caley

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!

That probably should go down as one of the craziest wrestling stories in history. They debut amongst much fanfare: "A true rival to WWE with a new PPV business model!" before sort of settling into a #2 spot that's a bit WCW (The X-Division was kind of like the cruisers with old guys meandering around the main event) and a little bit ECW (It's a little person masturbating in a trash can!). And then they occasionally make their way into the wrestling mainstream (X-Division is exciting and new! We're treating women like actual wrestlers and not eye candy! We're bringing in Angle! We're bringing in Hogan) and every time they seem to surge and get new eyes on the show they follow it up with some new manner of self-sabotage and the new viewers dump it. And they're almost NEVER anyone's favourite company. There's rarely any sense of WWE vs TNA tribalism because there's just never enough TNA fans for them to be taken really seriously. And the company's been DEAD so many times and they always make it out in the end. I mean, look at that debut on AMC. They probably get the most eyes on them in years with that debut on AMC and they basically book it as a regular TNA episode, no real surprises or debuts to keep people watching. And they've been around longer than ECW and WCW...and what is their legacy? It's the most bizarre story!

Sometimes people muse on what Kurt Cobain would be doing had he killed himself that time and my basic reply to that is "He wouldn't have, though. He'd overdosed a couple of times, I think he was just never going to live a full life one way or the other". And that's what I tend to think of with ECW, if their roster had been stronger, if they'd had a network to support them, if RVD hadn't got hurt, if they'd been around during the indy wrestling bloom...I think no matter what, that company was going down. You look at their TV deal, they were on the air barely over a year and shortly into it, Paul E was already programming TNN as his lead heel faction. I think no matter where they went and who they had, Heyman was always going to fight with the network over airtime, advertising, money and especially content. I think he could've gotten a sweetheart deal with a major network for lots of money and he still would have found a way to torpedo it over something the network asked him to tone down or refused to air. I think ECW, at least as Heyman envisioned it, was always something that was destined to only really exist in the 90s. I watched the movie Freeway 2 late last year, and as terrible as it is, there's something almost QUAINT about how 90s it is: edgy "humor", faux lesbianism, and cookie-cutter alternative rock songs. In that sense, it reminds me a lot of ECW something just perfect for one small era that you can't really transplant anywhere else. It was so "itself" that it can't function outside that one small period of time.

I never got to see ECW until it hit TNN. I'd read enough about Taz to be excited about him and in the first episode on TNN, they had him squashing Rhyno which included a half-nelson suplex through a table that honestly looked like he had murdered him. Then Taz gave one of his intense promos and the "Beat me if you can, survive if I let you" catch-phrase and I was soooo looking forward to seeing him every week. So imagine my surprise when some three weeks later, ECW on TNN comes on and Taz has lost his title to a wrestler with one of the worst names I had ever heard: Mike Awesome. It was a step-down from Justin Credible (one of my favourite things about his name being as "clever" as it is, is that how often you'd see it in print or online, even in Beyond the Mat IIRC, as Justin Incredible!), might as well call him Steve Terrific or Gene Gnarly! And then ECW just had him WRECK dudes and I was hooked. Towards the end of the year, I started looking up wrestling online and remember being so bummed when I read that he was possibly on the outs with ECW because of how perfect he was as ECW champ. That said, the last time I went back and watched Awesome-Tanaka (Any of them really), I winced and cringed left and right: "There's a concussion!", "There's another!", "Oh god, how did he survive that?!"

Oh, it's so much more than that! In addition to becoming an onscreen character, bizarre hirings and firings, moving TNA outside of their TNA Asylum area, etc. etc. but most the most notorious was her reliance on Vince Russo which culminated in the amazing moment where supposedly SpikeTV had told her to ditch Vince Russo, she insisted he was not under contract, while he was NOT working for them, Vince Russo emailed creative plans to wrestling journalist Mike Johnson instead of Mike Tenay, Johnson posted it to his site, revealing Russo was under contract the whole time (Spike later claimed that Russo had nothing to do with TNA leaving Spike, and that Russo was overstating their importance or some such nonsense) but it was one of the most baffling moments in a fed full of them.

Chelsea seems like a great person I'm sure I told the story on here, but pre-Hot Mess TNA Chelsea (She had been in TNA at this point, but just as a random un-pushed knockout) wrestled at a little show in my hometown and me, my brother and brother-in-law went to the show (I want to say Ted DiBiase or Jimmy Hart or someone was there; I mean Val Venis was there, too, but nobody was going to see him and that was pre-truther Valbowski). Chelsea had her match, it was perfectly fine. But at the intermission, there was an endless line of creepy dudes with their friends and/or children ("He" points at small indifferent child, "REALLY wants your autograph") getting photos with her, sticking their arms around her, just generally being the creepiest of creeps and she could NOT have been friendlier to everyone and I thought "Boy, I really hope she has a succesful career!" so...good on her!

Speaking of...where is Taz?!

No one mentioned the highlight of the night? The Toa Liona moonsault to the floor, replete with Ricochet laughing his ASS off after he did it. GOA are my favourite, I'd like to see them take the 6 man titles off the Ops for...reasons.