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nate

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Posts posted by nate

  1. 9 hours ago, The Natural said:

    OIP.oEkEwC9YptVuRWukocJ76wHaKI?dpr=1.3&p

    I thought you were the 31st getting a Birthday and New Year's Eve the same day. Have yourself a good un xxx.

    It was a bit of alright.  Good food, family around.  I enjoyed it.

    Thanks for the good wishes, naitch.

    • Like 1
  2. 1 hour ago, twiztor said:

    finished watching all of 1993 WCW (*there's a handful of C-shows i'm still tracking down, but for the purpose of this post we'll just say i'm completely done) and wanted to post up my thoughts. I doubt there's too many fresh takes here, but here we are, 30 years later. These are in no particular order

    • Paul Roma in the 4 Horsemen. the 4H were basically a non-entity for the entire year. Roma wasn't a good fit, but he also didn't DO anything. a mediocre tag team with Arn Anderson that lasted 9 months. Then again, if you're tagged with Arn for that length of time and it never gets past mediocre, then maybe that's on you.
    • the NWA World Title -> big gold belt -> World Title as recognized by WCW International. i thought this was handled reasonably well, and i don't really understand the disdain this gets. I think Barry Windham's run could've been given more merit, but the Flair run is fine, and the Rude reign really elevates it.
    • the video skits. "Lost in Cleveland". "White Castle of Fear". the sting/bulldog vs vader/sid beach one. i thought these were fun. weird. cheesy. different. they were a bit jarring, but they had a lot of charm to them. some more than others, of course. would have liked to see more. They're certainly better than any of the 'Dungeon of Doom' skits.
    • British Bulldog. why was he even here? he showed up, had a main event-adjacent run, and then disappeared. a complete waste of a stint, and honestly left me much more sour on Davey than i had been previously.
    • Hollywood Blondes. definitely a breath of fresh air in the bland and unremarkable tag scene. the deal with Steamboat/Douglas and the masked title switch was just pretty bizarre, but i guess what can you do? the team itself didn't get nearly long enough together. we're talking less than a year!
    • Ron Simmons. we start the year off directly after he lost the world title back to Vader. and from there, he just..... exists? i believe there was an injury involved, but he just doesn't do ANYTHING all year. kind of floats between face and heel, then there's a shitty mentor/mentee angle with Ice Train that sucks (i blame this on Ice Train, who sucks).
    • Disney tapings. look, all of the c-shows are jobber shows. this move didn't effect my viewing whatsoever.
    • Vinnie Vegas. i liked the character and thought it had more legs than what was given. It was also cool to see Big Sky, who i previously only knew as Sabretooth from the first X-Men movie in 2000. 
    • Yoshi Kwan. Charlie Norris. i actually liked the look of Kwan. look, i know it's "yellow peril" racism, but it was certainly a look that set Chris Champion apart. everything else about the gimmick was pretty trash, but i think something that's not done with racist intent but keeping some of the same physical characteristics could work in the right environment. please don't hate me.
      Charlie Norris is a name i had read LONG before i ever saw him. i always assumed it was somebody doing a LEGALLY DISTINCT Chuck Norris character. how wrong i was. Charlie was a lame Native American character. He wasn't particularly good or memorable. It sounds like WCW wanted their own Tatanka, but Norris didn't want to play into stereotypes. Kudos to him, but once they got past the NA theme, he really had little else to offer.
    • Steve Austin vs. Dustin Rhodes. these guys gelled together fantastically. i know they previously feuded over the TV Title, but this definitely felt like a life feud that would see them rise through the ranks and eventually both be multiple WCW World champions, trading the belt back and forth. it seems unfeasible that within 18 months, both men are released from the company. And man, Dustin got done dirty by WWF. seeing "the Natural" probably wouldn't have worked in the Attitude Era, but he (the worker) had a much higher ceiling than Goldust (the character) did. 
    • Why was Starrcade on a Monday? that can't have been good for PPV buys.

    You may have given OSW several ideas for their next story arcs.

  3. 15 hours ago, Dolfan in NYC said:

    Oh man... Have I got some unfortunate news about women's prisons for you... 😕

     

    15 hours ago, Cobra Commander said:

    i'm going off of MSNBC Lockup episodes where women's prisons are loaded with women who could plausibly be driving semitrucks who are in prison because they murdered their husbands

    I will give you this:

    If you're a man with low self-esteem, one trip across the open boulevard of a women's prison will make you feel like a minted million.

    But yeah, even women's jail units are pretty rough.  The prisons ... well, their contraband is decidedly different from men's.  And a lot more women in prison fights go right for disfiguring the face.

    The above is based on my experiences.

    • Like 2
  4. On 11/14/2023 at 11:50 PM, Ramo2653 said:

    I have a friend that's from Puerto Rico and she loves Batista and used to think he was from the island until Guardians of the Galaxy came out. 

    Mid 90s Flair vs. Low Ki on WCWSN or Worldwide would have been amazing. There also would have been one spot that went comically wrong too. Imagine Flair locking in the figure 4 and getting leverage from Woman or Elizabeth on the outside. Or Woman hitting Ki with her heel to give Ric an advantage.

    My obligatory reminder that we were once literally *this*close* to Kevin Nash vs Low Ki for the X Division title.

  5. Oh my god.  Okay.

    Haunted Samurai (1970)

    I'm going to do my best to be as spoiler-free as possible, but I'm also going to write as free-flowing as possible, because there's a lot to wrap my head around.

    The back copy of this release - "the most gory ninja film of its era" - only makes sense if the other ninja films of its era aren't gory at all.  The gore is pretty low key; in fact, apart from the requisite arterial spray from even the smallest nicks (feudal-era Japanese citizens could really have benefitted from some Losartan), the only other notable bit of gore was an arm getting lopped off during a sword battle.  That only makes this film as gory as any random entry in the "Star Wars" franchise.

    This is an absolutely beautifully shot film.  I don't usually nerd out about cinematography and such things, but this film uses wide shots and the margins of frames to some pretty cool extents, even when the subjects are centrally focused.  Emotional scenes are punctuated by slowly blowing blades of grass on the periphery.  Violent battles set in the township that makes up the major locale of the story is dressed with onlookers ogling the fight or fleeing for safety.

    I'm not good with keeping the character names straight, so I shortened them to keep my sanity.  Please bear with me:  Roku, a samurai spy, has abandoned his role in the Shogunate's army after a crisis of conscience and the suicide of his sister.  This brings him to the attention of the Yagyu ninja clan, two ambassadors of which are dedicated to hinting him down.  On Roku's journey, he happens upon a farmer and his children being victimized by robbers.  He guards them in the journey back, and, once he gets to their township, he realizes that, hey, this farming life isn't really that shabby.  He can do some good, and he can hide from assassins.  But he can't hide from the shifty eyes of another samurai in hiding, a fellow townsman who has less than charitable notions for the locals.  Add in scheming politicos, bandits, and a sudden sack of gold, and allegiances shift, blood is spilled, and human drama is played out in front of the watcher with no definitive outcome foreshadowed.  Is Roku destined to die for the villagers?  Will he retire from his bloody life at the side of the elderly farmer's daughter?  What of the jealous farmhand, wanting the daughter's hand for himself?  And, if the opening warning is true, that the Yagyu have their spies EVERYWHERE, who can Roku even turn to?

    There's so much I *want* to tell you about this movie, but to do so would be a serious folly.  The story interweaves in ways that, yeah, seasoned movie fans could pick up on and maybe see coming a good distance away, but the journey is something else.  I will tell you this, though: The scene where a bevy of topless female ninjas set up on Roku to the point of driving him into the sea, where the camera work goes underwater for a good bit of action, was a head scratcher, because it comes and goes in a way that's kind of out of left field, and what it sets up could literally have been set up any number of other ways.  But hey, topless female ninjas FTW yo.

    An aside, but it'll make sense in a bit: Of the Leone Eastwood westerns, my favorite is "For a Few Dollars More."  The camera work, the music, the intricate webbing of character dynamics were always head and shoulders above the other three entries.  And there were many times watching this movie when I was reminded of that film, even though Roku's rival in the town called back more to Eli Wallace than Gian Maria Volonte.

    One complaint though:  The film is in the Japanese language with English subs.  There's no changing this.  And dammit, some of the subtitles are misspelled.  Occasionally a sentence here or there makes no fucking sense, and it's definitely more the fault of the translation than this reader.  But it only stands out glaringly when it pops up, and for me, it was forgotten just as quickly.

    If the ad copy is to be believed, once "Haunted Samurai" is gone, it is gone.  I don't think you will regret getting a copy.  Easily a 4.5 or more of 5.

    • Thanks 1
  6. 10 hours ago, Belgian_Waffle said:

    I like that breakdown of the roster from Mace and Monsoor. Is Rollins generally known as antisocial backstage? He always seemed like a weird annoying dude even before the dumb Jared Leto character but I've never really heard of anyone within the company having issues with him.

    I haven't read their breakdown.  Do they mean antisocial, i.e. the psych meaning, or antisocial, the lay person's "not interested in being socially involved with others" (a/k/a the wrong meaning)?

  7. I always like the "Time is on My Side" promos a little better than "Whole World ..." because you knew that was a crazy mother fucker with an exact plan of what he was going to do, and when, and how much he knew he was going to hurt you a little at a time.

    ... well, shit.  Only to find out that time's really not on anyone's side, after all.

    • Like 2
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