The Gaffer

48 minutes ago, David said:

"alley-ooping" for his pals with the cameras.

Channeling his sobriety into a positive and longstanding passion, yeah. 

Bam Margera's been sober for months by all accounts and is back on the board.

Lovely to see. 

3 hours ago, Loki said:

can we just all agree that all wrestling conversation outside of UKFF is uniformly shit and not bring it up here. 😛

I fear this has proved to be some sort of mad summoning ritual.

I check out a few minutes of it every year, and despite the professed improvements it just still isn't for me. Even when it gets it right, it seems to be 'getting it right' in this mad overproduced continuum of self reverence that gives me a headache. 

So - really - it's absolutely fucking nailing it as a WWE sim considering the above could have been written about watching Raw every week.   

I'll admit Klopp's definitely keeping me cognitively dissonant from the midden of business practices that is the Premier League. Call it glory hunting - and it is - but it's also holding onto something by the fingernails that you know you should let go of, and it'll be easier to do that once he departs and we invariably stop having moments. 

It's much easier to sack it off when your team's doing shite. And conversely - as Devon alluded to - also much easier to approach it with no skin in the game and just absorb it as the monstrous global TV product that it is. 

22 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

Best moment of this show was the production crew missing Hook moving out of the way so all we saw was Brian Cage inexplicably charging head first through a wall for seemingly no reason.

They had quite the night. The commentary feed was left up at the start of Kyle O'Reilly's backstage segment too, resulting in Taz, Tone and Excalibur snorting with laughter from a previous joke just as Renee said "Ladies and gentlemen, Kyle O'Reilly".  Justin Roberts had a few David Penzer tribute moments too with his mic being down. 

Thought it was another good show this week. They've very slowly, very satisfyingly gone from "Ship is steadied" to "Ship's looking pretty good."

Still think the Buck's current character work is the drizzling shits. Proper fans-cosplaying-at-the-controls stuff. Same ballpark as Rollins. 

The brighter look is much appreciated. AEW needed to get brighter, WWE needed to get darker! Dynamite now looks like the eyes wide open, 'A show' counterpart to Collision's more final days of Nitro feel. 

Yeah much needed refresh, this:

The blue and red I'll forever associate with AEW's post-Punk (or New Wave, if you're in the U.S.) era. An era which truly wasn't that horrible, granted, but is still fixed in my mind as being a bit of a doldrum. 

Hate to say it because he's such a talented performer but I associate MJF strongly with it too. Whilst his return will eventually probably do some great angles, his character felt completely overcooked by the end and I have to say, I don't miss him one bit so far this year. 

@IANdrewDiceClay you got a quick nod at the start of this one. Sting's retirement's been a boom period for you! 

2 hours ago, LaGoosh said:

Promo of the year.

Been laughing all day remembering her calling him Sean 'Excalibur' Mooney as well. 

She's the best. 

Been digging into a lot of old trip-hop recently. We have a hip-hop thread - I know - but I figured it sort of blends in here more (I might be wrong as I've never been a massive hip hop head so trip is something that diverges into electronic for me).

The Bristol stuff, Herbaliser, Nightmares on Wax. That old sort of "Music to smoke soapbar and watch the drone of post-midnight TV to" stuff that I still love and was a sort of prequel to that very early 2000s dark drum and bass aesthetic for me - which I equally love - where everything at the time felt like it needed to be edgy and subversive. Think the eternally dark game world in GTA III, the creepy production of early Derren Brown live specials, the old Big Brother title sequences. I'm proper spitballing here I know, just chucking things in that formed the look, sound and feel of the time to me. PS2 system menu aesthetic, basically. 

I'd forgotten how amazing DJ Krush is, and what an insane level of output he had. 

There's loads I could drop in, but this track in particular probably has my all timer thick squelchy bass. 

Legitimately, if all we get out of this Punk run is him being the fuel for Drew to finally catch up into someone entertaining I actually want to see then...it would be enough for me. 

Vince trying to get into the arena to submit 'Diarrhea Dwayne' to the creative meeting:

Some nice supplementary stuff here. Check out the Kingston bit at least:

Most of my gushing has been gushed better, so I just want to use my post to say the MEAT hoss test of strength/pose down segment was everything I love about big dumb wrestling - do a division! - and the lethargic fuck off boos when Jericho interrupted them had me grinning like a fucking idiot. Go to WWE and retire. I don't watch their shows in full.

32 minutes ago, Shane O' Mac Version 2 said:

I guess the drawback of getting into wrestling during Attitude is that I've always preferred my good guys to have a bit of attitude with them.

Totally get this as a valid point - and there's no point trying to change your favourites - however I would say Cody has plenty of attitude about him.

He's landing blows on wrestling's biggest ever shit talker, whacked a retinue of Heyman's hired guards about with a steel chair, and wrestled a Hell in a Cell match with a pectoral muscle that was being held onto his body with Pritt-Stick. 

The only 'attitude' I see an absence of is some of the lower down tropes of wrestling's Greatest Ever Era™ which have aged equally bad if not worse than the PG nadir of around 2009.

What's so once in a lifetime and unifying about him is that he's got the kids and he's got the adults who - after years of believing we were in a holding pattern until the next Attitude Era came along - have successfully rehabbed and reformed from our 20+ year delusion that the Attitude Era was the be all and end all, and surely must come back piece by piece. 

It'll probably be months before I get to it, but it really does look like they've done it. Taken the maddeningly expanded, attention-to-detail attitude of the original Remake and done the far more impressive job of taking it out of what was always somewhat of a constricted set of areas/biomes and into the much more varied and vast open world of disc 1. 

Yeah Briscoe, Hangman and the Storm/Purrazzo stuff was the highlight of an otherwise quiet Colliders. I really hope they have the same zealous trust in Purrazzo as a long term project as I do because to me she's an absolute star in a way the crowd reactions aren't quite telling all the way at the moment. In terms of stature and attitude she could/should be their new Britt Baker, only one who is far better in the ring. 

Tell you what though, that Bounty Hunter fella leaves me cold. It's been awhile since a gimmick actually made me feel a bit embarrassed for the person portraying it. I got it in 2003 when Spanky became Smackdown's jobber-in-chief but that was sort of part of the deal and I mostly had that reaction because I was 12, started reading Powerslam, and thought he should have been pushed to main event by WrestleMania XX. 

He's just goofy as all hell. It's like a bloke playing dress up at a kid's birthday, but I don't think the gimmick's meant to be in on that aspect of it? Some of the reactions have been pin drop silent too even by Saturday night standards. 

10 minutes ago, BrodyGraham said:

The hubbub over The Crow remake is fucking ridiculous. I loved the original when I was 16, but it's aged terribly, bears little relation to it's source material and pretty much exists solely as an awkward memorial to Brandon Lee.

Does Sarsgaard look a bit weird to me a 43 year old man and not a moody teenager? Yes Garth. How does he look to the film's target market? Dunno Garth, ask the Goth kids down the park.

One thing I do know is that Alex Proyas can fuck right off. Imagine mocking someone else's film when the last thing you did of consequence was Gods of Egypt. Get to fuck!

Definitely agree with you on Proyas and people having a laugh off Skarsgård's look probably missing that it's probably going to appeal to a younger generation. 

I still love The Crow though. It came out at the perfect time and perfect age for me and is pretty close to The Matrix in terms of being a stylistic, moody shit sandwich of everything I found cool at the time. Unlike The Matrix, it's admittedly aged horribly, but I'll always have a soft spot for it and think the atmosphere of it is still genuinely stunning in parts. 

It's also got that bit where mid-revenge on his girlfriend's killers, he takes some time out to play guitar solos on the roof of his gaf in the pissing rain for a bit. 

It's like a new Rolling Stones or AC/DC album. It's just an excuse to tour the hits again, or in this case bring out part ten of his autobiography which covers the build up to the match in maddeningly intricate, touchy detail. 

51 minutes ago, CharlesTuckerTheThird said:

I've just seen the trailer for the remake of The Crow. I'm a huge fan of the original and the trailer had done absolutely nothing to inspire any confidence that the remake will be as good or better.

Does this exist yet? I'm getting nothing. 

Yeah, no, this Rock character is magnificent. Couldn't care less how actually insecure the man is. How much of it's a work. It's feeding beautifully into the on screen presentation either way, which is the only element of it I care about. It's 2024 and we've got a proper top tier, big time evolution of his gimmick that makes complete sense. 

Rock's awesome, Cody's winning whether he wants to or not, and the Rock/Roman program next year will be molten hot and something people actually want to see once the Bloodline knock seven bucks of shit out of the guy and he pivots back to mega face in a "For a minute there I lost myself" promo. They've lucked into the happiest of accidents here. A month ago seems like four years ago. 

Cody's going to end up actually delivering a baby by the time WrestleMania 41 rolls around. 

4 minutes ago, Chest Rockwell said:

The other reason I dislike IDM apart from the use of the word intelligent is because it's an extension of the simplification that is lumping all dance music in to 'EDM' which does the opposite of what you say, because it's broad and shit.

Agreed, isn't EDM more of a stateside thing though that came much later? 

I think over there it is a bit of a lump in but I've always perceived it as that millon-a-night-residency, anaemic, "Wait for the drop" style club music for beautiful people. Tunes that always have vocal samples telling me watch out for the bass, but there's fuck all bass. 

So I definitely do take a certain classification from EDM, and it's one to avoid! 

Had a good whack off that playlist walking through town there. This is my favourite new find from it:

Probably an unpopular opinion - and I'll preface this by saying calling any genre of music 'intelligent' is obviously a bit naff - but subgenre classifications are a really handy way of identifying and sharing what you like, and most musicians are being mildly annoying when they complain about it. To quote Andrew O'Neill in his great History of Heavy Metal book, Lars mate your band has the word 'metal' in it.

Goth's pretty notorious for it too. It's full of baritone, mac coat misery merchants who'll go off on one if you drop the 'G' word. I kind of get it. But metal's the worst. Metal bands who try and say they're not metal can do one.