Jingus

We sure these are the full spoilers? Seems a bit short for an entire show, especially having only four matches. But I gotta admit, even I don't really see anything to complain about here. (Oh, I could nitpick about Lethal or the MCMGs (whom I don't personally care about, but they are over) jobbing all the time, but I mean serious fuckups like TNA usually does every week.) I might actually watch this episode, it's been a couple months since I've seen a full show.

FWIW, even my mom watched that game. And she pretty much never watches sports. So, clearly there was some kind of crossover mainstream appeal. Still, it's funny how this could in theory give Punk a Hogan-like excuse about how the numbers dropped when they took the belt off him. She needs to work a hell of a lot harder, then, considering how awful she still was.

Yeah. Kinda interesting. They so far haven't gone with the type of massive plot developments which tossed Dexter's life around like the Ice Truck Killer or Bay Harbor Butcher stuff they immediately threw at us in the first two seasons' premieres. Not to say there aren't any new "oh shit" moments making Dex's life more complicated, of course there are, but it's not the same type of "his secret has been discovered!" kind of stuff like before. It's more kind of stuff which might cause an internal change in Dexter's personality, how he sees the world and his place in it. Jimmy Smitts of all people has a nice supporting role. And inevitably the homicide detective crew is back to squabbling with each other again. And if you watch the episode, see if you agree with me that Julie Benz must've absolutely demanded that no matter how many sex scenes she has, they're not allowed to actually show her naked. Overall, nothing blowaway, but is promising in some ways.

All-time? If you just say the letter W, W, and F in that order, Hulk Hogan's still the first face that comes to mind. Stone Cold could be an acceptable second place. I don't see Rock that way since he left the business and got more famous doing movies, under his real name. Now? Sadly, it's Cena. He's way more recognized by the general public than any of their other current stars. If I had to name a runner up, Undertaker easily. Let's face it, outside of wrestling fans, pretty much nobody knows who the fuck Triple H is.

Half of why they couldn't come up with anything for him is cuz he's black. Seriously, have any of the non-white guys on the roster not had some kind of race-based gimmick at some point? This is a company which still employs a "Samoan jungle savage who can't speak English" gimmick today. WWE Creative always seems to have more problems coming up with ideas for someone who doesn't fit the company's preferred look. IIRC, didn't they pre-tape that segment? I don't think it was live. If Vince had a problem with London smiling, he should've just said "Cut!" and told him to knock it off.

Well, it was more a joke about how his name isn't quite as famous as the others you listed, except for whoever the hell Man Scout is. (Personally, I'd be most excited for 1.DAFFNEY, 2.Flair, and 3.everyone else.) Although I did work with Joey once a few years back, he stopped by through Nashville, probably trying to get a dark match with TNA. I heard his name wrong and then proceeded to call him Joey Silver throughout his entire match.

I always hated it too. But, thinking about it, was this the last show on MTV which actually showed music videos? Fragmented clips of videos with idiot kids talking over them, yeah. But I can't offhand think of any other regularly scheduled show on the network which specifically airs any music videos whatsoever.

...are we talking about the same Candice Michelle who wrestled last night? Who put on by far the worst performance on this show, bar none? Are you high?

That's fuckin' awesome! ...Joey Silvia rocks!

So did I. I mean, Billy Crystal as Satan. C'mon. A couple neat ones not mentioned so far: Zelig. Woody here kinda did the same thing as Forrest Gump, inserting a fictional character into real historical footage... but did it fourteen years before Gump. What's Up, Tiger Lily. Not really an Allen film per se, but I found it priceless. He re-edited and re-dubbed a shitty Japanese spy movie. The results had to have been an influence on everything from MST3K to Kung Pow. Bullets Over Broadway. A fun backstage theater spoof with a psychotic mobster who turns out to be a good playwright. Kinda like Noises Off meets Get Shorty. Wild Man Blues. Once again, not really Woody's own work, but it's interesting to see a behind the scenes look at how the man operates in real life. More admiration for Crimes and Misdemeanors and Purple Rose of Cairo, too.

Dammit, I hate it when other people get to the O'Reilly jokes before I do. "Falefal!" What, nobody else gonna even bother with the obligatory OMGRACYST~! comment? To be fair, that's also the first time I've ever seen an interviewer literally say that a presidential candidate wants to reinstitute slavery, to their face, on live national tv. Bawbawa's "us white people will take care of you" was a fine punchline too.

It's still false advertising. But it's false advertising done in a sneaky assholish way so that if they're called on it, they can just claim they never SAID Foley was gonna be there. Yet any wrestling fan who's been watching for more than a couple years will take one look at that ad and instantly make the Foley assumption. Truthy's right on this one, that's some fraudulent bullshit right there.

"Sting isn't a draw anymore." -Terry Funk, 2005, overheard backstage conversation But seriously, how is Sting a draw? He's been with the company almost since the beginning. Including all those years when they, y'know, lost money and didn't draw. Meanwhile, ECW on Scifi drew drastically higher ratings when RVD was the champ, compared to everything that followed since then.

Pillman and Sullivan both knew what was going on in the match. Arn, it's a question mark, since even in shoot interviews he always refuses to break kayfabe. The whole thing was an elaborate con by Pillman on Eric Bischoff, who thought that they together were conning the locker room and the dirtsheet writers. Pillman convinced Bischoff to go ahead with this crazy worked-shoot angle where Pillman would apparently really go completely fucking crazy, resulting in a couple of televised "shoots" with Sullivan in some of their matches. The key here was that aside from those people I've already mentioned, nobody else in the entire company would be in on it. Bischoff was always looking for some way to try and have an extra edge over the WWF and prove he was smarter than everyone else, so he went along with it. Pillman even showed up at some ECW shows in order to help sell his "Loose Cannon" character. Unfortunately for Bischoff, Pillman talked him into really getting WCW's legal department to release him from his contract, supposedly for purposes of realism in trying to fool Meltzer and co. Well, turns out all Pillman really wanted was to get out of his longterm WCW contract in order to go to the WWF, which is exactly what happened.

Yeah, used for comedy is one possible way. Though it can certainly misfire and be not funny at all. To me, this gets me thinking of Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, which was almost like a perfect storm of all the negative fads in the current horror movie. Now there's a "horror" movie which is not even the tiniest bit scary, and worse, it doesn't even seem to be trying to scare you. It's just a repetitive series of scenes in which people get captured, mocked, tortured, maimed, and killed. It isn't remotely scary. It's too much a hollow exercise in empty-headed style to bear any resemblence to real-world violence, so they can't claim that they're holding a mirror up to life or anything like that. Calling the characters "cardboard" would probably be overly charitable, so it's not like there's any story arc or protagonists whose fates we care about. And the "humor" is so cruel and takes its lazy cheapshots at such easy targets that I never laughed once. But nevermind all that, cuz it's got GORE! Lots and lots of people being wounded and tied down and carved up with sharp objects and screaming over and over and over again before they finally get their "mercy killing". Yet there are probably lots of Fangoria types out there who really loved this movie cuz you got to see that one dude strapped down on the table with his arms sliced open the whole time. What's the point? Why do we need this shit?

I don't mind it when there's some kind of point to it. There are movies which would probably be worse if you took out the gore. Stuff as base as Dead-Alive and noble as Schindler's List come to mind. But I've never understood the appeal of gore when it's just there with no purpose to it. While I think it's bad for a filmmaker to run away from depicting violent content as being, y'know, violent, I think it's also easy to go too far the other way and just throw around karo syrup because it's a horror movie and that's what people expect. To me, the stuff generally tends to look unpleasant if not downright nauseating, so I much prefer there actually being a point to it being there rather than just being thrown in because that's what creepy convention-haunting fanboys demand for their buck.

I do, when it's good. But it wasn't just the acting and the story: it was also the dialogue and the camerawork and the music and the sets and the continuity errors and the awful staging and the general incompetence all around. I don't mean like a Friday the 13th "not very good", I mean a Mystery Science Theater "UNBELIEVABLY FUCKING HORRIBLE". What is the attraction of gore, anyway? I've never understood that. Some people don't give a shit if a movie is good or bad, they just want to see wall-to-wall blood and guts. Seems like an awfully grim and antisocial reason to watch movies.

"I think it's on Ebay!" So, having just watched Blood Feast, can anyone tell me why some horror fans cherish the "cult classics" of Herschell Gordon Lewis? Yeah, it's gory stuff in an era when they didn't do gore. But aside from that, it's nearly Ed Wood bad in terms of acting, writing, directing, and everything else.

Inc, where the hell you been? It's actually pretty good, but it depends on a few variables. Firstly, whether it's the full version, or an abridged one. This isn't one of those "director's cut is always better" cases, since Hugo has one of the world's worst cases of word vomit and will frequently and cheerfully stop the book dead in its tracks to spend a couple chapters talking about any random thing which happened to catch his attention. I found some of it, like the long treatise about the history of Paris's sewer system, to be kinda fascinating; but others (the seemingly pointless and endless part about Waterloo, or the long section about the slang words of the criminal underclass) are filler at best. But then he gets to the actual meat of the story, and while some of it is a bit melodramatic and penny-dreadfulesque, a lot of it is really compelling. His description of the failed revolution is particularly rousing. Also, like any foreign-language classic, the book has come out in various different English translations over the years and some are better than others.

Why "Middle America"? Was Hassan mysteriously on the receiving end of massive cheers and applause when the show went to New England or California?

The main problem with Hassan and Daivari is that, in today's world, too many people are gonna be pissed off at exploitation of real-world events just in order to get heat on a heel. That's been one of wrestling's great weaknesses in the age of political correctness; they simply don't care if they offend anyone, and then they get perplexed as to why the mainstream public treats them like a bad joke. They'd already gone through an earlier and milder form of this back when they did Sgt. Slaughter's "Iraqi turncoat" heel turn in 1991, which not only angered many people but also did relatively terrible business as well. Hassan had character potential in one specific way: he was supposed to be an born-&-bred American citizen, not an actual Middle Easterner. Unfortunately, the company seemed to put that in there more to cover their ass in case of controversy instead of anything else. ("But they're NOT terrorists, they're Americans who are dissatisfied with the current political zeitgeist! We don't order our fans to boo them!") They never played it up as part of his character, and it was only mentioned this in Hassan's earlier promos. Sure enough, way too quickly they had Hassan and Daivari both playing standard evil towelhead characters, practically identical to what the Iron Sheik had been doing decades earlier. This eventually devolved to the batshit insane decision to not only run a complete terrorist angle (choking out Undertaker with piano wire in reference to the recent beheadings, an unconcious Daivari being carried out by masked Mohammedans like the body of a dead martyr), but also the even batshittier insaner decision to leave the segment in the pretaped Smackdown broadcast when the London bombings happened. Don't believe the company's lies that it was too late to edit the show; they had enough time to stick in a Viewer Discretion warning before the segment, which was an awesomely cynical move. UPN was so pissed off that they insisted the character of Hassan never appear on their network again. And for the millionth time, the WWE went into whiny crybaby mode, playing the victim over something which was 100% their fault and easily predictable for anyone who doesn't share their bizarre mindset. And oh yeah, having Hassan be played by an Italian dude who wasn't a very good wrestler sure as hell didn't help.

! If only more Kevin Nash matches resulted in the Fingerpoke finish. No kidding. Have you guys seen Road Wild 99? Just typing that makes me shudder. When I watched it, my VCR had this option to do variable-speed fast forwarding. I played it at double speed, and me and my brother joked that now it looked like a real match... and then settled into uncomfortable silence once we realized that wasn't a joke, those guys were moving so slowly that it really did look like an ordinary match in double-time. I think he did a couple others around that time, like Halloween Havoc 95 iirc.

The hell is that even supposed to mean? You're basically saying that since I don't particularly like Punk, that anything negative I say about him must be a lie? Go back and read my post again, bob. Or maybe for the first time, since you seemed to miss the entire point. I didn't say I ever saw Punk falling off the straight edge. I said it was a friend of mine. And I acknowledged that said friend might've been full of shit. The WWE has a couple of weird exceptions when it comes to fatties. If a Samoan is fat, they don't care. Part of the gimmick, I guess, though other Samoans from Snuka to Rock have been able to keep slim. The only other guys who seem to get a pass are any fat white dudes who are doing a redneck or hillbilly gimmick. Don't know why, but Vince never minds if he has some pudgy schlub in a pair of overalls. He physically can't do it anymore. The impact from making that landing every night was fucking his knees up even moreso than otherwise. What gets bleeped sometimes seems haphazard. Obviously any usage of "fuck", "shit", "goddamn", or most euphemisms for genitalia all tend to be banned. Racial slurs, well, remember the trouble Big Show got in when he mush-mouthed mumbled the word "goofs" talking about Kaientai and some people heard an entirely different fourth letter. But sometimes they're really random about stuff. Every once in a while you'll get a verboeten word which slips through, never over the promo mic, but sometimes the ring mic picks one up. Seems to be more common on PPV, where restrictions are in theory a bit looser. And then sometimes they go and bleep random stuff which makes no sense at all, or just have bad timing on the bleep so you hear half of the swear but then miss like the next five unrelated words too. I guess that's what comes with the territory in a live, semi-unscripted show.

I don't get the appeal of Palin either. (And I'm, like, one of three guys in this whole folder who actually doesn't mind the idea of invading and occupying third-world dictatorships.) I've seen a long laundry list of stuff to dislike about her, from standard politician lies to archconservative social beliefs. But the only good thing her record suggests is that she's not one of those types who is addicted to the status quo, and she's not afraid to make enemies and cause havoc if she thinks that something really needs to be done. But then you get into the issue of what exactly it is that she wants done, and my interest wanes again.

What worries me about Righteous Kill is that it's the same director who did Pacino's last movie, 88 Minutes, and that one was just howlingly bad.