caley

I'm curious how many people have gone back to watch Hogan-Andre over the years. I saw it when I was 10/11-ish, thought it was kind of boring (I wasn't a big Hogan guy, except for his theme which is/was amazing) and the idea of watching 23+ minutes of Hogan-Andre now sounds like torture to me (That's the listed time when I look it up on YT). I understand its importance, I enjoy the big powerslam moment but thinking about trying to watch it again makes me think I'd get 30 seconds in before looking up something on my phone. By the way, I saw a bit of the Hogan-Andre Rivals show on A&E the other night and I enjoyed where Hogan said he thought it was so important to sell the emotion of the moment when Andre aligned with Heenan that he wanted to cry a single tear during the segment. So he put Vick's on his finger and as Andre tore off his shirt he puts his finger by his eye to try to coax a tear, but Andre just shakes the shit out of him as he tears off Hogan's shirt that Hogan couldn't get his finger close enough to his eye, worried about poking himself, that he wasn't able to pull it off. He also said that between the blood on his chest and the moment itself, the tear wasn't really needed anyways.

You know who I've kinda come around on...Speedball! I thought he was all right in TNA but thought the martial arts schtick was kinda lame when he got to AEW. But he's kinda won me over on that front, but the thing I notice about him: that guy genuinely LOVES being a pro wrestler. Sometimes coming to the ring, he'll look up at the crowd and just break into a grin. He smiles after grueling matches, he celebrates after wins like he's genuinely won something. He just seems like a guy who is thoroughly enjoying almost every minute of his time. It's infectious.

I think Chono was largely a "vibes" guy. Like he looked so cool with his sunglasses and trenchcoats and cigars and he was fairly big (or maybe he wasn't...but he seemed tall). And the Yakuza Kick looked cool when he did it. So I always have fond feelings of him but can't point to a single match where I think he was awesome. He's like Japanese Diesel: looks impressive, seems like a badass but then the match starts.

My favourite recurring trope in this feud is Kenny Omega saying "The god of pro wrestling, this is not something I called myself..." but in the preceding video package they clearly show Kenny from a few years back going "I am the god of pro wrestling." Also, Kenny's line about how he can't "Tell a story in the ring using just physical action" ventured very deep into "I am a better actor in this fake sport than you, Kenneth!" territory. "You know what I'm gonna do, take you out for a nice seafood dinner!" I definitely thought Thekla was veering into Ron Burgundy territory before the abrupt turn into onstage finger-breaking. Lexi looked pretty scared, too. I thought Don painted those, himself?! *** -United Empire looked cool showing up in suits. Henare also looked someone who had never seen a suit before, never mind looking comfortable in one. I think the Italian guy (I can't remember his name) probably had the biggest break-out of any of them. -Willow-Aminata was pretty good. -Christian/Edge-FTR was pretty stupid. I'm supposed to be sympathetic to the guy who said he had banged both the other guys' moms?! My favourite part was when they were "breaking" Christian's arm and they showed Edge laying on the floor and a ringside fan clearly, loudly said "Get uppppp!" with all the sympathy of an overtired father trying to get his toddler to stop laying on the floor of a Wal-Mart pretending to cry because he won't buy them a new Paw Patrol dinosaur vehicle. -I think Ciampa should win the title because you can write the easiest story around it: play into his thing about obssessing over the title and how he refuses to lose it. Instead of open challenges, he tries to avoid defences as much as possible, making guys win eliminators before he'll put the title up, lots of cheating to win, even walk-outs (countouts) and DQs to get out of losing the title. He keeps it through sheer meanness and cheating when all else fails. Holds it for a couple months and just as he gets up closed to Fletcher's record (You might have to fudge the numbers/defences a bit), Fletcher comes back to take it off him. You could even do a double-turn where Callis sides with Ciampa because he's got more of a killer instinct than the newly-face Fletcher, if you wish.

But what's so funny about him is Rewatching this recently I genuinely thought Eugene Levi should have gotten an Academy Award nomination. I think the biggest problems I had with this one is a) at this point they tried to make room for all the Guest stock actors and there was just too many and none of them had the depth of character of his previous movies and b) the movie they're making within the movie is too terrible and too intentionally bad to ever be believable. *** This week I watched Hot Pursuit: All right, I will concede that I watched this because Sofia Vergara and Reese Witherspoon are two pretty ladies...but I thought maybe it would have some 'Bridesmaids'-esque charm. It did not. I got to the end of the movie and thought "Well, that one scene was kinda funny..." then I tried to remember what the scene was and remembered that there was no such scene. I think I genuinely did not laugh once. There's also something really stupid about Vergara chastisizing Witherspoon with "You don't think the brown girl can read!" and I was wondering what character she was talking about only to realize she was talking about herself, despite and Witherspoon being pretty much the same level of tanned. Also characters repeatedly making jokes about Reese Witherspoon looking like a little boy made me think they had another actress lined up, switched to Witherspoon and just stuck with the "Well if we tell people she's ugly they'll just believe it regardless of whether it's true" script. The Mirror Crack'd: Early 1980s Miss Marple reboot is FULL of stars (Angela Lansbury as Marple, Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis, Kim Novak) aaaaand not very good. Taylor plays a failing movie star whose drinks ends up poisoning a woman at a party and Marple sort of investigates it (Her nephew is the investigator but she stays home and talks about it with him). It's not particularly well-acted, Taylor, in particular, plays some scenes as if she's acting within the scene and playing it up but then it turns out, isn't. I guessed the killer, but not the motive. It's just sorta thoroughly mediocre. Order of Death: I might be crazy, but I LOVED this. Harvey Keitel plays a really bad cop who starts to be followed by a strange young man (John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten) who confesses to being the copkiller they're investigating. And Keitel arrests him and that's it. No, of course not. Keitel, worried that this guy is going to expose all his crooked dealings, takes him prisoner, tortures him, while investigating to figure out who he is, and if he possibly could be the cop killer. Keitel plays his great conflicted drunken bad cop character to a t, while Lydon is actually really entertaining as he's the complete physical antithesis of Keitel's character who bullies and manhandles him, while he psychologically torments Keitel. Some of the reviews I saw were pretty negative but I thought it was completely engrossing. Lake Placid: I also kinda liked this. It's stupid. It's weeeeeeeeeird. But I can't say I wasn't entertained. Bridget Fonda is a paleontologist who gets sent to a small Maine town possibly being menaced by a giant crocodile. All right, I'm going to tell you: it is definitely a giant crocodile. Bill Pullman is a Fish and Wildlife officer, Brendan Gleeson (trying his darndest not to sound Irish but not quite sounding American either) is a sheriff, and Oliver Platt is a billionaire crocodile fan who just shows up and they investigate the possibility of this croc together. The film is so odd because Fonda is completely unlikeable and irritating for the first half or so, neither Pullman nor Gleeson are especially sympathetic and Platt is irritating beyond all get-out and they spend the bulk of the money fighting and making fun of each other, in between crocodile attacks. People get their heads bit off, then they're standing around cracking jokes a minute later. Betty White also turns up as a resident who may know about the croc than she's been letting on. Fonda repeatedly falls out of vehicles to almost get eaten. And the crocodile remarkably looks pretty good. There's some neat jump scares. Roger Ebert panned this one because he said that the tone is all wrong but, to me, that made it kinda memorable. Like they kinda knew they were making a movie about a giant crocodile menacing a small lake and though "Hey, let's not take this too seriously." Plus, I REALLY love Brendan Gleeson and he's endlessly entertaining in this one.

Someone posted on here a while back that they noticed a growing corner of wrestling discussion that seemed to believe the pro wrestling was real ("Stone Cold would've kicked this guy's ass!") which I also noticed, but now even more recently I've noticed a growing trend of "wrestling fan" who understands how wrestling works but also seems to think everything is some sort of shoot. Like after the whole McAfee turn, I saw more than one tweet asserting that "Cody has gone off-script!", "Cody is trashing the angle and standing up for us fans!" etc. And it's...no?! Like if Cody gets the microphone and starts trashing WWE off-script, they turn the microphone off. They don't stay with it and promote it on their socials. Like every single thing is a worked shoot, or just a shoot. "You can tell how much they hate each other!" It's really odd. I genuinely think if this forum goes down, I probably just drift away from wrestling, cuz there's nowhere else worthwhile.

Entertaining show but somehow the only thing that stuck with me was the security guys coming into the ring and, seemingly forgetting they were playing security guards, started throwing worked punches at Edge and Christian and it was so hilariously lame and simultaneously just wrong that it really cracked me up. Even one of the announcers kinda chuckled and pointed out they were attacking them instead of, whatever it is that wrestling security guards do.

-Also, that opening Kenny-MJF was promo was pretty hilarious: "Here's the bombshell you're not telling everyone..." Oh, I wonder if Kenny is retiring, maybe he's told his family this is hast last year! "Your intestine is a ticking time bomb." Oh, okay that's not really a bombshell. "Yeah, well I talked to your doctor..." Oh, is MJF battling through an injury too?! "and you have no dick" [well more or less!] Ah! -I enjoyed the 6-man. Ricochet was lots of fun in that. -I understand the story and the idea, but I don't really buy Will Ospreay as blood feud killer guy. Neither his personality nor his moveset really suit angry killer. -It was weird how guys who had nothing to do with Darby or the Callis Family came out to help Darby against the latter, but NO one came to help Ospreay from nearly getting crippled by the Death Riders. Even guys he teamed with! -Thekla is so much fun. I liked when she walked around the ring going "Huh! Huh! Huh!" like Mankind then yelling "Kiss my toxic ass" like Mankind, thankfully, never ever did. -I miss Tazz

I thought the Learning Tree gimmick with Jericho as a clueless vet taking time away from the kids while "mentoring" young wrestlers had some legs to it, but he/AEW played it up all wrong. Jericho was too knowing in the role ("Gotta get my spots in, right?" [chuckles]) when he would've been much funnier using Gen-Z slang wrong ("I'm gonna rizz Kenny Omega up!" "Uh, boss I don't think that's what you mean to say!"), wearing old-style tights and getting made fun of for it, give him a 20-something girlfriend, have him get blown up in a Iron Man match. Then you could have his students turn on him, bring him back later a surprise face to put his students takeover down. But I don't think he wanted to look out of touch or dorky enough. I guess he could just "play the hits" and get cheered for doing his old Jericho routine but I'm not sure how long AEW fans will put up with it. Then again, some fans were still cheering MJF last night so wrestling fans ARE also very stupid.

Moxley's promo seemed to imply they were done, too. He said something like 'Private Party's not doing so good; we won't be seeing them for a while" and I wondered if maybe this was the time PP "owed" AEW and they were leaving. It was weird.

I watched The Bellboy with Jerry Lewis and can say, with all sincerity, that I unabashedly LOVED it. The story, as TCM explains it, is that the studio wanted a Jerry Lewis comedy for the summer and he didn't want to rush 'Cinderfella', so instead in a matter of weeks, he came up with this film which he wrote (such as it were!), produced, starred in and directed in order to get it out for the summer of 1960. Now I'm not the biggest Lewis fan but something about this plotless silly little flick scratched me right where I itch! Lewis plays a mostly-mute bellhop and gets into assorted shenanigans as a bellhop at an exclusive hotel. The movie is quite literally plotless, there's even a short introduction where they explain it as such. Sometimes a segment is as minute as the bellboy being unable to carry a suitcase, sometimes he's flying an airplane, you generally never know where it's going to go next. And the great thing is all the vignettes are really short, so if you're annoyed with one, you don't have to stick it out very long before he's on to some other such madness. I genuinely, genuinely enjoyed the heck out of it.

Do you mean THIS?!

It's one of those MST3K/Rifftrax where it's kinda awkward cuz they can make fun of things but can't really mock the plot/storyline. It's kinda the same as the Rifftrax of 'It's A Wonderful Life' cuz they poke fun at a couple things but you can tell they all LOVE the movie. Like in 'Hamlet' you can make fun of the acting, the performances but you can't be like "What a dumb plot twist!"

I actually recall liking Shaft in Africa but it was the least of the Shaft movies. To be fair, I'm not the best judge, score aside, I actually liked Shaft's Big Score better than Shaft!

Also, since I don't ONLY watch bad movies, I also watched 'Shield For Murder' which is a solid little film noir. Edmund O'Brien plays a crooked cop who bumps off a bookie's runner, steals his cash, then tries to stay one step ahead of his fellow cops, including the young cop he mentored. Best watched on the TCM Noir Alley broadcast because Eddie Muller will go into great detail about how many actors from this film ended up in significant long-running TV shows (A very young, very pretty, very blonde (!) Morticia Adams for instance...). The funniest one was the police captain, as I just saw him last week in the extraordinarily poor 'The Girl in Lovers Lane' (But at least I watched the MST3K version) and I thought he was kinda better than his supporting cast and wondered if he ever got into anything good.

But, can you/will you be able to watch 'Ernest Goes to Africa'? That's been a step too far for even me up to this point.

I tried to watch 'Ernest in the Army' this week (Hey, I like 'Ernest Saves Christmas' and 'Ernest Scared Stupid' enough to watch them semi-annually around their respective holidays!) and thought "Maybe it's stupid but entertaining enough..." I...I didn't make it. The movie is SO bad. The above two (I haven't seen Ernest Goes to Jail or Ernest Goes to Camp recently enough to properly rate them but they were amazing when I was like 8!) are stupid and silly, but they're tame enough that you can watch them with kids (Well 'Stupid' is maybe a little scary). So, Ernest in the Army is in that same vein, but mines a LOT of humor out of parodying...military spending and publicity-hungry generals which is a real weird track to take for a kids film. Anyways,the overt anti-Arabian racism is actually rather quaint as it's post Gulf Storm racism but pre-9/11! So, Ernest wants to drive the big vehicles in the military and his friend urges him to join the reserves so he can drive the weekend and they don't have to go into battle and just party and drink beer (AGAIN a weird thing for what is, ostensibly, a kids film; I almost think they were trying push past family friendly and go for the audiences that weren't QUITE old enough to go see Adam Sandler movies). Ernest does. A middle-Eastern dictator name Toofootti (Perhaps a joke on Tofutti ice cream substitute...perhaps a complete coincidence) invades a made-up country and they decide to send Ernest's reserves to war. Some UN general hates him, he's in love with some local newswoman who ends up reporting on the war (A nice thing about Christmas and Stupid is that one NEVER has to think about Ernest's love live...unfortunately they don't stick to that formula here). I laughed at Ernest trying to walk through the desert with a canteen of chocolate milk. I smiled at Ernest getting electrocuted by an electric fence. I looked at the clock and saw there was 25 minutes left and I...could not do it.

You know if you had told me watching 2018 ROH that one of them would have a world title runs and be a steady upper-card wrestler for WWE, it probably would have taken me a long time to get to Punishment Martinez. I thought he had a good look and potential, but not much more than that. Good for him, though!

I didn't know about this, Thanks! I should know better than to leave the chat on...but I did and it greatly annoyed me. There was a Raw dark match between Erin O'Grady (Crash Holly) and Vic Grimes (with long hair!), I know I was into wrestling in that period so it wasn't completely something I didn't know about, but the chat going on is all "Who are these guys?" "Guys wrestling on the weekend to pay the bills! LOL", "LOL so true!", "Thats lowkey", "It's Nunzio", "Yeah that's Nunzio." Okay, I know Crash Holly's not the MOST recognizable wrestler in the world (pre dyed hair) but he looks NOTHING like either Nunzio or, epspecially, Loki. I don't have a problem with "Who are these guys?" "I don't know, before my time." That's perfectly valid! But don't ANSWER if you don't KNOW! Hahaha, sorry for ranting but that's one of those modern internet things that drive me bananas. If you don't know something, say "I don't know" or just, you know, shut up!

That Darby-Kidd match was hilarious. Darby trying to drive into Gabe with his crapmobile. The ether and locking him in the trunk to drive into a hill about 20 feet away was hysterical. It was just missing Darby rolling out of the car and exclaiming "It jumped out right in front of me!" Gabe Kidd having to play dead for an interminable length of time, complete with Darby not quite fascinating the straightjacket on Kidd so Kidd had to pretend like he couldn't take it off for the rest of the match (Knowing what we know of Kidd...he might have struggled with the mechanics of a t-shirt so maybe it wasn't that far-fetched). I also greatly enjoyed Kidd saying something like "Making good memories" as if he was a Batman villain trying to show how crazy he was. Also the "Pushing Up Daisies" thing on the inside of the coffin was so silly, but even funnier when he turned the coffin around late in the match and some guy in the crowd reads it outloud at an extraordinary volume: "PUSHING UP DAISIES!" Also, why did the cameras keep focusing on that one knothole in the coffin? They zoomed in on it 2-3 times, were we supposed to see something, was Gabe supposed to stick something through. It was weird. Mina-Marina was all right. The NHB stip seemed to only be there to give Mina any chance of winning. Enjoyed Maring throwing her socks at the announcers. Liked Davis-Speedball. The Jurassic Bus thing was weird. Like Jungle Boy carrying the knife is supposed to make the goofy Jungle Boy moniker more menacing, but then they make a vignette where he feeds squirrels and makes his one-armed friend drive his bus?! Also the fact that they left the cameras on Perry and the Bucks an extra 3-4 seconds too long while they stood there looking...serious (?!) gave it a Werner Herzog-esque awkwardness to the proceedings. I think my biggest beef with AEW storytelling is that guys feud, try to get the other fired/murdered and then turn and bury all that in the past. Like Perry and the Bucks hated each other, were trying to ruin each others careers, then all of a sudden "Two of my oldest friends in the business!" Moxley is cruel, mean and trying to destroy this company, then he's on commentary and Tony is cracking jokes with him. He tries to repeatedly kill Darby Allin but he wins a few matches in that tournament, and he's back to being cheered. Now Ospreay's back, and you're supposed to boo him again. I know it's wrestling, but i'd just like some consitency and not guys bouncing back and forth from blood feuds to alliances.

I wonder if this has anything to do with stupid Logan Paul's stupid feud against stupid football players. Though it did have that one great moment when Le'veon Bell went on a multi-tweet mental breakdown how every football player would throttle every pro wrestler ever and said how any football player would "throttle" Stone Cold Steve Austin to which someone replied "Well he's sixty years old now". But even better was as he went on this endless tirade, Bell talked about how he would "throttle" Seth Rogen (First response: "Uh I think you mean Seth Rollins.").

Is Moose's back genuinely injured? Because as a guy who hurt his back about a month back (Sciatica is the worst!), there were a couple moves (a big boot and a pump kick IIRC) where Moose could/would not his get his leg up the way one normally does. Then, at another point, he dropped his chair (or maybe some other weapon) on the ground and looked at it, annoyed, and you could see him seriously contemplating if it was worth picking up before gingerly leaning over and grabbing it. And I recognized that exact pattern from dropping the remote control on the ground and wondering if I could just leave the TV on whatever it was on, rather than bend over to pick up the remote. But then a few minutes later, he's getting powerbombed on the bottom of a stood-up trashcan! So is he really good at selling, or is he just gutting out an injury?

I say this as someone with a staunch record of heterosexuality, but is it just me, or is that David Finlay one HANDSOME man?! The group needs a little work, Finlay and Connors come across kinda same-y, Kidd comes across kind of odd not so much dangerous, none of them are really projecting a star-level personality, and the name sucks. I get that they wanted to drop/de-emphasize the "War" word (Seeing as the US is in one!) but they should've used the opportunity to finetune the whole name until something fit a little better and was less generic/silly as The Dogs (Unless they start acting like dogs in which case I would be all-in!). I think the biggest problem is they're all kind of serious, dangerous wrestler and need someone to break that up a tad. You know who would totally change the narrative/impression of that team?! Juice Robinson! Juice starting trouble before being saved by his serious buddies would probably be a better use of him than him occasionally teaming with one of the Gunns while everyone else is on the IR.

I spent way too much time last night thinking that the Death Riders needed a sort of apprentice/young boy/low man on the totem pole so that Yuta doesn't always have to take the losses and trying to connect a wrestler to the group that I ended up with an endless loop of Danny Garcia's Death Rider theme stuck in my head along with a headache. I actually think (with the exception of Pac), that all the Death Rider themes are really excellent. Also, I never did match a young wrestler to the group.