BomberPat

I assume they're holding out for a possible Nigel McGuinness match for Danielson at Wembley, or we'll get another Stadium Stampede match for Blackpool Combat Club. I can see Ospreay getting the main event, whether that's a World Title match or something else, I don't know. I kind of assume they would have gone Ospreay/Omega if Kenny were healthy, or Ospreay & Kenny against the Don Callis Family in some capacity.

They're a standard metal folding chair, there's no gimmick to it, so they have a decent amount of heft to them. Every wrestler or trainee I know who has picked one up for the first time has gently bopped themselves in the forehead with it and been surprised how much that hurts.

Is this "Pandora" at 0:45, do we reckon?

I watched Top Gun Maverick for the first time last night, and thought it was bang average. I have no real nostalgic connection to the original, so found a lot of it cloying and irritating. The action scenes were really impressive, but every character was irritating, none of it was believable, half the dialogue was clunky exposition, and I'm just utterly burned out on not on remakes and sequels per sé but on remakes and sequels that just obsessively fetishise the iconography of the original film. The film is full of lingering shots on Maverick's jacket, or anything else you might recognise from the original film, because REMEMBER TOP GUN? I found it hard not to laugh out loud every time there was a photo of characters from the original film displayed on the wall - stills from Top Gun framed on the walls of Naval offices, or Maverick's locker door covered in photos of his old friends like he's a teenage girl - or every time characters in the movie recapped the events of the original in conversation; it's been thirty years, and none of these people have had a single new photograph taken, or had any of these conversations in the meantime. Outside of Val Kilmer's scene, which was at least genuinely moving though more for Val Kilmer's real life health issues than for any narrative significance, there's no sense that any of the characters from the original film had any kind of lived experience or internal life in the intervening thirty years. They just sat around waiting for a sequel. As three stars a movie as ever exists, genuinely do not understand all the love it got on release.

This is actually a more nuanced example than you might expect, as Kingsley is half-Gujarati. So it's not "John Wayne as Genghis Khan" territory. Other than tabloid ghouls knowing that it'll generate clicks, this kind of casting controversy comes down to the assumption that white, male and straight, or at least two out of the three, is the default option. That all roles would naturally go to white men and white women, and that it's only a conscious and political choice when a casting director deviates from that and casts a woman in a conventionally male role, or an ethnic minority in a role that was historically white (though, in many cases, it doesn't even need that caveat, as some people get angry about non-white actors being cast at all). When a white actor is cast in a play or a film, you don't get people wringing their hands and demanding to know if they were really "the best person for the job", but if a black actor gets the same part, you're inundated with comments about how the role should go to the best candidate, not just ticking boxes, without any consideration that maybe the black actor was the best candidate for the role, and that the people who saw them audition had a lot more evidence with which to make that decision than some random commenter on Facebook who's never going to see the play anyway. It's not just in acting, sadly. At my mate's wedding a couple of years ago I had to put up with his Dad complaining about how his mate didn't get a job he went for because they hired a black guy instead, and he just got the job because of diversity campaigns - but how the fuck do you know? You didn't see the other guy's CV, you weren't in his interview, why just assume that the only reason a black man would be hired over a white man is to tick boxes, and why assume that a random white bloke is always the best candidate? Again, if your mate had missed out on the job to another white bloke, you'd maybe make up some other excuses, but generally you'd assume your mate either didn't do well enough in the interview or the other guy did better, you wouldn't invent a culture-wide conspiracy to explain not getting the job you wanted. In terms of Shakespeare, though, the people complaining about a black Juliet were fine with Baz Luhrmann setting his version of the story in present-day America, so they can't even cling to their usual thin argument of "historical accuracy". I even saw one prick say that it was an issue because Juliet wasn't black "in the original film". The beauty of Shakespeare is that it's incredibly malleable - Orson Welles directed an all-black Macbeth set in the Caribbean, Akala set up the Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company, Hamlet has been performed in Klingon, a 20-something John Gielgud played an 80-something King Lear and an 80-something year old Ian McKellen played a 20-something year Hamlet. The script can survive a black actor in a role that has absolutely nothing about it to suggest it can't be played by a black actor, has probably been played by black actors countless times in the past, and being played by a black actor may even uncover nuances and interpretations that audiences hadn't previously considered. Aside from being clickbait for racists, there's no issue.

we don't know that Tony Khan was sitting there in silence, though. He's on a headset, he could very easily have been giving orders to production, I don't think little Tony getting up and stepping in himself was going to be much help. He also still had an enormous wrestling show to run, so was juggling a lot of balls in that moment, and it should fall to the Chris Heros and Jerry Lynns to sort this stuff out, not the boss stepping in directly in the first instance. Jonathan Snowden - who is admittedly no fan of Punk - takes exception to the idea that the footage confirms Punk's version of events. https://hybridshoot.substack.com/p/stop-please-cm-punkyoure-telling He makes the point that Punk tries to claim that he was the calm and cool customer who was goaded into a fight, but the video looks very much like Punk steps up to Perry, and waits until Perry is tying his hair up, so doesn't have his hands free, before punching him and choking him, and that Punk's version of events leaves out that he needs to be physically dragged away. I don't think this video changes anyone's perception of events, but I do think it's not nearly as simple as "the video confirms what Punk said happened". The more interesting thing Snowden brings up, which I've not seen suggested anywhere else, leans into Tony Khan saying that the plan had been to air this footage on this episode even before the Punk interview aired - that this angle wasn't a response to CM Punk's interview, but that CM Punk got word that AEW were going to air the footage and arranged the interview to get his story in ahead of it.

I still have no desire to see anyone really go to WWE, because WWE have hit a one-in-a-million home run on their biggest show of the year, so we're effectively comparing Wrestlemania to weekly TV, and most of WWE's weekly TV still looks like uninspired dross. Cody might have had the red carpet laid out for them, but Andrade hasn't exactly had a hero's welcome back in WWE, and I doubt Malakai Black or Miro or whoever would do anything to rise up out of the forever-midcard mess either. AEW are still capable of putting together matches that, from the match graphic alone, I ever get excited or think "wow, I never imagined I'd see that" or "I can't really picture in my head what looks like, I'm curious to find out", and WWE basically can't achieve that, because I already know what a WWE match looks like, regardless of who's in it. They have a house style and a formula that shaves off the bits of wrestling that make wrestlers interesting or different and turn them into WWE versions of those wrestlers, and that works for them, but I can't think of anyone in AEW or anywhere else that I would be more interested to see in WWE. I'm not disappointed in where AEW's at in comparison to WWE, I'm disappointed that a TV show I watch every week and usually look forward to and have something worth talking about coming out of it has this week just been a slog. They're building to an absolutely stacked PPV, and you wouldn't have known it from this show, there was no energy to it, no life, and too much petty shots at WWE. I was at a basketball game last night, and my partner commented on how much the opposition side's coaches were arguing with the referee compared to the home team, and I said you don't argue with the ref when you're winning - and right now, AEW keeps proverbially arguing with the referee. Just play a better game and remind me why I like you, rather than taking potshots at the other team. It's not just the CM Punk video. I actually liked the idea that the Young Bucks, in their current gimmick, would try and bullshit together an excuse that they lose matches because they're too busy with their other super-important jobs, that's completely in character. They're about to face FTR, so tying it into backstage chaos at All In makes some kind of sense, particularly if it's going to bring Jack Perry into the mix. But actually playing the footage added nothing, and detracted a lot more. It felt desperate, it overshadowed the actual story, and it guaranteed that Jack Perry is going to be followed by "CM Punk" chants for the rest of his career. AEW was the babyface promotion and they're dangerously close to turning them heel, and you can't afford the company to be the heel when you're the smaller company, the challenger brand that relies on brand loyalty. On top of that, there's Will Ospreay using half his interview time to address something from the WWE's press conference and cut a promo on Triple H - why? We're not getting Will Ospreay vs. Triple H. The "boss' daughter" stuff screamed of mid-00s TNA. The whole show had the stink of Voodoo Kin Mafia on it. And then on top of all that, you've got a main event where Dustin Rhodes is fighting for the World Title, and that should be great, but it was piggybacking on the main event of Wrestlemania so blatantly, so one hand they're slagging off WWE and people who work there, and on the other hand they're tacitly admitting that WWE's main event was great and here's our budget-price version of it. It doesn't work. It especially doesn't work when WWE are coming off the most critically acclaimed PPV in years, and are generally on a hot streak and, incredibly given everything going on around that company, getting a lot of audience goodwill. And when WWE are all but acknowledging AEW's role in making Cody a star, showing photos of Kenny Omega, Chris Jericho and the Young Bucks in the pre-match video package for the main event of Wrestlemania, it makes AEW look even more desperate to targeting them now, and even more petty to be criticising them when, at least publicly, WWE have come across as pretty even-handed about them. And then it's not even just the WWE stuff. You've got Chris Jericho in Highspots tights and a shitty T-shirt looking the worst he's ever looked, and the most like a washed up BritWres talent who hasn't wrestled outside his hometown in 15 years, actively detracting from the two effortlessly cool wrestlers stood either side of him. You've got a tag team breakup storyline happening in fast-forward so Chris Jericho can attach himself to Hook, but the guy taking the fall in their match isn't even a member of the tag team. The trio that beat them have an Olympic boxer on their team, but he wasn't the member of the team who helped them win with a big knock-out punch. Adam Copeland vs. Penta was good, but Adam Copeland is making me care less about Eddie Kingston, Mark Briscoe, and Willow Nightingale, because suddenly they're all adjuncts to his storyline rather than getting ample TV time on their own merits. Dustin Rhodes and Samoa Joe are doing great work, but it's tarnished by the timing of the match, and by - as good as they are - show-opening and show-closing brawls by Swerve and Joe feeling all a bit overdone. Mercedes Moné isn't going to debut until not this pay-per-view, but the next pay-per-view, which means we've got more than a month, and a whole other PPV cycle, of her being trotted out to pose and dance for a bit and hit a stilted couple of promo lines, and never actually wrestle. And going back to the CM Punk footage, because it's all anyone is going to remember from this show anyway, introducing that footage into kayfabe is a fucking mess. So the unforgivable thing that caused untold chaos backstage was a fight backstage? But hang on, isn't that happening every week on this TV show? Wasn't Mercedes Moné attacked during her interview on this episode? Wasn't there a dude in a devil mask and a bunch of cronies leaving people unconscious in the car park and throwing people through windows backstage for weeks? What makes this one scuffle so much more important?

that would have been the worst Dynamite in weeks even without the Punk footage, but luckily it had that to make the whole thing feel a bit grubby as well.

Surely the days of tuning it out of curiosity for a segment like that are long dead? If the only thing I wanted to see was the CM Punk footage, and just for it's own sake rather than wondering how they incorporated it into a storyline, I wouldn't go out of my way to tune into Dynamite for it, I'd wait until it inevitably showed up on YouTube or social media.

Jon Snow was asked in an interview years ago if he considered himself a feminist, and he answered that it's not his decision to make. That's where I'm at for now, for the reasons I talked about above, in terms of whether I'm an ally, a safe person to turn to, or anything else, it's not me who gets to make that judgement, it's others who have to make it about me. I obviously hope that people see me in those terms, but I think a lot of men are quick to adopt the language of allyship not for any untoward reasons, but because they want to be part of the conversation, when often it's a lot more helpful to use whatever voice or platform you have to make space for other people to speak rather than drowning them out with yet another well-meaning bloke talking over everyone. My partner's dad's best mate doesn't have a phone at all, any time we've needed to get in touch with him it's by email, and other people leave messages with him at his local. I'm horribly addicted to mine, and to social media in general, and sometimes envy that way of living, but am always stuck in the headspace that something awful might happen and people would need to contact me, even though no one has phoned me without prior arrangement for years, and only about three people even have my number, and if something that awful did happen, chances are I wouldn't be able to do anything about it anywway.

I think the main event really summed up why Cody Rhodes is the guy for WWE. You can nitpick and pull apart all of the things that don't make sense, but they all worked, so it doesn't matter - the golden rule of wrestling is that you can do anything when you're over. In AEW, all of Cody's weirdnesses stuck out like a sore thumb to the point that people started turning on him - he speaks like a wrestler generated by AI, his promos are needlessly verbose and self-important, his matches are melodramatic self-conscious epics overbooked to within an inch of their life, and he's constantly putting a hat on a hat, apparently never having heard the phrase "less is more". Yet somehow all of those things that made him harder to like and harder to relate to in AEW make him come across like one of the most genuine people in WWE, and all of his worst tendencies are a perfect fit for how WWE produce wrestling, to the point that it almost feels like he can do no wrong now. If that match that had been Roman against almost anyone else, it would have been unforgivably shit, it would have been Triple H vs. Sting. Yet somehow the presence of Cody just pulls everything else into his nonsense orbit and it just works.

I think for a lot of people, having seen protests, activism and campaigning fail go make the meaningful changes they had hoped they would, and living through years of Conservative government actively making life worse and actively holding them in contempt, the only power they feel they have left, and some of the only agency they have left, is in where they choose to spend their money. So things like this, kind of disorganised boycotts, take on a greater degree of importance - and I assuming Rowling still makes some royalties from the game, anyway. The "ally" thing is something I do find annoying, though. That's not a badge I feel I should be able to wear myself, it's on others to decide whether you are an "ally" or not. Years ago, there were a group of well-meaning women selling a particular branded range of T-shirts, with the intention being that if you were at a show on your own, somebody in that shirt was, essentially, an "ally", a safe person you could go and talk to and hang out with. I ended up in quite a frank exchange of views with one of the people behind it, because I said that my buying one of their shirts isn't enough to mark me out as "one of the good guys". That's not something I should be able to self-identify as. If I want to be an ally, it's on me to prove that through my actions, not through a T-shirt and a hashtag. Otherwise it can be all a bit "Not All Men". I also think, to your point, that there’s more to being a genuine ally than simply not being a bigot. It's the Ibram X Kendi thing about the difference between simply not being racist, and being actively anti-racist. One is a passive act, the other requires action. Just not being being transphobic doesn't make you a trans ally, it just means you're not actively making their lives worse.

Yeah, that is what was meant. Ata (The Rock's Mum) was Lia's child from a previous marriage, and was adopted by Peter Maivia when he married Lia.

That was a real Use Your Illusion of a Wrestlemania - if the best bits of both nights could have been filed down to a one night show, it would be up there as one of the best they've done. It was a show that highlighted that there's really nobody better at this style of big, glossy stadium wrestling, but also reinforced my feelings that it's a genre of wrestling that really isn't for me, and that is only worth watching once or twice a year, nothing about it made me think "oh, I should watch this more often/I should watch RAW tomorrow and see what happens next". That's kind of the problem with building everything around "finishing the story", though, it's not exactly a hook to tune in tomorrow! Best matches were Gunther vs. Sami and Iyo vs. Bayley, and the main event was a complete clusterfuck but it needed to be one. Again, the thing they do is not for me, but it's hard to argue that they're the absolute best at doing that thing, especially now they're no longer governed by a barely concealed contempt for their own audience. Only criticisms of that main event for me are that Seth Rollins looked like a complete idiot - somehow, despite entering the weekend as World Champion, he managed to be an afterthought in three separate matches - and it wouldn't have hurt to let him get one shot in at somebody before getting murked, and that they shouldn't have had John Cena hit his finish on Roman Reigns and just focused on Solo; that's the difference between the babyface having back-up to even the odds and the babyface needing help to win the match. But it's on a weekend where the babyface team in a tag match, with a hundred other people at ringside, still needed outside interference from two massive NFL fuckers to win a match and that was treated as something to celebrate, where babyfaces routinely cheated more than heels, and where The Rock and Roman Reigns had to win a match to grant them a stipulation where they could do whatever they liked, despite establishing within that same match that they could already do whatever they liked because The Rock is on the board. Make it make sense. I could have done without all the self-congratulatory patting of the back, all the "Triple H era" and "Yay, Paul Levesque" from the Hall of Fame and throughout Wrestlemania weekend. Aside from being self-indulgent, trotting out Trips, Stephanie, Nick Khan and Bruce Prichard on TV in the current climate runs the risk of aging incredibly badly depending on how all things panned out. Even all the "it's a New Era" stuff aside from that context reminded me of them launching the "New Generation" youth movement ad campaign during King Of The Ring 1994, a show headlined by Roddy Piper vs. Jerry Lawler. It's one for the "Age in US wrestling" thread, but it's a hell of a New Generation when the first night ends with a 50 year old whose first Wrestlemania was 26 years ago pinning the heir apparent top babyface and future champion, when the new tag team champions are 52 and 43 and have both been with the company almost twenty years, along with a night two blood feud for two forty-somethings, Rey Mysterio and Bobby Lashley getting big wins, the parade of old-timers in the main event, and the young up-and-coming future prospect getting their first World Championship win at 41. New Era!

yeah, fair enough, it would only take one line in a promo to get Tama Tonga over as a member of the Bloodline - same goes for Heyman, really, early on he brought up his history with managing members of the family as to why Roman would seek counsel from him, job done. I'm still concerned that it risks hanging over every Polynesian wrestler for the foreseeable future, that people will speculate about them joining the Bloodline at the expense of thinking about what they could achieve in their own right, similar to how for a time any female wrestlers who so much as wore some dark eyeshadow had people calling for her to debut as Sister Abigail.

I think RAW after Wrestlemania is less of a thing now that Wrestlemania is two nights long anyway. As for the possibility of Tama Tonga in the Bloodline, I hope they don't go in that direction. He's not part of the family, even in the tenuous way that The Rock is, and I think that dilutes the selling point of that stable, and is a bit "well, Tongan, Samoan, all the same, innit?". Roman and Rock aren't going to be around for a while, so it's basically a soft reset if not the end of the Bloodline anyway now. If Jacob Fatu is really coming in, maybe he can team with Solo, Jimmy can be drafted to the opposite brand, and they can build eventually to an Usos reunion against them. If Fatu isn't coming in, have Tama Tonga in that spot, but don't make it an extension of the Bloodline.

I haven't read Sapiens, only the random graphic novel adaptation, but - other than nitpicking over chromosomes as an absolute definition of sex - I think that's a really useful explanation, and worthwhile in how it explains that without consideration of trans identities, because you'd hope that something like that would make it easier for those of who aren't trans to recognise that all of our genders are constructed through social and cultural factors, it's not only trans people for whom that's true. The problem is that recognising when something is cultural rather than innate is extremely difficult, because, as Terry Pratchett said, a fish has no word for water. If you've never been given cause to, it's difficult to unpick the culture that you're immersed in and has permeated every aspect of your entire life. I think that explains almost all reactionary kickbacks against "woke", against trans rights, LGBTQ+ rights in general, against equal rights movements of the past, and against basically all cultural criticism - to a lot of people it feels like these things have come out of nowhere and told them, "the way you think the world is ordered is wrong", and they think, "it can't be, it's always been this way, why are you trying to change it now?". Similarly, one of the reasons that using examples from history or other cultures often fails to land is because people instinctively kind of write it off - okay, people in the past thought differently, but we're in the enlightened present, so we must have it right. Another culture has more than two gender roles? Well, that's them over there, but here in civilised society we know how things work. Going back to the earlier point about how it's useful framing the idea of gender being cultural without reference to trans identity, it's a similar thing with having pronouns on your email signature or social media bio. There's a kneejerk bigot response, but it's not just trans or non-binary people who benefit; some names are gender neutral, and some names may be unfamiliar to you, perhaps from a culture or language you haven't encountered before, so that context clue of their pronouns can be useful. I've made that point before, and people gave argued that pronouns in an email signature shouldn't change anything because you wouldn't write an email to a male colleague any differently than to a female colleague anyway, but it's as simple as not causing embarrassment by saying "he" instead of "she" in a meeting when talking about a colleague called, for example, Ashley. I think one of the things I find frustrating about it all is that gender as a cultural role distinct from sex was explained to me in my first year at university, and it was all so simple and straightforward and obvious as to be self-evident. Better part of twenty years later, and people who have had it explained to them more often and in greater detail than I ever did act as if it's either brand new information or impossibly complicated. It's really not!

On the Royals, it's more complex because they're more than just public figures. Charles is our Head of State, so it could be convincingly argued that there is a genuine public interest need to have a clearer picture of his health and treatment - particularly given his fondness for quackery, I would like to know if any of my taxes are going to pay for him to be treated by homeopathic "medicine". With Kate it's less cut and dry as her position isn't as significant as Charles', but I could still understand the argument for more transparency about what was going on, though if I understand the timeline of events correctly she had already said that she would be in hospital until after Easter, so the "Where's Kate?" stuff was all cooked up by the media when they knew full well what she'd said. It was a disaster of PR and reporting, rather than any genuine conspiracy. I know the Marina Hyde/Richard Osman podcast gets a bad rap on here sometimes, but Hyde did a pretty good job of summing the whole thing up on their episode about it, basically talking about how the media behaves when there's a vacuum of information coming from the Royals, and they have to fill the gap with either fluff or speculation. That, and banging the drum of the story themselves, but then reporting it as, "people on social media are saying..." rather than accepting their own culpability. @Merzbow - I've seen that clip of "Pandora" many, many times, and it's good to see it in fuller context! There's something I really love about this era of paranormal content, that I think started to die off by maybe the mid/late-90s, where it's the preserve of "eccentrics" and people with their pet obsessions, and it all kind of exists in its own little bubble. You could buy books about UFOs, books about Bigfoot, books about ESP, and books about secret government conspiracies, but it was still a few years off all becoming intermingled and being able to buy books about how Bigfoot is a psychic alien and there's a government conspiracy to keep him hidden. And they're all probably written by Neo-Nazis. I blame the X-Files.

I think "social construct" has maybe just outlived its usefulness as a term, as a lot of things that start out in more academic circles tend to once they break containment and start getting used to mean something that's not quite the definition by well-meaning liberal kids, then becomes a TikTok/Tumblr buzzword, and then ridiculed by the right who only encounter it once it's morphed into something it was never really intended to mean in the first place; it happened with "emotional labour", which went from being a specific critique of how capitalism expects workers (and especially women) to regulate their emotions and put on a smiley face in the workplace, alienating themselves from their genuine emotional response, but ended up being used to mean "anything that might make me feel sad". More pertinently to the idea of "woke", the same thing happened about the phrase "politically correct", starting out in academia to basically mean "you're fixating too much on using the 'right' language at the expense of clarity", but by the time the right-wing newspapers had got hold of it, meaning anything from not saying the N word out loud to basic health and safety regulations. With that off my chest, I think the problem is that - and it's hard to not to sound like a snob about this - we're having the conversation with people who haven't ever encountered an idea like "social construct" before, so rather than approaching it in the context that the term requires, just have a bit of a reckon of what it sounds like it means. The result is that, usually, they just see "social construct" as meaning "all made up", and if it's made up, then it doesn't matter. But something can be a social construct and still have enormous significance and material impact - our life is governed by social constructs; the law, the value of money, nation states, all of these things are social constructs but are still very real and very important to how our lives are organised. But when people only encounter the term in one context, and that's the context of gender, I can see why they get a bit kneejerk reactive against it. One of the shibboleths of the anti-trans lot is the phrase "Adult Human Female", intended to say that "woman" is actually something with a very clear definition, that excludes trans women, and that to pretend otherwise is just equivocation. But they've literally just pulled up a dictionary definition and not thought about it - the map is not the territory, but it's an assumption that an appeal to some nebulous authority (the dictionary, in this case) is sufficient argument. Except it's not even a useful definition - "Female", in this context, is no less contentious a term than "Woman", and "Adult" is in itself just as much of a social construct, and, historically, you could find examples of "Human" being a constructed definition with boundaries that fall in a different place to where most people would define that term today. So the only correct response to defining woman as "Adult Human Female" is to then define "Adult", "Human" and "Female".

I think people overstate the usage of "dream match" in AEW, much like I see the worst anti-AEW accounts on Twitter sarcastically make jokes about every new signing being a "gamechanger", which just isn't the language that AEW themselves use. A lot seems to be a confusion or conflation of what the promotion itself promotes and how some of its fans behave. The recent Shibata matches for Ospreay or Danielson make for perfect wrestling TV - there's a story there for both of them individually, and in contrast to one another, not enough of a story for those matches to be a money-spinner in their own right, but enough of one to accent the PPV match they are building towards. To refer back to another phrase that AEW's critics used to love to laugh it up about, in terms of "sports-based presentation", the question of how two wrestles fare against the same opponent ahead of a match against each other is a more interesting way (to me) of building that match than four weeks of interrupting each other's promos at the top of the hour. I don't think "this wrestler is a star in Japan" is a hard sell, and I think it's insulting to the audience to suggest it is. When people watch, for example, RuPaul's Drag Race UK Vs. The World, they don't cry about how they couldn't possibly know who this French drag queen is, they accept that they won their series, are clearly a big deal in their own context, and then see how they will fare on the new show. Are wrestling fans that much more incurious, or small-minded, to not understand the idea that other countries exist where other people are performing in a similar context? Would they have had their minds blown by International Gladiators? At the end of the day, as somebody who's booked or had a hand in booking shows in the past, "you keep booking dream matches" is the sort of problem most of us wish we could have.

On that point, one of the things Cena was brilliant at was subtly playing the "heel" role in a match without actually working heel, if that makes sense. If he was with a "Cena sucks" crowd, he wouldn't play into it that much, but if he were in a situation where the crowd aren't just booing him but are cheering for his opponent, he would allow them plenty of opportunities to shine, and would modify his own offence slightly. Rob Van Dam at One Night Stand and CM Punk in Chicago are the big obvious examples, but I remember a match he had against Wade Barrett in the UK, where he slowed down the Five Knuckle Shuffle to really look like he was rubbing it in the crowd's face, and generally give it much more of a heel than a babyface delivery, following the old adage that a babyface speeds up while a heel slows down. Never going so far as to actually be a baddy, or to make his fanbase turn on him, but enough to play to the crowd in the building on the night. Eddie Guerrero was similar - if you watch him as a babyface, the Three Amigos is about being smooth and technically proficient, whereas as a heel the transition between each suplex is slower, and the suplex itself has a lot more snap to it, so the same move is used with different intent. In terms of generational differences, it's hard to say Cena "suffered" given that he became the biggest star in the company in spite of people booing him, but he had the drawback of being the first real post-WCW top star when the audience had shrunk and were generally a lot "smarter" than they had been historically, and came off the back of a few years of the company re-educating the audience as to what good wrestling looked like - before him, we had Benoit, Guerrero and Angle, all of whom we were told were top stars because they were the best technical wrestlers in the world, and, in Benoit and Guerrero's case, had worked hard for years to earn their way to the top. So then John Cena comes along, who's nobody's idea of a technical wrestler, and is on top very early in his career, and he's not fitting the bill - made worse by his Wrestlemania feud with Triple H, where, while JBL had always acted genuinely concerned that Cena could easily beat him in a fair fight, Trips in his infinite wisdom builds the feud around outright saying that John Cena isn't very good at wrestling, and presenting himself as the technical expert (which, in Triple H's case, seems to mean "does an Indian Deathlock sometimes"), knowing full well that "technical wrestler" was something the company had spent the previous three or four years teaching us to respect and care about. They then spent the next decade trying to re-re-educate the audience back into the Hogan vs. Monster Of The Month formula, but the genie was out of the bottle, and by the time CM Punk and Bryan Danielson came along, they basically ushered in another cultural shift towards a faster paced, more indie-influenced style, and Cena's US Title run was him trying to show that he could still hang in that environment. I complain a lot about how WWE don't let their heels cheat or generate genuine heat any more but, that aside, I think the days of most matches being a pure "babyface gets beaten down, then comes back in the third act" are behind us not just because of changes in wrestling, but because of MMA. Too many people know what real fights are more likely to look like, and don't buy a guy getting beaten up for fifteen minutes then pulling it out of the bag after all that, and need a little more back-and-forth, a few more hope spots and false comebacks peppered in.

one of the first Smackdown episodes written by Paul Heyman ended with Edge, Rey Mysterio and John Cena standing tall and being called the "future of Smackdown", maybe a month after Cena's debut. So he was being presented as a prospective top star from the beginning, and I vividly remember watching that episode and thinking, "oh wow, okay, this guy's one to watch, then". He had some rough patches after that - he didn't make a PPV card for months and was dicking around in a feud with Billy Kidman before the rapper gimmick came along, and even that gimmick was played for laughs at first, but his first title match against Brock Lesnar at Backlash '03 definitely felt like a statement of intent to test the waters with him at that level rather than just a filler defence for Brock. After that, it always felt like just a matter of time, and while Cena was still a heel he was (as odd as it feels now given how perceptions of him carried through most of his career) quite an internet darling and people were often calling for him to get a bigger push, from what I remember. I actually suspect that if Lesnar hadn't left, and if he had been able to weather the storm of a near-inevitable move to RAW and a feud with Triple H trying to undermine him at every turn, that the long-term plan would have been for Lesnar and Cena to be generational rivals once they recognised Cena at that level - and most likely with Brock as the babyface and Cena as the heel.

I thought "Internet fans" were the ones who liked CM Punk. I'm so confused. Either that or "internet fans" is a meaningless distinction when everyone is on social media and the fanbase is a fraction of what it used to be.

the Adam Copeland promo felt like a big TV star coming to your local promotion and going, "hey, some real great talent you got in that locker room, isn't wrestling great?", complete with him mispronouncing Ospreay's name to top it all off. It doesn't help that it feels like we've been getting the "I grew up watching wrestling and wrestling is great, let's all have fun at the wrestling" promo from Copeland for the last four years. I get that Moxley's taking some time off, and Kingston maybe wasn't there, but they're both guys who rule at doing this kind of pep-up rallying the troops promo, and that's only in part because they're great, passionate talkers, it's also because you believe that they're invested in what AEW is supposedly trying to do, and wear it on their sleeves. Copeland has been around five minutes, and spent a fair bit of that time in his own "wrestling his mates" bubble, so he doesn't feel genuine as the guy to be the flag-bearer for AEW and why we should care about it. A big mis-step for me, and while I ordinarily hate the trope of a show opening promo being interrupted by another wrestler, here I think it was needed - if they could have transitioned Copeland's promo into a reason to care about him and what he's doing, and given it some purpose, it would have stood out less. Luckily Willow Nightingale was there later in the show to remind everyone what a genuine, heartfelt feel-good promo actually looks like. Mercedes Moné coming out after that to say one pre-scripted line and try to get a catchphrase over, then start spamming the taunt button, was night and day next to Willow - one was everything that conventional wisdom tells you a wrestling star should look like, the other was the one who doesn't fit the bill but who was actually getting people to care and felt like someone you'd want to invest in. Put Willow Nightingale on a talk show, a game show, reality TV, anything, and she'd get over. Chris Jericho has to be the coldest he's ever been, just a complete non-entity working a story nobody wants, and, based on the level of energy in his promo, that includes himself. Absolutely baffling that he's persisting with being "The Lionheart" - firstly because he honestly seems to think he has a Faces Of Foley thing going on where The Lionheart and The Painmaker are distinct characters and not just different tights, secondly because he's doing his workrate gimmick when his wrestling has never been worse, and thirdly because the crowd do not give a shit about him at the moment and he's taken away the one thing guaranteed to make them react in his entrance music. The last point being especially baffling when he referenced the lyrics to Judas in his promo! Mostly I thought that was one of the weaker Dynamites in a while. I enjoyed Hobbs vs. Ospreay, more than I enjoy most Ospreay matches in fact, and the tag match was great if all a bit "seen it before", but a lot of the rest of the show felt like going through the motions.

A few over the last week: Night Of The Big Heat - a 1967 Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing joint I hadn't seen before, that happened to be on one of the more obscure channels I could pick up while staying in a hotel. In the middle of winter, a Scottish island suffers an inexplicable extreme heatwave. Turns out it's aliens. It aims for a kind of Night Of The Living Dead/Day Of The Triffids vibe where a lot of the horror comes from the survivors being trapped in one place and getting on each other's nerves to build tension, but where it lands is lots of irrelevant talk, irritating characters, and fuck all happening, with aliens only showing up at the very end and being dispatched in record time. A bit shit. The Blood Beast Terror - a 1968 horror watched in the same circumstances as above, once again starring Peter Cushing. He plays a 19th century detective investigating a string of murders that turn out to have been committed by a vampiric were-moth. A giant moth that can turn into a beautiful woman, and drinks human blood for reasons. Cushing is good, but the film is dogshit. It might have been alright with a bit more of a budget, even if it were on the lines of Hammer's output at the time, to give it enough period atmosphere to distract from the flimsy premise. Awful. Galaxy Quest - as close to five stars as you can get, really, a masterpiece. One of the three best Star Trek films. I hadn't seen it in years, stuck it on while I was getting ready to go out, and ended up running late because I had to watch until the end. Smart writing and great performances means it outperforms its rather hokey premise, and even representing the fans of its own genre as pathetic shut-in dweebs a la Ready To Rumble is forgivable. By Grabthar's Hammer, what a savings. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar - I thought this was bobbins. Like a student film trying to do Wes Anderson, all of the tropes and none of the charm. Late Night With The Devil - One I actually bothered going to see in the cinema; didn't know much about it, other than figuring the premise was a late night talk show deal. I've seen so much hauntology stuff deriving horror and uncanniness from 1970s British TV formats and retro tech - in places this felt like it could be a feature length Inside No. 9 - but never as far as I can recall seen the same approach applied to glitzy American TV, so that was a fun touch. The period attention to detail is fantastic, one of the characters being a James Randi stand-in got a big pop out of me, as did other nods to conspiracy culture and the '70s occult craze, and I liked almost all of it, up until the closing ten minutes. It felt either like the filmmakers lost confidence in their ability to tell their story in the format they had chosen, or like focus groups had told them they needed to over-explain everything, because at the end they abandon everything that gave the movie its charm, in favour of lazy horror clichés and exposition, over-explaining things that were already pretty clear in the film as a whole if you'd just been paying attention. If the movie ended at the end of the "episode", it would have been far better, and if they must tie up any loose ends, there would have been more thematically appropriate ways to do it - a montage of news clips or headlines over the credits would have been my choice. The Iron Claw - finally watched this one, long after I intended to. I thought it was good - I almost wrote that I enjoyed it, but that's not the word. It was unrelentingly bleak, and the way they tightened up the timeline only made it more so. It's a story I know inside and out so there were things not included that I was surprised by, but that was balanced out by minor details that I really enjoyed. The main cast were all really good, the guy playing Fritz was fantastic in that you never got the impression he was being played as a villain, and he believed everything he was saying. I think it could perhaps have done more to show how huge the Von Erichs were as stars, to get across why they'd be putting themselves through all this, though Fritz's obsession with the NWA Title carried enough weight in that regard to make up for it. As everyone has said, the guy playing Ric Flair was awful, but it wasn't his film, so I don't actually mind that much - he got the point across without just doing an impression, and that's all he needed to do. He was only in it for a few seconds, but the bloke they had playing Jerry Jarrett nailed it.