caley

I've always been a little puzzled by AEW's use of Rush. He comes out, looks like a badass. Destroys some guys. Disappears from TV. Comes back, destroys some guys. Disappears. Builds up a bit, loses to someone above his paygrade. Disappears. Comes back, destroys some guys. But he always stays really OVER. He's got that Mark Henry-esque thing of no matter how many times he's been beaten, he comes out and there's a definite murmur in the audience like "This guy is going to kill somebody". I'd like to see him get someone to talk for him (Stokely? Someone else?) that represents him but that he can kind of bully so when his second is talking too much, he basically grabs him, tells him to shut up and yells out the "Get the horns!" catchphrase and give him a nice, real run (Maybe Ricochet's title? I don't remember what it's called). I think he could be doing a lot more meaningful stuff than holding the ROH tag titles. He should be way higher up the card, a threat for the world title and someone who sometimes holds the secondary titles. Also, I really liked everything about that insane four-way tag match. Some moves and routines I'd generally never seen before, Dalton Castle flipping out on commentary. Good stuff.

That Thekla segment last night was masterful. She comes out badmouthing Stat, fumbles a little bit given she's not speaking her native language, morons begin to "What?" everything and she just powers through it, even getting a chant for "Toxic ass", and crowd popping for everything down the stretch. Whoever is producing her stuff (But some of it, like when she repeated "But! But! But!" wile getting into the ring is I think just natural instincts) is really hitting it out of the park. She reminds me a little of early WWE Alexa Bliss (but a better wrestler) where the crowd is a little middling on her, but she's so sure of herself on the mic and as a character that the crowd is constantly won over. On the opposition, whoever is doing Statlander's stuff is doing the reverse. The sunglasses and leather combo and not speaking until she has to stuff is...bad. I enjoyed the crowd popping for Thekla making fun of it. It sorta seems like ever since the sorta heel turn, everything they've tried with her just hasn't worked. Her wrestling is fine, her matches are fine. Her promos are dreadful, her character work is sub-par. It's like someone has it out for her. When she showed up to warn ThunderRosa last week, it was maybe the dorkiest character-work since Zack Ryder as John Cena's cuckolded friend. I think the biggest thing is they seem to play up one thing: Calling her Stat Daddy, the alien/space stuff, the cosplay stuff, the silent sunglasses deal etc. etc. then just drop it after a couple weeks and try something else. I think they just need to stick with one gimmick/character for a while, and give her more of an edge, make her less of a goody-goody.

Aside from finding Kidd's wrestling kinda...dull...I really HATE his entrance as well. The faux-epic drum intro/theme song, the War Ready nickname, and ESPECIALLY the stupid crawling thing he does. It does not work for me on any level. He looks less "Whoa this guy is crazy, better watch out!" and more "This guy eats postage stamps." This entrance, while still retaining the nickname/music, at least works a little better for me.

My (not exactly favourite but more weird variety of guys I'm sort of proud of seeing): Great Muta, Big Show, Christopher Daniels, Rey Mysterio, Juventud Guerrera, Asian Cougar, Brock Lesnar, Chelsea Green, Val Venis (post WWE/pre Christian culture warrior/mid breakdown), Jim Neidhart, Greg Valentine, Vince McMahon, Tank Abbott, Tony Kozina, Black Dragon, Zack Gowen, Tajiri, Eddie Gurrero, Vampiro, Davey Boy Smith Jr, John Cena, The Undertaker, Goldberg, Booker T, and Count Monsterod Von Hugenstein.

Having not read the SRS article, there's also a Chris-Jericho-likes-to-work-the-dirtsheets possibility to this. He talked in his book about when he was coming back to WWE, how he met with Dixie Carter, then used a backchannel or some such to message one of news sites about how he'd seen Chris Jericho talking with Dixie Carter to improve his negotiating position (He also copped to writing to one when he was starting out as a wrestler praising this young wrestler named Chris Jericho he'd just seen to the moon!). So it's entirely possible Jericho has put either his WWE return or his AEW contract freezing out there to either garner sympathy, throw some doubts into where or when he returns, or just mess with people.

I think the Vince love of MLK was genuine in his own addled brain. One of my favourite stories was in one of Jericho's books when they had guest hosts and they booked Al Sharpton to host. And Jericho was a heel at the time, so he thought he'd be heeling on him or something, but instead Vince wrote this GLOWING speech about Sharpton and made Jericho read it out and wouldn't let him change a word. Jericho thought it made no sense because he was a bad guy and Vince was agog at this idea because it was AL SHARPTON! And Vince loved MLK so much that he was so excited to have someone somewhat connected to him that he wrote a segment where MVP and Jericho traded praise over him. (As an aside, reading up on this (I'd pretty much checked out on WWE at this point IIRC), but the segment with him and the Bella Twins sounds way more entertainingly bad!)

I searched "Kelowna" (Where Nitro took place that week): Nada. I seached "Kamloops" (Where I BELIEVE they taped Thunder): Nada. I searched "Thunder": Nothing. I finally searched Juggernaut and scrolled through his matches until I found it! So it wasnt working good for me either.

I haven't seen the show in years, but checking it out on Cagematch, it would appear to be Juggernaut (big hefty dude), Ladies Choice (long-haired guy doing an HBK-esque gimmick), Michelle Starr (dyed blonde-haired guy playing a homosexual gimmick), and Rockford 2000 (I saw this guy wrestle probably 10+ times and all I can remember about him is that he had some Matt Hardy-style pants!).

I watched 'The Ballad of Wallis Island' this week and it's probably my favourite thing I've watched in 2+ years. Tim Key plays a lottery winner who uses his winnings to bring his favourite folk duo to his near-empty island for a private concert. It's really funny, really sweet, has lots of great music and scenery. I would not have guessed that the goofball from 'Taskmaster' and 'Alan Partridge' (And I think he's on the new newspaper iteration of The Office but I haven't really watched it...) would almost make me cry with his performance. I think it's on Prime (at least if you're in Canada) and I genuinely loved it.

Who is the worst actor you have ever seen?! I'm not talking like "Oh that guy from The Room!" or "Adam Sandler makes terrible comedies!" or "I HATE this guy's politics/private life so him!" but genuinely the WORST working actor/actress you've seen. I was thinking about this because I watched a Mamie Van Doren gangster movie and she's, you know, pretty bad. If she's not acting sultry...well she can't really handle much else (She was supposed to get angry in one scene and it was no different from the scenes where she was flirting or being sentimental!). And tonight i watched 'Queen of Space' with Zsa Zsa Gabor and it occurred to me watching it, that it might have been the worst "professional" acting job I've ever seen (Like I've watched a bunch of MST3K/Rifftrax/Drug, Teen, Black exploitation films with people you almost never see again. So, like, Torgo is pretty bad, but I don't think he's really a pro!). It's actually quite stunning: she's a Venus alien woman who has a Hungarian accent despite none of the other Venusians having accents and there are scenes when you genuinely can't tell if she's a on the humans side because it sounds like she's lying but it's just bad acting. Even scenes which require her to walk into frame, she does this weird, slow exaggrated steps or her dresses are so tight she can barely move at all. She has the exact same tone when she's surprised, happy, angry, sad, and victorious. I'm sure I'll remember someone after, but genuinely, tonight, I think she might be the worst professional actor i have ever seen (Or at last performance!).

You know I thought the same thing! That he had passed away about a year or two ago... but I remember it SPECIFICALLY being him, not someone else from the same time period. Isn't that odd?!

Another WWE-ish thing was the introduction of the strap to create the gimmick match. All of a sudden, Thekla randomly whipped Statlander with the strap on Saturday so that Statlander could challenge her to a strap match. It's like in WWE when someone who never uses tables suddenly uses one because it's the time of year for the TLC PPV. You needed at least a month or so of Thelka and SoS tying people up and whipping them with belts before the Stat says "I'm gonna give you a taste of your own medicine". The introduction of the strap was so obvious and silly.

I think Thekla is a heckuva fun character that AEW hasn't quite a handle on, yet; that said I don't think this title change really hit right. The ending wasn't impactful enough that the crowd didn't really react because there was no way they figured that was ending it. I would actually love a double-turn where Hayter/Windsor end up aligning with Thekla as a mean group of brawling...er...birds, and Julia and Blue become more spooky, plucky underdog faces. Thekla as a mean, fearless champ who's back-up bail her out when she's in over her head would be a lot of fun, plus you could eventually turn Hayter against her after some time.

Watched a solid movie with a terrible ending impacted by the code THE STRANGE AFFAIR OF UNCLE HARRY: In which George Sanders (I love George Sanders!) plays a lifelong bachelor who looks after his two sisters (one sickly, the other damaged by the death of her husband) and suddenly falls in love. When he tries to start a life with his wife, his sickly sister gets sicker, makes it difficult to find a new home, and ultimately tries to stop his wedding. Ultimately, he has to choose between his sister and his wife. Watched a solid movie undone by a DREADFUL ending (not caused by the code) THE CAPTIVE CITY: John Forsythe is a smalltown newspaperman who gets a tip that the local police force has been corrupted, mostly ignores it, then the man who tipped him off ends up dead. As he investigates it, he discovers the presence of mafia members helping to run local bookie joints but no one wants him to pursue it. The police turn on him, local businessmen pull their advertising, and even his partner in the paper begins to doubt the necessity of his pursuits. As he begins to be followed and the threats get bigger and bigger and the tension builds... And then I watched THE BIKERIDERS which was just kind of awesome all the way through about the rise of an American motorcycle gang. Jodi Comer turned in one of my favourite performances of the last so many years as a sweet midwestern girl who falls in with one of the bikers. She is this little sprite of a woman with this polite midwestern accent but has this incredible strength and toughness about her. There's nothing better than her giving the other bikers shit about parking on the lawn in her acceent. Anyways, Tom Hardy turns in one of those great Tom Hardy voice/accent combinations that are basically unlike any actual voice/accent combinations but he's so great and strangely intense as the head of the gang, Austin Butler is fine as the brooding boyfriend of Comer. And there's lots of great smaller performances (Michael Shannon, Emory Cohen, Norman Reedus). Just great.

Twitter vs Blusky is a bit like Lego vs Mega Blocks, if Lego were inherently racist. They both do kind of the same thing, but few people actually have the latter and the pieces don't quite go together as easy as the racist ones, so it's just easier to stick with what you know.

I was watching their match where Desmond Xavier (or whichever name he's using now) dives over his opponents and when they go to hit them he does a stop motion with his hands then points, and his opponents stop fighting him to turn and wait for the other guy to do a dive onto them and I went "Oh yeah, I kinda hate the Rascalz!" I had forgotten as it's been so long since I've seen them!"

Oh, and I LOVED the Ciampa debut but, to be fair, I wasn't really watching NXT during the Ciampa-Gargano feud and I've always felt sorry for Ciampa and his horrible stroke of luck with injuries every time WWE seemed to get behind him. I think he's a fun character as a heel, less so as a face (But I think it's going to be hard to make him a heel after that reaction, even as a foil for Briscoe!).

He is one of those guys I just find impossible to cheer for as a face (With Sammy Guevara, The Miz, Seth Rollins)...something about his face, his hair, the playing card in the mouth, I just want to see him get beaten up. In the ring I have no real specific problems with him or his moveset, but I feel the entire package would work better if he was arrogantly posing as a heel, rather than rather arrogantly posing as a face. Another weird part was when FTR were double-teaming Doyle and going for the superplex, Mark Davis just went and sat down by the ropes inside the ring and watched his teammate get doubled-teamed for a while before he finally stood up and clotheslined someone on cue.

Watched Payback: I was watching this and trying to figure out if it was a weird connection or a stylistic choice because it looked sorta washed-out (The latter, it turns out) and accidentally read the part about Mel Gibson taking control of the edit and shooting an entirely new ending and maybe it's me reading this and knowing ahead, but the back third of the movie kinda suffered for it. For the first half with him as Parker, er Porter, (In the books he's Parker but they changed it to Porter for the movie), and his single-minded pursuit of revenge is endlessly entertaining. But in the back stretch, he goes from wronged anti-hero to superhero. He's stopping hails of bullets with a snitch's body, he's dodging machine gun fire and sliding under cars etc. etc. It was all right, but I wasn't as good as it could have been. Cry of the City: This was pretty neat with Victor Mature (I LIKE Victor Mature! He's got this sort of sensitive tough guy schtick that just resonates with me for some reason!) as a cop trying to put away a longtime family friend (Richard Conte) who killed another cop. There's some great smaller roles in here and the like. But the whole thing was kinda thrown off by TCM's Eddie Muller introduction where he explained that Debra Paget was 14 (!!!) at the time of filming as the love interest of Conte. Apparently the studio lied and said she was 18. So, Paget is fine in the role, but it's hard to watch any of her scenes with Conte without being a little bit skeeved out. Hoodlum: I was interested in this because I'd heard of Bumpy Johnson but never really saw any movies about him (save the opening of 'American Gangster' and he doesn't really last very long in that one) and after reading up on it, I'm still hoping to one day see a movie about him. Anyways, I watched it and it seemed...amateurish? Laurence Fishburne is fine in the lead and Andy Garcia's a good Lucky Luciano, while Chi McBride pretty much steals every scene he's in. But a lot of the cast is wooden and there are so many sub-par Carribean accents and some really stage-y artificial scenes. It was just kinda long and overwrought and then you read about it and how many characters and sequences are just...made up? Freebie and the Bean: You know, once a time I might have LOVED this movie but watching it now, I HATED it. James Caan and Alan Arkin are two longterm partnered cops who argue and needle each other in their relentless pursuit of justice. But there were so many sequences in here that - maybe in light of current events/climate or maybe not- were just so mind bendingly stupid and kinda hateful and awful. So F&B find evidence on a drug kingpin they've been after, but can't press charges against him until the ensuing Monday; so they have to protect said kingpin until then. This leads to "wacky" hijinks like them brutalizing a possible witness (Including Caan taking his nude girlfriend (?) into the bedroom and handcuffing her in a "sexy" scene), pursuing a suspect in a high-speed chase that includes them running down members of a marching band during a parade and crashing their car through a third-story apartment bedroom, as well as them finding as assassin in a bathroom stall and...well...murdering him while he's on the toilet in a hail of gunfire and, presumably, unarmed. There's also a subplot about Arkin's wife cheating on him that's also handled in a similarly heavy-handed way. So, yeah, I DETESTED this. I was heartened to read that Arkin did, too. And that's all without getting into the Double Dragon: This was a Rifftax version which is thankful cuz man is this bad. I never understood why the 90s had so many movie adaptations of video games where they dumped almost everything that made the game popular in order to make it less authentic. I'd somehow never seen this and am absolutely mystified by it. Apparently the director figured that since the main characters were young people on an adventure, he had to make it kid-friendly but then throws in scenes like their friend being blown up in an exploding building or a recurring joke about characters almost saying 'Shit'. Couple that with the repeated in-jokes about actors in the film that NO kid in the mid-nineties would ever get (A villain fighting Alyssa Milano goes "Who's the boss now?" and later the same villain quips "I generally send my victims to the hospital" about an actor who appeared on 'General Hospital) and making Abobo into some sort of mutant Testicle Monster (I think that's what the Rifftrax guys called him) and it's completely insane. The Rifftrax version cut this thing down to like 75-80 minutes and it still somehow feels 3 hours long!

This is so much better than watching a Royal Rumble match.

From their wiki "WWF management then placed them in a tag team called The Hell's Henchmen managed by The Jackyl.[6][7] Both men made their first appearance on TV as a team on the November 15, 1998, episode of Sunday Night Heat attacking 8-Ball, Skull and Paul Ellering as the D.O.A. came down to the ring for a match. The following week on Sunday Night Heat, The Jackyl came down to the ring as the duo interrupted a match and proclaimed Bradshaw and Faarooq to be his Acolytes."

This has crossed my mind numerous times. Because his pairing with Heyman was just him constantly snapping at Heyman. In AEW he seemed to ignore what story the other announcers were trying to get across to get his own annoyances broadcast. But even his commentary with Lawler could get rather heated with him attacking Lawler (rightfully!) for his banter, but then shortly thereafter they were talking about what great friends they were (Outside of WWE TV) of course. So I've wondered if JR is just kind cranky, or a surprisingly good actor. It's probably both, really. (I'm going to number these because i have NO idea how the quote function works on here sometimes and am too dumb to figure it out!) 01. Oh once Kamala hit the ring the whole "This is creepy" vibe turned to "Stop slapping your belly, c'mon! It's the 1990s, surely someone can communicate to this guy that you can't pin someone who's upside down!" Though to be fair on the "friend's uncle Kamala" point, I think there were approximately four black people in my town back then. 02. Does anyone remember how long they referred to him as Chris Chavis? I can remember one of the announces talking about him using his name which REALLY confused 11-12 year old me because I got the name Chris Chavis somehow confused with Mark David Chapman whom I was slightly aware of (Both parents being Beatles fans) and wondering where THIS stroryline would go. As an aside Tatanka has one of the more random pre-wrestling backgrounds on Wikipedia: "He competed in his first bodybuilding contest, Mr. Virginia Beach, placing second. He won many competitions during his time in bodybuilding, but decided against competing on the national level and possibly turning pro. From 1985 to 1990 he worked for Bally's Health and Tennis Corporation, becoming a divisional manager. Chavis went to the open try outs during the 1987 NFL player strike for the Miami Dolphins and made the cut, but he turned it down due to the lucrative money he was already making selling memberships at Bally's.[7] In 1989, Chavis left Bally's to pursue an accounting career." He should've been brought in as Money Inc's mistreated accountant! 03. He is one of my LEAST favourite wrestlers ever! Boring in the ring. Mechanical on the mic. As a Canadian, it was hysterical when WCW brought him and had him go bcak to his legal name. So after years of only knowing him as Kona Crush, Crush, even jailbird Crush...he suddenly shows up and shares the name of Bryan 'Summer of 69' Adams. In Canada, we have Canadian content rule for airplay on the radio. Now it is supposed to protect Canadian content but it was just a flat requirement of so many songs per hour on the radio being Canadian, so instead of motivating radio stations to play a broad range of Canadian music, it just meant that stations would endlessly play the music of whoever was popular in the States and happened to be popular endlessly on the radio. So if you turned on the radio in the early 90s, you would be guaranteed a Bryan Adams song withing 10-20 minutes (See also: Celine Dion, Shania Twain, Barenaked Ladies etc. etc.). So I can't hear the name Bryan Adams and not imagine his big muscular dude coming to the ring to the strains of 'Run to You' or 'Everything I Do I Do It For You' and chuckle to myself. 04. Agreed! I don't know the answer to this, but my favourite Fonzie story is how when Chris Jericho first got to ECW he overheard people talking about Alfonso and somehow decided that THAT must be Taz's name, so when he introduced himselt to Taz he kept calling him Alfonso and Taz, whom apparently was not happy about Alfonso's presence in the first place, got really mad. Not that I think about, I feel like Jericho took some especially nasty suplexes in his debut...

I was really excited for 'The Men Who Stare At Goats' with its trailer and cast. And I liked some of it, (Like the remote viewing scenes set to 'More Than A Feling') but it was much sillier than its source material. The book is actually quite fascinating, tackling the psychic warfare stuff, but also delving into the MK-Ultra and the Abu Gharib stuff. It's way darker in tone. It probably would've worked better as a semi-serious doc, maybe with some reenactments.

I'm just a few minutes into the show, but in Canada there was a very hilarious commercial break. What was supposed to be a picture-in-picture ad break, instead became fullscreen footage of Samoa Joe beating on Speedball while a Bell ad (One of the two big TV providers in Canada) covered the lower quarter of the screen. Now this in and of itself isn't funny, of course, but Bell likes to do an initiative this time of year for mental health (Sounds good, but there's some conjecture about how much of this is Bell using mental health to promote their brand as well as how many folks they have let go in recent years but all that's a conversation for another day!) and this year they've been doing ads serving as a mental health break. So this big blue symbol comes up and a breathy ASMR voice goes "Bell is giving you a mental health break, so inhale...hold...exhale" and the whole time this relaxation/mental health break is going on, Samoa Joe is silently kicking the shit out of Speedball in the background!