Jingus

I was about to say "aw come on, that'd be too retarded even for them"... until I remembered that they've done exactly that in the past. Samuel L. Jackson showed up in character as Shaft in a Crash Holly skit a few years back. And anyone who saw it will never forget the agony of all those Naked Gun skits with Leslie Neilsen searching for the Undertaker. But still, nah, I don't think that they'd actually have Rourke come out claiming to literally be Randy The Ram, though they might work aspects of that character into the angle in a worky-shooty kind of way.

Huh. Okay. I understand that ROH was probably taking the best deal they could get. But still, having your program only be available to customers with hi-def televisions and cable packages seems kinda limiting in terms of how many homes you can reach.

So you have to have the hi-def setup in order to get it? I browsed through the channel listings on Dish and didn't see HDNet anywhere.

I have very vague memories of the first Underworld, since it turned out to be one of those movies that you and your girlfriend say you're just gonna quietly sit down in the bedroom and watch together, but then it turns out that there isn't much sitting down or quiet involved at all. However, I did try to watch the sequel alone and sober, and turned it off about ten minutes in, was just fucking terrible.

And also the skeletons they found in the caves where they stayed in the first season. God I hope not. That'd be the next worst thing to that abominable old sci-fi short story cliche, where about a million different amateur writers all thought it would be a cute idea to have two astronauts crash onto some mysterious planet and then it turns out they're Adam and Eve.

I'm through three of the five Best Picture nominees. So far, Slumdog Millionaire > Benjamin Button >>> The Reader. Seriously, The Reader is essentially a pretentious and stuffy Masterpiece Theatre version of Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS with all the nastiness swept under the rug. I know the Academy makes some funny choices (does anyone actually like Crash?) but it's still frustrating that such a pious piece of shit like that can make the cut while many more deserving films get left out.

Admittedly, the drug use isn't usually that open in real locker rooms, at least any of the ones I've been in. Well okay, there was that one where the booker sat around in the office with some of the boys after the show, passing a joint around. One of said boys may or may not have been a certain staplegun-wielding maniac whom Randy The Ram wrestled in the movie. But typically that kind of thing is kept on the down-low. It was especially jarring to me the sheer quantity of shit Randy was buying, that was hundreds if not thousands of dollars worth of drugs, and I found myself wondering how the hell he could afford it.

No, she does not. Which is ironic, since she gets naked in almost every other scene in the first half of The Reader, though that was easily not as good a movie as Revolutionary Road (a film I still didn't like very much).

Just looking at this movie's IMDB page made me spontaneously grow an extra chest hair. So we have Kingsley and Whitaker for the serious acting, Couture and Statham and Lundgren and Li for the badassery, and Rourke and Stallone to straddle both worlds. Damn. Hey, Jet Li might finally get to be in an English-language action movie that doesn't suck. And Sandra Bullock, too? Well, her resume is a bit thin these days.

Well then, allow me to personally say thank you, since I've enjoyed a lot of your old game reviews and gotten much utility out of the FAQs you wrote. Whenever I finally get around to finshing Final Fantasy X, it'll be with your walk-thru. I dunno how much feedback the FAQs guys get (probably a lot, probably bad, probably badly spelled) but I thought I'd take this moment to stop and say, thanks. . . . And I do kinda agree that Mabel gets more complaints than he deserves. Okay, this is feeling dangerously homoerotic, stepping away now.

Wow. This might be a historic moment, finding someone who actually LIKED King of the Ring, 1995! In truth I don't despise that show as much as most people do and I think it gets a worse reputation than it deserves, but it was pretty crappy. Aside from HBK doing his usual show-stealing, 96 didn't have much in the way of ring classics. But aside from Utimate Warrior and Lawler practically sitting down and playing poker in the ring, most of the matches were at least watchable. Others have already mentioned Pillman's promo and the crossing-paths thing with Austin, but it's still enough of a ghostly powerful historical moment that I'll bring it up again. Mankind/Taker was a really fun ahead-of-its-time brawl. KOTR 97... I'm having a hard time even remembering what half the matches were. I know Mankind beat Lawler in a lackluster match in the semis, to send him to a heatless final against Hunter in a boring match that felt like it was never gonna end. I can't even remember who HHH went over in his semi match. Goldust? Ahmed? Whoever, it likely sucked. Stone Cold and Michaels had a decent match with a crap finish. Main event was... uh... Taker vs Farooq, I think? Can't imagine that exactly lighting the world on fire. This was definitely during that floundering-around period where they were losing money and WCW was stomping on their balls every Monday night; they didn't know where to go next, and there was a feeling of desperation in the air. Hey Psycho Penguin, I asked you this before, but didn't get an answer. Are you the Psycho Penguin who writes for GameFaqs?

It's still around, but it certainly isn't as huge a fad as it was back in the 80s. The influence of MMA has kinda watered down the old style vs style arguments, and there are more Self Defense type courses out there now than there are martial arts schools of a specific discipline. I guess The Brazillian Jiu-Jitsu Kid just doesn't have the same ring to it.

I would mention that she did time in Hulk, except that she out-performed everyone in that movie not named Sam Elliott. Damn, she does have a surprisingly good resume when you step back and look at the whole, considering she's never had That One Part which sticks out and makes her a star,

Maybe, but that's almost cheating to name them. (And the legend of Falconetti never doing any other screen parts is wrong, she'd appeared in a couple of forgotten movies back in the teens.) I added "never been in a bad movie" because "never had a bad performance" is too subjective. Also, with that one you could just name someone like Judi Dench or Phillip Seymour Hoffman who's so talented and professional that they're always good regardless of the relative quality of the film around them, but they have slipped up in terms of picking projects and starred in some stinkers during their tenure.

Now here's a man who's never seen Inventing the Abbotts. Or The Rocketeer. Or Dark Water. That is actually not a bad little game: try to name someone who's never had a bad performance. Or, if you want to broaden it a little, never been in a bad movie. I can't think of anyone, offhand. Or he was Rosencrantz. Or both? Neither? They were awfully vague about the name thing. Maybe he was secretly Vladimir or Estragon.

I personally don't believe in the most common model of global warming. That is, that the earth is inevitably heating up, and that it's undoubtably the fault of human beings, and that we can actually do anything to stop it. I admit that might possibly be the case, but I personally am not convinced. However, I am puzzled by the way many conservatives tend to try to explain away the motivations for people who believe in it. The theory of "scientists are only causing alarm to get government grants" is especially perplexing. Um, if they're only in it for the money, isn't there much more money available if you go work for Exxon and produce a study saying that global warming is a myth? There often seems to be a Republican belief that Democrats don't really think the world is heating up, they're just using that excuse to further some other agenda, and I've never understood the logic in that claim.

It says seven other people were in the cafeteria, but doesn't say what seven people. They could've all been 98-pound computer programmers for all we know. It's probably not like the local jiu-jitsu club was just happening to sit there. What's the normal reaction of an untrained civilian to horrific violence, after all? To run and protect your own ass. That's a common pattern in most brutal murders committed in public; the witnesses mostly all run away.

Hoop Dreams wasn't nominated because of the bizarre, byzantine rules they had back then about what officially qualifies as a "documentary" per se. The Oscars' host that year David Letterman even made a joke about it, saying something to the effect of "And to the Academy documentary committee, I've been asked to pass on a message: some guys from Hoop Dreams are waiting for you with baseball bats in the parking lot". The rules were updated after that, but they're still odd and complicated. It did get a pity-fuck nomination for Best Editing though. King of Kong wasn't nominated because... um... cuz they're stupid.

What, were those not good enough for you? Well, Kane is the obvious critical favorite of his career, sure. It losing out to How Green Was My Valley, which wasn't even the fourth-best movie nominated, is one of the more infamous whoopsies of Oscar history. Although admittedly the competition was unusually stiff that year, what with Maltese Falcoln and such. Touch of Evil on the other hand didn't get nominated for jack shit, in an awards year which saw Gigi walk off with Best Picture, so yeah he totally got raped on that one.

Aside from Citizen Kane and maybe Touch of Evil, which ones would Welles really have deserved it for? I never understood the hype for Magnificent Ambersons. And the rest of his films tended to either be sabotaged by low budgets (all his Shakespeare stuff) or were genre thrillers dressed up with fancy camerawork (The Stranger, Mr. Arkadin), or just weird stuff that the Academy never even would've considered (The Trial, F for Fake). His legendary problems post-Kane with getting anyone to finance his films pretty much wrecked his whole career.

Ordinary People over Raging Bull, Dances With Wolves over Goodfellas, Chicago over Gangs of New York...

Hey dammit, don't you so it goes and post things like that without spoiler tags!

I think they should just drop the "original" and allow adapted songs. Especially when you get years like this, with a grand total of two movies nominated in the category anyway. Wouldn't hurt anything to bump it up to a full roster of four or five. I'm trying to watch The Reader now. ZShare is being a dildo, not loading properly and finally crashing. But I did manage to see the first forty minutes. There was a LOT of Kate Winslet naked, all over the place. I approve of this endeavour. The rest seems awfully mediocre. The kind of movie that thinks, having one character reading aloud from some classic book to another character who is emotionally moved by it, that somehow qualifies as some kind of deep or beautiful filmmaking. Yeesh. The flashback structure with Ralph Fiennes seems badly timed too, he'll vanish for so long that when he finally reappears it's jarring. "WTF, Voldemort's in this movie? ...oh yeah, he is." Oh yeah. Especially if she wins. How disgusting yet appropriate would that be. "Congratulations, Hollywood, you literally fulfilled our scathing parody of your shallowness!"

Yes, I am aware that's the category and the rule. I just think it's dumb to limit official recognition of artistic merit to only something which was originally composed for the film, if the actual recording and performance is new and only performed for the film. It's kinda like if they just had Best Original Screenplay and no Best Adapted.

Why not any song which is performed and recorded in a new version for the film? If, say, Elvis Costello does a really kickass cover of some Elvis Presley song as part of a movie, I don't see why that should be treated any different from scripts which are remade from old material. If you can give me a really good reason why the rule should stay the way it is, I'll happily drop this and shut up, I'm feeling like Current Events debater here continuing the same argument ad infinitum. I just think that this is one of many cases where the Academy's rules for eligibility are flawed. (And I'm still mad their stupid double-standardy rules for the foreign films deadline will keep Let the Right One In out this year, and it'll almost certainly have been forgotten by the voters this same time next year.)