being the ideal guy to dethrone Jon, but the best guy is Hangman. I'm biased though because Hanger is probably my favorite dude and thing in all of wrestling.

Presumably they were either afraid of him or He Who Remains and each guy is dead. The Council of Kangs doesn't really have much of a purpose now. I still would like to see something along the lines of Doom stealing the power of the Beyonders except this time he slaughters and steals the power from all Kangs. That or a handy Miss Minutes briefing on Loki God of Stories just deciding, yeah, fuck those dudes and cutting that cancer out of the multiverse.

To be fair, audiences first saw Thanos in Avengers for a hot second and had no idea who the fuck he was. They saw him again for, what, 2 or 3 lines, in the middle of GotG. Next time they saw him was, I think, in the post credits for Age of Ultron. And that's it until Infinity War. What made Thanos a threat was him murking the fuck out of Heimdall, Loki, Hulk, and Thor in the first few minutes of Infinity War. The first phases were building somewhere that the hardcore audience knew about, but the general audience had little to no idea unless they could recall Tony's or Thor's visions. As long as Doom isn't 1 or 2 and done and this is more so his introduction by making a big bang then the next time he's featured in a movie and let's just call that movie God Emperor Doom it's going to mean even more. I'm basically throwing most everything from phases 4 and 5 out with the exception of Spider-Man, Shang-Chi, and GotG Vol. 3. Nothing else really matters. BNW was their real reset and return to form. In that sense, Doomsday and Secret Wars will be what Avengers 1 was except much bigger and setting the stage for all there is to come. Now, if RDJ Doom isn't a variant and it's 2 movies and done for Doom, then they have massively fucked up on par with Vince fucking up the Invasion.

Some additional thoughts...why I think this is such a homerun is that what made phases 1, 2, and 3 work so well is that those movies all were practically episodes of a longer season of TV. BNW felt like the start of making these movies episodes of a longer series as opposed to these kinda sorta one off movies that went nowhere or led to nothing. Thunderbolts is for all intents and purposes a fucking AWESOME episode in this new series that's leading to a 2-part season finale. Fantastic Four is going to be the penultimate episode, and Doomsday and Secret War is the 2-part finale. My hope is that we do indeed get something where this RDJ Doom is a variant and where we end off in Doomsday or Secret Wars is with a Doom that is going to be a presence and threat that sticks around for the long run. Cosmic MCU will still be a thing and at some point you'll get Star Lord and maybe the new GotG getting roped into saving the universe again. Maybe they can salvage Captain Marvel because christ, fucking salvage her because that character rules and I'M STILL WAITING FOR MY ICONIC CAPTAIN MARVEL PULLING ON HER GLOVE SHOT. But Doom will be the one that stirs the pot going forward. And to talk about the second post credit scene...

Yes, it is as Casey described.

I was just coming here to talk about it because I just learned about it from Remap. Motherfucker. It's not even that Vox sold Polygon, it's that Vox, a company with a fucking union, sold Polygon to Valnet. Who is Valnet? I'M GLAD YOU ASKED. Valnet is a company that I learned about from a Netflix document called Hot Girls Wanted. And then another documentary called Moneyshot. Valnet is a Canadian company that has had its hands in sex trafficking, sexual assault, and more! It's one of the scummiest companies on the planet, or at least it was at one time. Could they have changed? Maybe? My guess is probably not. Everything is a fucking dumpster fire. These people, the people at Polygon, the people at Giant Bomb, I had friends at these places, I had connections with these places, and now these people have been forced to quit, were fired, laid off, and of those that remain which is like, 1, you're doing the work of a fucking AI bot. I fucking LOVE games. Games are a part of my DNA. I, like many gamers, know exactly where I was the first time I got my first system. My first experience with video games was going to a department store in town called Highland where they had TV and NES on display that you could play and it was to the left of a display of Star Wars lightsabers. The OLD lightsabers that were basically just a long tube of plastic. The first thing I ever played was Kung Fu. I was instantly hooked. My parents didn't make shit. Dad worked in a factory and mom basically made a little more than minimum wage, but they did stupid shit like spoil me to the point where they had to file bankruptcy and one of those things that probably contributed to their debt was taking me to get an NES, Kung Fu, and Pro Wrestling the night all of my cousins were at my house for a pool party. I couldn't take part because I had an ear infection. It's one of those things that is just imprinted on me where I'm like this living embodiment of the song Hurt and the line, "and I remember everything." And that love of games that started there and grew into chatting with duders online who would be a part of games journalism, good games journalism, is now dead. Others that I didn't know but were popular enough were able to form their own Patreon gigs, but that's hardly games journalism. It's more or less content creation to give people like me and the rest of us an informed opinion on the purchases we make. This sucks. This week fucking SUCKS. Xbox following Nintendo's lead, which will probably lead to Sony doing the same, which will lead to other publishers doing the same, and the shit with Giant Bomb, and Polygon's essential death fucking sucks.

I love that everything Walker did was the exact opposite of what Steve or Sam would do. And yeah, Ghost is the most underdeveloped cool character in the movie. I think she’s pretty neat, but she’s limited to a couple lines about her past from Ant-Man and the Wasp and that’s about it.

A+. Instant top 10 MCU movie. I about came in my pants for the end credits scene and everyone in the room went fucking nuts. I loved this so much that I can see myself putting into the rotation of movies I endlessly rewatch. It is fucking ON.