Jingus

Yes indeedy. I smoke weed for the proven health benefits of cannabis, I'm constantly on the internet because it's a great learning tool, I eat fatty foods because of the Atkins diet, I date fat chicks because they have better personalities, I think non-fans are crazy when they claim that wrestling is homoerotic, I can stop drinking whenever I want, all my problems are someone else's fault, and I play video games for the boost in quick strategic thinking and hand-eye coordination. Any standard loser excuses I missed?

Oh yeah. The trailer was awesome too, but it was one of those sneaky bastard trailers which stuck every single good moment from the movie in it. In the end it felt like it was made by some guy who really loved Quentin Tarantino's/Robert Rodriguez's/Sam Raimi's movies for the excessive violence and dark humor, but he didn't have any idea how to put it all together himself. A bunch of strange plot twists/holes and crappy bargain-basement CGI effects don't help either. Ten-four, good buddy. When a new George Romero zombie flick inspires in me the feeling of "man, I wish this acting and dialogue were at least as good as they were in Day of the Dead", that's not so good. Aside from the handheld camera dealie, it didn't do a single new thing which hadn't already been done in the other series entires. The mockumentary gimmick wasn't handled very well, and mostly made it feel like a Blair Witch/Cloverfield imitator. Extra points for some really awful narration too. It's not a worthless movie, there are a few good bits here and there (Amish guy, swimming pool) but it's easily the worst of Romero's Dead series imo. Felt much more like something which should have come from one of Romero's millions of copycats rather than the man himself.

Ironically, it happened the very next night after I saw him wrestle at a house show. Considering how that match went, I'd say the broken leg was nothing more than a case of quick karma.

I don't think he "sucked", per se. They only blew one little spot, and who knows whose fault that was. The thing that struck me is that he wrestled literally like a rookie straight out of a southern indy training school who'd only had a dozen matches. Just look at his entire offense: chain wrestling, armdrags, backdrop, dropkick, and a rollup for the finish. Working the Southern outlaw indy circuit, I saw about nine thousand matches which looked exactly like that. Although he didn't physically look like an OVW trainee (for one thing he looked like he could actually pass a wellness test without cheating), he sure as hell wrestled like one, and like one who just recently graduated from the Intermediate class at that. I do think he had decent charisma, though. Not like the second coming of the Rock or anything, but certainly more than your Lance Cades of the world.

Yeesh. I took your advice, and now I will not be taking your advice again anytime in the near future. What a vulgar, disgusting movie. In a bad way. Torture porn disguised as an action flick.

Haven't seen Inland Empire yet. Want to, just haven't gotten around to it. Haven't found it online for free anywhere (aside from a French-dubbed version), and that's usually my preferred method of watching movies.

Kinda reminds me on All In The Family when someone was quoting statistics on the number of people killed by guns and why it meant that guns should be banned. Archie: "What, you'd rather they was pushed outta windows?"

I'd be willing to so the Shitty Nitro Viewathon thing, depending on what time of day. Evening or night is better for me. They had an annoying tendency of sticking anyone who happened to wear facepaint in Vampiro's group. Sting, Great Muta, Insane Clown Posse, the Misfits, anyone. I understand why they did it, with Hogan being arguably the biggest wrestling star of all time. Problem is, WCW fans were used to seeing him as the villain. When he turned babyface in summer of 99 there was a decent nostalgia pop for him, but he was gone again two months later anyway. As his WWE appearances have shown, Hogan is great for a short-term spark but actively drives fans away if he keeps coming back long-term. His opponents didn't help; as noted the Flair feud had been done to death several times, and who the fuck would actually pay to see Hogan vs. Luger? Nash, guess what, got hurt. By slipping and falling. Seriously. Okay, it was in a puddle of ice in a parking lot at night after a house show, but still, he broke his leg by tripping and falling. And let's not forget his AWESOME run as Commissioner! Like when he went completely insane and thought he was Commissioner Gordon, and actually spent television time pontificating on why Bruce Wayne and Batman were never seen together. Ah, so you are That Guy.

May I say that I pretty much fully agree with your entire analysis here, and may I say that you may suck my fat white cock for getting to this movie before me. I knew Mulholland Drive would get nabbed, but I thought I could let this one sit out til the late rounds.

That would fall under the label of "no shit". Why do you care? People want to guess how successful stuff is gonna be, that happens in every single industry on the planet, especially ones like the popular media where they talk about this shit on primetime television every week.

That's kind of my point: it's more or less impossible to make a faithful movie out of these books, because the books are too damn long. There's too much plot, too many characters, too much shit happening. There's no way to cram all that effectively into a bit over two hours. The Lord of the Rings individual books are all about half the length of OotP, and those movies are 3 hours plus, and even then a bunch of stuff got left out which some of the nitpickier fans weren't happy about. In fact, in some ways, the relatively faithful nature of the HP films and their refusal to fiddle with the books' plotlines is something which constrains them, imo. They try to cram in as much as they possibly can, often resulting in a movie which has about a thousand individual scenes which are all ten seconds long. Little plotlines, like Bellatrix Lestrange vs. the Longbottom family, make cameo appearances in the movies which would inexplicable to anyone who hasn't already read the books and doesn't know what's going on. Or, showing Luna reading the Quibbler, but not mentioning that her father runs it (and is just as much a conspiracy kook as her); or Ginny's odd expression when someone mentions Cho; without spoiling anything for you, some of that is at least mildly important in the last books. If they'd actually just gritted their teeth and cut out some more extraneous subplots and minor characters (like they already seem happy to do with anything involving Quidditch), I think the movies would've flowed better, been more coherent, and felt less like a desperate attempt to hopscotch over each vaguely important part of the book so as not to piss off the fanbase by leaving anything out.

Yeah, well I did read the books first, I read this one like five years ago, so there's no way to change that. And what am I supposed to do, just pretend that I never read all nine hundred friggin' pages of that book? Yes, they're two completely different media. And I just plain don't like them as movies. The characters are thin, the plot jumps around too fast, and there's an annoying overreliance on obvious CGI. I just sat there thinking "ya know, this reminds me a lot of Yoda vs. Palpatine".

I can definitely understand a non-fan being confused or bored by these movies. The books are so complicated and stuffed with various backstory that you almost need to know in order to make sense of the whole plot and actually care about the characters as three-dimensional people, but the movies tend to cut most of that out. OotP was the worst culprit, as they somehow took the longest Potter book and shoehorned it into the shortest Potter movie. They didn't even have Dumbledore explain about the prophecy at the end, which is the weirdest part since it's a pretty vital plot point for the rest of the series.

Why do smart marks talk about the ratings of wrestling shows? It's just a method to gauge (or brag about) your ability to analyze how the public will react to any specific thing. With box office receipts, I talk about it because I hope to someday work in the movie industry. The general daydreamy theory is, if I can correctly guestimate how much money various movies will make, I might have a shot at being able to successfully pander to the masses myself. I don't know if that's what it's like for everyone in there, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was something along those lines.

I'm not sure what your argument is here. McCain has no chance of winning and will get squashed in a Reaganesque manner come election day? The current polls don't seem to show any credence towards that. You seem to be assuming that personal dislike for the Bush administration automatically equals general dislike for the Republican party, and I don't think that's the case. Are more people unhappy with the Republicans now than ever before? Of course. But they've still got whole heapin' helpins of support out there. Consider that everything Bush has ever done to fuck shit up and alienate everyone (and it's been a lot of fucking up and alienation), he still has the apparently unwavering support of around 30% of the populace. I do think that Obama will probably be our next president, but I don't think the GOP is gonna just roll over and die come this November.

I miss the mid-late 90s. It seems like that's when the best of everything came out, from movies to music and whatnot. I know a lot of that is just due to those being my formative years in first discovering the media could be more than just something to mindlessly entertain the masses, but still, stuff just seemed more fun then.

It's a little different in the summer since the kids are out of school. I'm sure they've been clamoring for weeks to go see Wall-E, so the parents rushed them to the theater at the first opportunity just to get 'em to shut up. Wanted is the first big-budget R-rated action flick we've had in a little while, and the trailers were certainly appealling to the type of fans who just want cool stylish murder stuff and don't care about realism. It's also the only action flick out right now which isn't being marketed as comedy (Get Smart), horror (The Happening), or comics (take your pick). It's just people shooting each other, and there's always a market for that.

No one has been officially proven to have been wrongfully executed in over 50 years. There have been many controversial cases where the evidence was far from airtight. There's a pretty common government reaction, whether state or federal or otherwise, to discourage digging around old cases after the convict has actually been killed. Nobody wants their system to be undermined. And considering the thousands of people who have been executed in that time frame, statistically speaking at least one of them had to have been innocent. Keep in mind when I say stuff like this, or mentioning earlier that many execution methods are often neither quick nor painless, I am actually for the death penalty. But it's important to know all the filthy details about exactly what you support.

Does Joe need to lose the belt already to the very first challenger to come along, though? He already looks like enough of a punk as it is. If they want people to take Joe seriously as a top guy, he needs to start kicking asses, and in storyline terms he should start with Booker. It's not like there are any big secondary babyfaces to take over his spot if Joe fails in this role; Christian was underwhelming as a babyface champ, Sting is just a part-timer, AJ seems permanently stuck in this love triangle angle (u see wut i did ther), and everyone else is too far down the card to be taken seriously as a contender.

No doubt a whole hell of a lot of people are saying that, sure. But once again, refer to history. In 2004, twelve million more people voted for Bush than did four years prior. Despite all the shit he bungled in the first four years, despite his consistently declining approval ratings from 9/12 on forward, despite everything about the last four years they'd just lived through, twelve million new people decided "I want me some more of that!" and rushed to the poles. Never underestimate the (mad lib) of the American people.

Freezes right after they get on the train thing, sits frozen for a while, then resumes with the gorilla attack? Yeah, same here. Buncha little pops and blips in the sound, too.

How is that not cruel and unusual punishment? Physical mutilation should never, ever, never be a part of the American justice system. Why not break the trigger fingers of bank robbers or glue shut the nostrils of coke addicts while we're at it? Dude, that's a fairly ordinary sentence for any kind of violent felony. Or even longer than ordinary for violent physical assault. There were literally murderers who have been arrested, convicted, sent to that same jail, and paroled while that guy still sat in his cell. Hell, if he'd chopped off the girl's arm with a meat cleaver instead of raping her, he probably wouldn't have gotten half that much time.

No, it wasn't that, but thanks anyway, cute story. It was "A Study in Emerald", the first story in his book Fragile Things. I went back and re-read it, and it really wasn't so much a Cthulhu Mythos story as it was a League Of Extraordinay Gentlemen type melting pot of throwing in a bunch of fictional influences from that general time period, of which the Old Ones were just one part.

WHY R PEOPLE REPPUBLIKKKANS? THAT'S SO ST00PID! You could start by asking the 50 million people who voted for Bush in 2000, and the 62 million who did so in 2004. Lots of people agree with Republican policies, ya know.

Shaun of the Dead "A romantic comedy. With zombies." And they meant it. An amazing combination of slice-of-life nerdiness and badass heroics, and possibly my favorite entry in the Silver Age Of Zombie Flicks this decade has been.