Jingus

Yeah, the era of really good special effects makeup seems to be sadly riding off into the sunset with everything turning CG these days. Winston dead, Dick Smith retired, Tom Savini not doing much of anything. Nicotero and Rick Baker are still around, but they spend half their time just collecting paychecks from really terrible blockbusters.

Strangely, my main TNA memory of the Naturals is neither a tag match nor anything I saw live. It was at Lockdown 06; Bubba Ray had hurt Andy Douglas, tore his pec with a chop or something mean like that, and Chase Stevens was in some random six-way X division scramble match. Well, Chase went and single-handedly tried to get himself a singles push by doing a shooting star press off the top of the fuckin' cage. And nobody caught him! He somehow plummetted down right in the middle of FIVE guys, none of them even got a finger on him, and he went SPLAT. How he didn't break himself in half, I'll never know. After risking life and limb in such a spectacular and dangerous fashion, you'd think the booker would be nice to the guy afterward, throw him a bone, right? His big reward the next day at the Impact taping: getting jobbed out to Abyss in thirty seconds. What a great company to work for.

Before you pay, it's a bill. (Or it's The Check, but only in sit-down restaurants.) After you pay, it's a receipt. I'm still tripping over "Javoah". Especially since right afterwords he spelled "witnesses" correctly, arguably a more difficult word.

In case that gets edited or otherwise fucked with, I feel the need to repeat it here just so it will be forever preserved for posterity. Javoah indeed.

That sounds like quality entertainment to me.

What does it mean besides the standard dictionary definition of "evil, naughty", etc? That is like a John Holmes-sized dick move by your "friends" there. That's been my experience with renaissance festivals too. They've got a few cool things scattered here and there, and a bunch of chicks with corsets and elf ears, but it seems like just buying a drink is a $10 minimum, and purchasing any of the dry goods runs you way into hundreds of dollars. Never go to Tennessee, because that's the entire state. Nashville and the surrounding area is especially legendary for simultaneously running a billion different road construction projects which all take years to complete.

Oh yeah, the Bad Lieutenant remake. I'd say this project had the stench of deathly doom all over it... except it's being directed by, of all fuckin' people, Werner Herzog. Who is FAR too good a filmmaker to utterly fuck something off like this. After all, this is the guy who remade Nosferatu and NOBODY complained that his version raped the original, which is fairly unheard-of when you think about it. So I have to wonder what kind of tricks he has up his sleeve. It sounds like the worst idea possible, but hell, so did Adaptation on paper.

. . . How did that work?

If it helps, I've been sharing your suffering. Woke up early this morning with a harsh stomach ache; tried induced vomiting and pepto, neither seemed to help much. Eventually I just said fuck it and took some knockout pills to go back to sleep. The pain was mostly gone when I woke back up, but I've felt bizarrely weak all day, just walking up the stairs feels like a chore. I think a bunk batch o' bananas was the culprit. ...17 years? Really? Who are you, Seinfeld?

Maybe, but satire typically involves some sort of metaphor in which real life is portrayed through exagerrated proxies. What would Dawn's cooter crunchers stand for? Women's lib and feminine empowerment, I guess? Biting off penises = burning bras? I maybe could see that, especially since the movie's timeframe is stylistically skewed. It seem to be directed in a manner to give you an anachronistic feeling as if it were set in the 50s or 60s, despite it technically taking place in the present day.

I get that. Sort of how none of my closer friends from the past decade can comprehend that I hated Scream. "How is that possible, it's like the most perfect combination of everything you like!" No. No it wasn't. That's far from the only example, I regularly get into fights with film snobs about Clockwork Orange and plenty of other movies.

Oh you fucker. I didn't give a shit about Anderson's other movies (they're good but not Desert Island Good), but I so wanted that one. I can understand bps not liking Lebowski. Even though I enjoyed it a lot and found it very funny, I don't get the bizarre amount of worship which some people heap on it, calling it the funniest movie ever or what have you. It's got a very odd sense of humor which plenty of people just wouldn't like.

Come to think of it, Cena has never really had that This Is The Man type moment, has he? His finally taking the title off Bradshaw, despite being a clean win in the semi-main of Wrestlemania, still seemed anticlimactic. When he beat HHH and HBK at the following Manias, it was just sort of "Cena wins again... meh". Even handing guys like Umaga and Khali their first pinfall losses somehow didn't feel like anything special. What would it take to really, finally put this guy over? Hogan, Rock, Austin, and Undertaker are the only big names left which he hasn't beaten.

What? Aw shit. I didn't even know he was sick. Hell, I didn't realize he was that old. Guess I'll be watching Pumpkinhead tonight.

Any time I think something is being unusually sexist or misogynist. Which, let's face it, is an awful lot of the time in all kinds of media, but horror flicks seem especially prone to it. Although Teeth was one of the rare few which is sexist against men and goes too far in the other direction. (Though you could make an argument that aside from Dawn's "superpower", every woman in the movie is portrayed as a helpless victim.) Anyway, I wouldn't even call it a horror flick, more like a dark comedy which I didn't think was funny.

Oooh, low blow. Which one? There's, like, three or four Coen flicks which might qualify as such. I get a feeling there's gonna be a run on musicals sometime soon, don't know why, just do. So I might as well snap my favorite one up now: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street Great songs, great performances, greatly executed by director Tim Burton. And fountains of blood.

Wasn't feeling that one at all. So except for her dad, every male in town is a rapist or pervert of some sort? Talk about a straw cock argument. That's not feminism, that's some middle-aged guy screenwriter trying to act like he's feminist. And the sick mom, and the nuclear plant next door, and a protagonist named "Dawn", and always playing cheerful old family songs right after every dick gets bit off, arrgh too heavyhanded.

Really? I hated Palumbo for the longest time. Felt like he was just another generic steroid kid with no charisma or talent. Jindrak seemed like he had much more upside to me. Bagwell had been with the company fulltime since 1990. What major promotion has ever taken a guy who's been around for a decade and then made him a top star? It would be the same as sticking Val Venis or Funaki in an "angry young upstarts" division today. Maybe even worse, since he was a 4-time tag champ and even was an earlier member of the NWO back before every other guy in the company was let in. That is not a rookie, that is not New Blood, period. Compare him to Kidman, who'd only spent four years in the company, and half of that was as a jobber nobody. Leading the Revolution: so? Did anyone look at Benoit and Malenko, with their lined faces and receding hairlines, and think "man there's some young fresh-faced kids"? They were, what, maybe ten years younger than the "old geezers" they were feuding with? WCW waited long years to do anything whatsoever with any of these guys, and by then it was too late. They'd already established a system where absolutely nobody was going to get on top except for the guys who were already on top. In fact, here's a great example: prior to Russo, there were only two guys in the Nitro era who were allowed to break through the glass ceiling and play with the big boys: Goldberg and DDP. Goldberg was a young guy, a fresh talent who hadn't been there for long, and he got monstrously over. Page meanwhile was a dude who slowly fought his way up the card, had several high-profile feuds with the top guys, and then when he finally got the belt, the reaction was: "WTF, that guy is world champion?"

Joe just needs to be killin' some motherfuckers out there. When's the last time he looked like the kind of badass he was back when he was walking around with Chris Daniels' bloodstained towel as a scarf? He needs to Defy The Odds and be superman every now and then if he's gonna be a top guy. Even though all the smarks are sick to death of guys like Cena, Taker, and HHH doing that endlessly, the damned thing is that it works to an extent. When's the last time Joe, figuratively speaking, smashed some poor schmuck with a sledgehammer? When's the last time any of his enemies acted afraid of him?

Since everyone else is snapping up the foreign flicks, thank christ this one somehow didn't get picked yet: Seven Samurai You know those movies which, when you're done watching them, make you feel like you've just seen The Best Film Of All Time? You know it's not THE best film of all time, because that would be Citizen Kane or Return of the Living Dead III or something like that, but it sure makes you feel like it's #1. That perfectly describes this movie. I've never seen an Akira Kurosawa movie which wasn't fucking awesome. And several of them are BEYOND fucking awesome. So when I say this is, imho, the very best movie he ever made... yeah. Invented cliches which are still used today, and had some of the damndest battle scenes of all time.

This seems to suggest he's exempting them from the equation. ROH does get special treatment from the big leagues compared to most other indy promotions.

Jeez, a whole lotta Fuck The Pigs sentiment on here. I feel more sorry for them than anything. A miserable and dangerous job with shitty pay. Depends on the job. My mom, a teacher, doesn't make a hell of a lot more than that. And she's a special ed teacher with uncommon skills and training... working in a relatively wealthy county... having thirty years' experience in teaching people of all ages with all kinds of mental and physical handicaps... with a good track record for actually helping thse people improve... and she's got a Master's degree from Vanderbilt. Still gets paid bullshit. She only does it because she loves the kid so much.

No he didn't. Ever. The annoying part is that it could've worked, in theory, with some tweaks. Like, Hogan had been a heel for most of his WCW run, and I doubt that the people would've rebelled too hard if he'd gone back to the dark side. Same thing with Flair. Hell, those two are all you'd really need; make them cut a bunch of condescending promos about how they're better than this sport and only in it for their giant contracts and just be dicks in general. You're also right about the weird makeup of the "New Blood". The fuck was Bagwell doing in there?! Or Steiner, or Douglas, or Knobbs, or half the guys who'd been around forever. Guys like Kidman, Awesome, and Kanyon made sense, and got perfectly over when given the chance. I think Awesome was the one guy they fucked over worse, since they took a guaranteed world-beater and quickly and brutally sabotaged his entire career. He certainly had a World Champion sized body, and as long as his opponent knew how to adjust his style he had good matches.

Really? Compared to any other indy belt in the country, sure. What other American, non-WWE/TNA belt is considered more presitigious?