Raw thoughts and miscellany...

Being an Internet wrestling geek, I like to think I have a pretty good handle on what's going on. That said, I'm usually pretty happy when Vince and his writers decide to throw me a curve. Last night, they decided to.

In about three weeks, WWE is going to be having an "interactive" PPV event called Taboo Tuesday. Theoretically, the fans are going to be allowed to decide a few things involved with the show. One of those things is choosing the opponent of the current World Champ, HHH. Prior to last night's show, the IWC seemed convinced that regardless of the vote, Randy Orton would be the "choice" of the fans. Well, last night, Orton seemingly got his ass whipped out of the running by Batista with help from HHH and Flair. The favorite would now seem to be Chris Benoit, though Orton may find his way back into the voting. Vince is nothing if not fickle, abandoning whole storylines at will if he thinks something will pop the fans better.

Other then that surprise, Raw was pretty mediocre. Orton did cut a fantastic promo on Ric Flair, which had me almost believing that Flair might abandon HHH for good. Silly me, of course, but Flair did such a good job of selling his uncertainty that I thought he actually might turn on HHH.

The Lita/Kane/Gene Snitsky angle unfortunately continued, as Snitsky has seemingly been added to the Raw roster. He got a win over Val Venis(remember when he was IC champ? No, me neither) as the crowd chanted "babykiller" at him, which I thought was pretty funny. (That's one way to get over with the crowd.)

HHH and Shelton Benjamin had another DQ finish match, though Benjamin held his own with HHH. Moving him over from the SD~! roster was the best thing they ever did.

Next week, we get HBK vs. Christian for the IC belt, and theoretically, the Kane/Snitsky confrontation that I was expecting this week.

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Some recent search results that got people here:

The ever popular "Salo Torrent"
The still equally popular "Is Lita really pregnant/married to Kane?" (Come on, people, it's wrestling.)
"Thriller: A Cruel Picture Trailer"
"Thriller: A Cruel Picture Torrent"
"Thriller: A Cruel Picture DVD"
"Hopkins and De La Hoya Clips"
"Doriana Gray Torrent"
"Raw Randi Orton" - No, the misspelling is correct.
"Larry Merchant On Pacquaio"
"semiporn"

For the last time, I don't have any torrents here~!

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New additions to the collection:

Downloads:
The Gong Show Movie
Love Letters From A Portugese Nun (Jess Franco 70's Eurosleaze)
Society Of The Spectacle
The Virgin Spring
Ribald Tales Of Canterbury (70's adult goofiness)
and a couple of Brigitte Lahaie 70's French films.

Rips:

La Dolce Vita 2 disc
Hammer's The Mummy (1959)
Street Mobster and Graveyard of Honor (2 Kinji Fukasaku Yakuza films)
The Apple (insane late 70's musical directed by Menahem Golan of Golan/Globus, Review to come.)
Peeping Tom Criterion Edition
Children Of The Corn "special" edition (Can anything related to this movie truly be called "special"?)

And I actually bought the Star Wars Trilogy DVDs. (Review of those also forthcoming, as I am on vacation next week and am going to try to get some watching in.)

Roy Jones is done.

Holy crap, was that a terrible fight. Roy Jones got "knocked the fuck out", as my boy Brendan would say. Glen Johnson was just cruising along, beating Jones purely with workrate, not really killing him, then all of a sudden, bam, end of story. Jones also got himself a nice concussion from banging his head on the canvas, and as the HBO broadcast ended, still hadn't left the ring. Larry Merchant eulogized Jones' career as dourly as though his dog had died, and even during the fight, Merchant, Jim Lampley, and Emmanuel Steward(who HBO really should try to hire permanently) were just killing Jones for not even trying.

What a contrast to the Hopkins/De La Hoya match replay that proceeded it. Despite some reading to the contrary this week, De La Hoya is by no means finished unless he wants to be. Hopkins was winning the fight when it ended, but Oscar had been competitive and might well have been able to put something together late. The question, of course, is where does Oscar go now. Does he slink back to his old weight class and admit the experiment was a failure? Should he try to find someone else's ass to whip? Or should he just retire and continue to run his succesful promoting business? (Based on the ratings returns for The Next Great Ham'N'Egger, a career in reality TV is right out.)

At least Oscar has a future in the sport. Roy Jones is toast.

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How do you play a football game in a near-hurricane? I just saw some of the footage of the Miami/Pittsburgh NFL game, and all I can say is ouch. In the first half, it looked like the opening of The Last Boy Scout, except Billy Blanks wasn't running down the field and blowing his head off in the end zone. And yet, 30,000 insane Fish fans still showed up to see their team lose to the Steelers.

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And all you whining Red Sox fans after last weekend's two losses to the Yanks, well, you got 'em back, so there.

Placeholding Quiz...

Thanks, Demp. You and me against Brew and ECG and FMW.

Proceed at your own risk.

This may be the greatest message board thread in the history of the Internet Wrestling Community. It is scary, funny, disgusting, and tragic, all at the same time. If you have an hour to kill and are curious, go have a read.

There's enough poop in this thread to equal Salo. You have been warned.

Ray Traylor, R.I.P.

From 411wrestling:

Big Bossman Passes Away At Age 42
Posted By Ashish on 09.23.04

Another tragic wrestling death....

Ray "Big Bossman" Traylor suddenly passed away Wednesday night at his home. He was 42.

Traylor had a very successful run as The Big Bossman in the WWF years ago, and another semi-successful stint with the WWF in the late 90s as a somewhat repackaged Bossman.

His cause of death is a mystery right now. He did not have any known health problems.

411 would like to send our best wishes to Traylor's friends and family.

Sad that the first thought I had on hearing this was wondering whether or not The Big Show might invade the funeral and drag Bossman's coffin around.(It was a terrible angle a few years ago. The less said the better, as well as the terrible Bossman/Al Snow/Al Snow's dog storyline which ended with the worst cage match ever; Kennel in a Cell at a PPV whose title escapes my memory. Horrible.)

*Edit* - An Atlanta-area TV station is reporting that Ray Traylor died of a massive heart attack. Probably too much biscuits and gravy.

Russ Meyer, R.I.P.

Rest in peace, you crazy breast-obsessed man. Maybe now Fox will release The Seven Minutes on DVD along with Beyond The Valley of the Dolls.

*Edit* - I found this, an appreciation of Russ by one-time Meyer collaborator and film critic Roger Ebert. (Link snagged from Daze Reader.)

Also, Rodney Dangerfield is apparently on his way out as well, having been in a coma for the last month.

More later.

Big F'n deal...

Vince's "big announcement"? That the "Taboo Tuesday" PPV was going to feature an interactive element. Too bad that as an internet fan, I've already known that for a month. And we know how well WWE does with interactive material. The Diva Search currently running is "interactive", but if you read the rules that they provided at the start of the contest, you would see that there's a clause that basically says that WWE reserves the right to change the contest at their whim.

Anywho, the first match that they announced is Bischoff vs. Eugene, with the stip to be voted on by the fans. Can you say trainwreck?

Raw is in progress as I write this. They just had a bizarre interview with the jobber that caused the possible "miscarriage". Now Kane is being interviewed and says that the baby has a 50/50 shot of making it. This storyline sucks. Period.

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Watched the Criterion Videodrome finally. For those of you unfamiliar with the film, it concerns Max Renn(James Woods), a Toronto cable TV operator who specializes in running spicy material on his cable station(this is 1983, mind you) and is somewhat of a dicey operator. He discovers a program called "Videodrome" which is far and above anything that he's showing on his network. But when he tries to find it, what he finds is far, far worse.

Videodrome is an audacious and unusual piece of filmmaking by David Cronenberg, and Criterion has given it a nice 2-disc deluxe edition. There are two new documentaries about the effects, a vintage making of documentary, a collection of trailers (which includes possibly the worst trailer ever made for a motion picture), and an amusing 1982 interview with Cronenberg, John Landis, and John Carpenter which finds Cronenberg expounding on how hard it is to make his movies without getting an X. There are also two commentaries, one with James Woods and Deborah Harry(which I have not listened to yet), and one with Cronenberg and director of photography Mark Irwin. The Cronenberg commentary is very interesting, as he talks a lot about how not to get your movie made, and also about how he wasn't trying to be prophetic when making the movie. At the end of the commentary, he also makes an amusing comment about wanting to have that #1 box office, $200 million blockbuster. No offense, David, but you're not really trying. (Actually, I just finished reading Joe Bob Briggs' "Profoundly Disturbing", and in the chapter on Cronenberg's Crash, there's a list of some of the mainstream projects that Cronenberg turned down. Top Gun. Witness. Total Recall. Beverly Hills Cop. The Truman Show. Alien 4. Flashdance. Can you imagine Cronenberg's Flashdance? No, neither can i.)

Next on the list is the 4-disc extra-special edition of Dawn Of The Dead. I watched some of it, but there's more to be watched. Review forthcoming at some point.

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Evidently Lita just lost her "baby", as Kane was just heard shrieking from the hospital room. Did I mention this storyline sucks?

Oh, and apparently the Hurricane's a heel now. Weird.

More tomorrow.

New acquisitions...

Ever heard of "situationalism"? Neither had I until I downloaded the wacky Can Dialectics Break Bricks? from my current torrent source of choice.

Can Dialectics Break Bricks is an example of an art movement of the 70's(from France, natch) that is called "Detournment". From Barbelith.com: Detournement is usually translated into English as ‘diversion’ and was the method of artistic creation used by the situationists. It was, in effect, plagiarism where both the source and the meaning of the original work was subverted to create a new work. In the SI’s own words ‘there is no Situationist art, only Situationist uses of art.’ Detournement is distinct from ‘theft’ plagiarism, which only subverts the source of the material and post-modern ‘ironic quotation’ plagiarism which only subverts the meaning of the material, the source becoming the meaning. The SI used detournement in films, art, graphics for their journal and in posters that detourned comics during the events of May ’68.

In other words, try to imagine a more politically charged MST3K, and that about covers what it is. Basically, it's a 60's chop socky film redubbed to be a film about class struggle and Marxist theory. And it's actually pretty funny. There are a few running gags which I assume are lifted from the political writings that these guys subscribe to. References to "burning off the hair under people's arms" and "the Great Morning of the Great Evening" are peppered throughout. Bizarre stuff, and I'd write more on it but I'm not sure what the heck else to say about it, being non-versed in the politics of the movie. More reading on Situationism can be found here.

Other additions: 2 70's-era Brigitte Lahaie/Jean Rollin adult films, a great CD by a Pittsburgh area band of Goblin wannabes called Zombi, and Vidocq, the first film by Pitof, the French filmmaker that gave us the critically lambasted Catwoman. The only problem with Vidocq is that it came with subtitles seperately from the video file, and when I tried to apply them in Windows Media Player, it turned the movie upside down and reversed it. (One of the guys at the torrent site suggested it would make the movie better.)

Still haven't watched Videodrome yet. Review will be forthcoming on that.

Oh, and NHL owners? Go fuck yourselves.

Raw thoughts...

What a weird, random show. Now, I didn't see the PPV, and I didn't hear anything good about it, but Raw seemed almost like a reset. The highlight of the show had to be Randy Orton dumping HHH into a giant cake that Orton had leapt out of to attack Evolution. The segment ended with Orton walking up the ramp, leaving HHH's legs sticking out of the cake. Funny stuff.

Vince actually showed up tonight, but his appearance was kind of suspect. He said that on next week's "Season Premiere"* of Raw, he would have an announcement that would be "earthshattering" to Bischoff, the locker room, and all of us. My gut says that the Tuesday PPV is his announcement, but it will be interesting to see if it's something else.

In the ridiculous Kane/Lita angle, they seem to have maybe decided to, if you'll pardon the expression, abort the storyline. As Kane was destroying some poor jobber, Lita got into the ring to prevent him from using a chair to Pillmanize the jobber. As they argued, the jobber hit Kane with the chair, and of course he plowed Lita over and landed on top of her. They did the now unfortunately cliched "load wrestler onto stretcher while JR and King speak in hushed tones" bit, and then went to commercial. One would expect that next week, they'll announce that Lita had a miscarriage, thereby ending this stupid fucking storyline, and in the process, stopping the flow of people coming to my website to see whether Lita is really pregnant. (Really, I'm not kidding. I get four or five hits a day from search engines with the search result "Is Lita really pregnant/married to Kane?" Between that and people thinking I've got torrents, that makes up about half of my traffic.)

The show ended with Orton getting triple-teamed by Evolution before Shelton Benjamin(returning from injury) and Benoit came out to save him. Overall, it was a decent show.

More tomorrow, if I get to it.

* and how exactly does a show that runs 52 weeks a year with no reruns or hiatus time have a "season premiere" anyway?

Blocked am I.

Can't think of anything good to write about. Haven't got around to watching Videodrome, and I've got more stuff to watch now, because the director's cut of THX1138 is sitting on my desk waiting to be ripped.

HHH won the title back tonight, and they're gonna have to work REAL hard to convince me that this is a good thing for the company, but I didn't see the show(I was at the video store.) I'll probably download it, but I'm not expecting much from what I've read so far.

I was going to write something about TNA's final weekly PPV, which I actually spent the $10 to buy instead of just downloading it, but the combination of Jarrett retaining the belt and Dusty Rhodes not getting beaten and kicked out of TNA just left me sour. I think I've about put paid to my interest in TNA unless they turn Impact into a show more like Raw and less like WWF Superstars.

Maybe I'll come up with something better tomorrow.

The Next Great Ham'N'Egger?

Okay, full disclosure: I DESPISE "reality" television. Not Cops or America's Most Wanted, but rather the trumped-up, fake "reality" of shows like Survivor, Big Brother, Temptation Island, The Real World, etcetera. Reality television has been the death of innovation on episodic television.

That said, I did enjoy one season of one reality show. Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn that it was the first season of the WWE reality show Tough Enough, which was a show in which 12 amateurs trained and tried out for two slots in the WWE. I just finished watching the first episode of the new Fox reality show The Next Great Champ, which is very similar to Tough Enough. Basically, 12 boxers will spend three or four months training with professional trainers for a shot at $750K, a contract with Oscar De La Hoya's Golden Boy Productions, and a guaranteed shot at a WBO regional title.

The show opens with a cliche-heavy intro to a few of the boxers. There's an Ex-Con, a Prison Guard, and a Golden Gloves Champ among the group, but no mention of whether these guys are pros or amateurs.(An ad in USA Today yesterday featuring the records of them is no help, as it simply lists numbers.) The 12 have brought a significant other with them, to act as a second, but obviously also to help the drama. And, because this is a reality show, there is drama. David Pareja, the apparent favorite here, is a white boy from Chicago with a racial chip on his shoulder. He makes a comment about how easy it is for "blacks and Mexicans" to become boxers, because they come from the streets, as opposed to "white kids who are brought up with a book in their hand, in school." Nice attitude, Sparky. That's going to make you real popular. David is obviously our Chris Nowinski/Richard Hatch/dickish heel character, and you wonder if Fox encouraged this.

We then see a montage of training, as the boxers train with Tommy Brooks and Lou Duva. Brooks and Duva are seen sparing no one, particularly questioning the heart of one boxer, Arsenio "R.C." Reyes.

The boxers are ranked 1-12. Each week, the boxers will go through a physical competition of some kind, to shake up their rankings and win some money. At the end of the show, the bottom-ranked boxer has to choose one of the top three guys to have a 4-round eliminator with. Whoever loses goes home, but if the 1-3 guy wins, they also get $25K.

The first contest is inverted situps. The boxers have to do the situps and punch three buttons to light lights. The person who does the most in 90 seconds is the winner, and gets $10K and the number 1 ranking. A boxer named Paul does the most, but does so by cheating, so he ends up last. David and Mike Vallejo tie, so they have a playoff, which David wins. We then see the standard confessional sequences of reality shows, where we see that David's second, his wife P.J., is naive and a bit greedy.

We then see Oscar, Lou, and Tommy as they rank the boxers. When we come back from break, the rankings are revealed. David is number one, followed by Otis Griffin(referred to as the dark horse by Lou and Tommy) and then Mike Vallejo. Paul the cheater and R.C. are the last two names on the list, and after Tommy bitches out Paul for being a cheater, he says that R.C. is #12. He has to choose his opponent.

After commercial, we get more confessional, as R.C. and his brother discuss who to choose. David gets to put his foot in his mouth some more with some more racial nonsense; Otis Griffin is cocky but not as bad as David, and Mike Vallejo, who has known R.C. for years, expects he won't be the one to fight R.C.

Sure enough, R.C. picks David, and we get the fight. And here's where we come into my main problem with this show. Because it's a reality show, we don't get to see the whole match between R.C. and David, and the camera angles chosen don't particularly help you to get a definitive idea of who's winning.

Round one: R.C comes out swinging and overwhelms David. We see maybe 40 seconds of the round, which goes to R.C.

Round two: More of the same. David seems overwhelmed by R.C., who is just swinging away as wild as can be.

Round three: David turns the tide, and starts working R.C.'s body, slowing him down. Clearly David's round. Between rounds, R.C's corner tells him he needs a K.O. David's corner tells him to keep up the pressure.

Round four: David keeps up the pressure, and holds off R.C. to win the fight and eliminate R.C.

The show ends with the standard reality show elimination, as R.C. hangs his gloves up on a hook in the gym. His post-show comments are basically "I didn't do enough."

Overall, it's not a bad show. It's obvious they're pitching this to the non-boxing fan. Not enough is shown of the training, and from the previews of next week's show, it seems like there's going to be more offtime drama and less training. In addition, 2 minutes worth of a 12-minute fight is not enough to really tell if someone's a good fighter or not, at least for my money anyway. Fox has my interest, let's see if they can keep it. (And my choice for the winner is Otis Griffin. Someone needs to knock David's block off.)

Happy Labor Day~!

No post today(unless I get bored tonight.) See you tomorrow (or more likely Wednesday.)

Some random musings on a Saturday...

Do yourself a favor. Don't bother with Peter Biskind's "Down and Dirty Pictures". It purports to be a large scale expose of the indie film scene in the last 15 years, but I'll boil it down for you in a couple of sentences.

Harvey and Bob Weinstein are evil, and love films but hate everyone except Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith. Harvey loves to cut movies without telling the director. He loves fast food, smoking, and profanity-laced tirades at anyone who gets in his way.
Bob Redford never wanted Sundance to be big, but then when it was, he tried to shove it in everyone's faces. Quentin Tarantino is the coolest guy in the universe.

That's pretty much 600 pages in a nutshell. Seriously, after you read the first 100 or so pages, it's just the same shit over and over again for the rest of the book. Unlike "Easy Riders and Raging Bulls", which had a much larger cast to draw from, ultimately everyone in the book ends up getting sucked into Miramax's arc. Plus there are a number of errors that only a film geek would spot, such as the suggestion that the 1981 slasher flick "The Burning", co-written by Bob and "created and produced" by Harvey, was somehow influenced by "A Nightmare On Elm Street", which wasn't made until 1984.(The correct answer would, of course, be "Friday The 13th".) In addition, Biskind dismisses the Weinstein's purchase of Zhang Yimou's "Hero" as a flop in 2002. For those of you who pay attention, last week's number one film? Zhang Yimou's "Hero". Am I nitpicking? Perhaps. But believe me when I say that this book is no more then the above summary.

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Got a great torrent the other day. 42nd Street Forever is a great collection of trailers for some of the worst movies ever made, and virtually all of them are of the grindhouse quality. One surprise on the program is the trailer for Thriller: A Cruel Picture, here called "Hooker's Revenge" and heavily edited. Thriller has been cited by Tarantino as an inspiration for Kill Bill, and will (hopefully) be issued by Synapse on DVD at the end of this month, provided Don May doesn't get killed by the director.
(What is it with Don May and whacko directors anyway? A couple of years ago, it was Jim Van Bebber giving him a lot of crap over the DVD release of Deadbeat at Dawn, and now it's this nutcase. Poor Don.)

Also on the program is a trailer for the classic(and I use that term loosely) The Devil's Rain, which features such luminaries as William Shatner, Ernest Borgnine, and a very young John Travolta. Of course, it would be a good trailer if it weren't for the fact that it pretty much gives away the entire ending of the movie. (Suffice it to say, the title is very appropriate.)

I'm not sure whether this is a compilation of someone's own making, or an actual release. The trailers are edited somewhat haphazardly, and there are a couple of odd trailers included(a multi-language-subtitled trailer for The Crippled Masters and the German-language trailer for this blog's favorite movie, Salo.(No, it doesn't improve the movie any.))

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Man, the Yankees suck right now. Sterling and Steiner pointed out that in a stretch where the Yanks are 8-9, the Red Sox are 16-1~! Looking worse every day, and now Kevin Brown's broken his non-pitching hand being a fucking idiot. The postseason seems to be slowly becoming more of a question.

Oh well.

Silly Quiz...

What Classic Movie Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

Real post later.