BomberPat

On 3/8/2024 at 8:06 PM, SuperBacon said:

Thought this might be of interest to some of you. An upload of Pauline Kael books.

 

I own a copy of the Citizen Kane Book in there, and it's Kael's biggest missing of the mark ever. It was the main source material for Mank, and basically contrives to deny Orson Welles of any credit at all for writing the script, or for the film's success, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

15 minutes ago, Merzbow said:

Beefcake could be another episode where there's a more lighthearted approach, a little fun to be had with all those gimmicks.

I haven't watched it yet, but given the episode is called "Saving Face", I imagine it centres on his parasailing accident.

4 minutes ago, Loki said:

- what happened to Strowman?  I thought he re-signed with WWE?

He did, and they inexplicably thought the best use of him would be a tag team with Ricochet. He's out rehabbing from neck surgery, last I heard. I wouldn't be surprised to see him be a big "RAW after 'Mania" surprise return, if that's still a thing.

That run of Roman Reigns was a fascinating example of WWE booking being fundamentally broken through its own mistakes. They realised they couldn't brute force Roman Reigns into the top babyface spot, but also that they couldn't keep up the "you either love him or hate him!" thing that followed John Cena for most of his main event run because Reigns just wasn't good enough yet to really navigate that, so they seemed to look at what audiences do react to and settled on how Daniel Bryan got over, but rather than recognising that him getting over was because fans genuinely connected to and empathised with him and felt he was hard done by, they seem to think, "people get behind our babyfaces when we book them to lose all the time", so booked Reigns on a string of losses at the exact time he shouldn't have been losing at all. 

13 hours ago, d-d-d-dAz said:

I'm more interested by the fact that Seth Rollins is in 2 featured matches at Wrestlemania, and a featured part of 0 feuds. Absolute waffle.

He's really just Jericho at WM18 at this point, isn't he? The least important person in his match, even though he's the World Champion.

In his own title match he's taking a back seat to an injured CM Punk, and to everyone being impressed by Drew McIntyre being allowed to do fairly rote heel work because it's been so long since WWE could actually book heels properly that it now looks fresh and interesting - same thing goes for the big Rock/Cody angle, it's as by-the-numbers as wrestling booking gets but it felt dynamic and interesting because it wasn't the usual micro-managed WWE fare and actually had some heat behind it; just goes to show that wrestling is at its best when kept simple and logical. 

I hadn't given it any thought before, but why not Jey Uso in the big tag match? He'd still stick out like a sore thumb in terms of star power, but at least he fits the story. He has his history with the Bloodline, obviously, but he was also teaming with Cody Rhodes for a while and they have some in-built history, rather than suddenly shifting to long-term rivals Cody and Seth being bezzy mates, and crowbarring Rollins into a spot that has nothing to do with him. They at least briefly tried to bring up Rollins and Reigns' history with Rollins promising to be Cody's "Shield", but they fucked it in classic WWE historical revisionism by having Rollins cut a promo all about how the Shield were some iconoclastic group looking to fight against authority when they debuted, when for their first few months they were basically the lackeys of a heel CM Punk (maybe lean into that bit of your history for the other feud, Seth?) and then of the Authority - that would be fine if they were teasing Rollins turning on Cody the way he turned on the Shield, and showing that he needs to really work to earn Cody's trust, to add another dynamic to the match, but they're not, it was just filling time while he's Babyface Best Mate, the Beefcake to Cody's Hulk. There's also the obvious issue that every time they bring up the Shield, you can't help but ask, "yeah, but where's the other one?".

17 minutes ago, Hannibal Scorch said:

Cyndi Lauper did the same, first, and we still love her

Apologies for this being an utterly tedious pedantic fact, but Roy Orbison's version was recorded first, even though it wasn't released until a couple of years after Cyndi's.

The lads with Martel are his nephew and grand-nephew, who have been working as a tag team in Quebec.

My favourite email sign-off was when I was a PA for a bloke who had been director of a lot of big companies, and we would have to draft all his emails for him from stuff he'd handwritten and then print them for him to annotate and approve, a really torturous process.

When emailing a business partner called Jon, he signed off "as they say in Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan".

my Dad used to work in the Netherlands a lot, and one of his colleagues in Rotterdam told him that he didn't need to bother learning Dutch, just learn the word "belachelijk" - it means "ridiculous", and he just said that if anyone starts trying to speak to you in Dutch, you just say that and walk off. 

Dutch is just an incredibly unserious language. Two of my favourites are this announcement from last year:

And this book title, which sounds like someone drunkenly and increasingly aggressively quizzing you on Wally's whereabouts:

4 hours ago, RedRooster said:

The Fite TV stream cut off before the end of a match again? That's really fucking annoying. I found out after the fact it picked up on their Rampage feed, not that you'd know that from watching this. 

I went into the match thinking "I hope they end on a cliffhanger to bridge between Dynamite and Rampage, would be a missed opportunity otherwise". I wasn't expecting it to just abruptly end without even giving the announcers time to tell you to stay tuned. If ever an opportunity arose for a Tony Schiavone "WE'RE OUT OF TIME!"

just came out of possibly the worst all staff meeting I've ever experienced, and there have been some doozies. 

The meeting invite was sent out maybe 24 hours earlier, scheduled during a time that a significant number of academic staff had teaching commitments. 500+ people, so understandably mics and cameras were turned off, but there's so little trust or goodwill towards senior management that a lot of people in the Teams chat were seeing that as them being purposefully silenced.

They styled the meeting as a "consultation", but it was barely a meeting. Management took no questions, and just read off slides with no additional information or insight, so there was absolutely no reason for it to be a meeting other than being able to tick a box about comms. The last time they did this they said they would respond to all questions that had been raised in the Teams Q&A after the meeting, but they didn't, they just produced a generic FAQ document afterwards.

This is all against the backdrop of a disastrous and damaging restructure that is on track to see at least 130 people lose their jobs, so you'd think there would be some attempt made to try and keep people on-side, but apparently not.

Last night was The Motive and The Cue at the Noel Coward Theatre.

It's about the 1964 New York production of Hamlet, with Richard Burton as Hamlet, directed by John Gielgud, and how they clashed during rehearsals. Mark Gatiss as Gielgud, Johnny Flynn as Burton.

I was expecting a smaller cast with the focus being solely on those two, but there's a strong supporting cast with it too. I thought it was slow getting started, and it took me a while to get into Flynn being Burton rather than just feeling like he was doing an impression of him, but by the end he was absolutely nailing it - I can only imagine how daunting it must be to get cast as either of the lead roles in this, "oh yeah, you're going to be playing one of the greatest actors of all time playing Hamlet, go for it". Gatiss was weaker as Gielgud - it bounced from feeling like Gatiss doing an impression to Gatiss playing smarmy older gentlemen the same way he's been doing it since League Of Gentlemen, but actually I think that's because he's always done a bit of Gielgud in those roles in the first place. By the end I was buying into him, though, as the character got a lot more to work with in the second half.

It's pretentious and indulgent - when my friend's Mum saw Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen do Waiting For Godot, she said it was just "luvvies being luvvies", and you don't get much more luvvies being luvvies than actors playing actors in a play about acting in a play that is itself also in part about acting, with everyone getting a chance to do a bit of Shakespeare. Luckily, I bloody love actors acting about acting and luvvies being luvvies, so I thought it was fantastic.

there's a British journalist called Roger Boyes. That's good for a titter, but a friend of mine mentioned him being a customer at their work once, and seeing on their database that he was married, which meant at some point he stood in front of a crowd of people while someone asked them the question, "Do you, Roger Boyes..."

The Beekeeper

Absolute fucking nonsense. A decent revenge film, that I don't regret watching, while also being a load of barely sketched out bollocks that aims way too high with the plot in the third act.

Best part is when a character says to Jason Statham's character, "do I detect a hint of British Isles in your accent?", which had to have been written in late into shooting by a director exasperated at Statham not being able to keep up an American accent for more than two words at a time. Two or three other actors in it with Randomly Occurring Accent Syndrome too, and not one character who can keep their bee metaphors straight - who are the bees, what is the hive, and who is the hornet? Completely changes scene-to-scene. 

A ridiculous mess, would recommend.

to go back to the broken record, the same year that the Faces Of Pain appeared in CHIKARA's King of Trios, they also appeared in a tag team gauntlet in which they defeated CHIKARA's Road Warriors pastiche, The Devastation Corporation, then lost to Demolition, who then lost to Marty Jannetty & The 123 Kid. In 2012.

Just now, Merzbow said:

Heidenreich and Droz.

Droz passed away last year, sorry mate.

34 minutes ago, Lion_of_the_Midlands said:

Johnny Saint v Bryan Danielson 

I don't want to keep doing this, but CHIKARA also kind of did this at a 2009 King of Trios;

Masters Of 1000 Holds (Mike Quackenbush, Johnny Saint & Skayde) vs. Team Uppercut (Bryan Danielson, Claudio Castagnoli & Dave Taylor).

Before Bobby Eaton passed away, I really wanted someone to book a three way tag match between the Original Midnight Express, the Midnight Express, and the New Midnight Express.

53 minutes ago, Hannibal Scorch said:

It's why Coldplay and U2 are the best bands in the world because they sell the most init.

There was an old Terry Wogan line about Coldplay that I always use - "the problem with them is, only the public like them". 

I'm sure the obsession with numbers and ratings and success exists in other media, but never to the extent that it does in wrestling, and I'm convinced it comes from two places - an obsession with the "Monday Night War", and people thinking that wrestling's default state is two rival promotions trying to outdo each other by metrics that largely don't make sense any more, and wrestling fans needing to be seen as "smart". Too many fans still seem absolutely terrified of just admitting that they like wrestling, or that they want to see their favourite wrestler win more matches, because to do so suggests that they're just a mark, and there's nothing worse to be than that - so they have to wrap it all up in arguments that sound business-y and insider instead. You can't just want your favourite wrestler to win, you have to argue about how the creative direction is better if they win, and how if they don't win, it's because someone in the office is holding them down. You can't just say that this promotion, or this style of wrestling, is your favourite, you have to argue that it's the best on some kind of quantifiable business ground - that this company's ratings are better, that this wrestler is a bigger draw, or that this style of wrestling "turns off casual fans", as if the barrier to your enjoyment of a bit of telly should be whether an imaginary other person is enjoying it or not!

It's mental when applied to any other form of entertainment - people arguing that I'm A Celebrity is the artistically best thing on TV and everything else on TV should emulate it because more people watch it, or that every album should sound more like The Weeknd. 

It's ingrained in so many people in wrestling too. I've been to so many seminars where one of the trainers will say something along the lines of, "if you're not here to make money, get out", and that becoming a star and making money out of wrestling should be the only motivation to do it. But some of my favourite people in wrestling are people who have found a weird creative direction and actively turned down opportunities to do something more traditionally lucrative, or just weekend warriors who know exactly what their place is, but still have fun. Very few people would find that choice objectionable in art or music, but in wrestling there's something dirty about not wanting to be the equivalent of McDonalds - and again I think it comes from that place of being terrified of being seen as a "mark".

As for WWE, I think they're at a point where their creative direction is better than it had been for years, but that's a really fucking low bar. But they're also in a place similar to around 1997, when there's a lot of energy around the main event scene, but nobody's exactly celebrating the midcard, which from everything I see seems pretty dire. 

1 hour ago, air_raid said:

Id love to see Haku/Meng, Barbar and Warload (they’re all still alive, right?) tagging as the Faces Of Pain.

This happened in a CHIKARA King of Trios - they faced Mike Bennett and the Young Bucks.

4 minutes ago, JLM said:

Yeah LA Park is an absolute mad lad, nightmarish to work with but a next level performer. Even in WCW you could tell he was brimming with charisma and had a tendency towards excessive violence, but as you say the older and fatter he’s got the more he seems to up the violence. Even just the first few minutes of that fight for the name match he is whupping La Parka 2 with no mercy.  I need to see some of his wars with RUSH.

 

He had a phenomenal match with Villano V in the reverse mark tournament, that made people stand up and notice Villano as more than an obvious filler/eventual loser in that series, and him and Rush vs. Blue Demon Jr and DMT Azul last year was tremendous stuff; both teams spend the entire match beating the shit out of each other rather than their opponents, and the crowd are molten for Park the whole time. 

L.A. Park is up there with Atsushi Onita on my list of "if money were no object, and you actually didn't have to deal with the person but somehow still get them to wrestle for you" dream bookings, the absolute platonic ideal of the violent middle-aged lucha nutter. Only gets better the older and fatter he gets.

Super Parka was a tremendous bit too - he used to wrestle as Volador (his son is currently Volador Jr. in CMLL), but took one look at how much success his nephew was having as La Parka and thought, "I'll have some of that" and just copied his gimmick. He had a few matches against L.A. Park, all of which are just mad brawls, and eventually lost his mask, but kept the bodysuit, so you just have a middle-aged moustachioed bloke walking around in a full skeleton outfit. Lovely stuff.

3 minutes ago, air_raid said:

Pat, come on.

Tell me if she's as Sexy.

 

I'm reliably informed by the good people at Lucha Underground that Every Woman Is Sexy And Every Woman Is A Star.

@JLM it's one of my favourite Lucha things, and proof that AAA fuckery isn't a recent phenomenon, that LA Park won the rights to the name La Parka and then neither man changed their name.

5 minutes ago, SuperBacon said:

my favourite Metal Gear Solid baddy.

12 minutes ago, air_raid said:

Was about to register my shock that Sexy Star had been given another shot until I realized.... it's someone else in the same mask, isn't it? From the country where La Parka wrestles, but it's someone other than actual La Parka from WCW, and actual La Parka calls himself something else!

Yeah, it's a new (and better) wrestler, who's been doing the gimmick since 2021. It's not really an issue in Mexico, but every time she pops up elsewhere people need to do the full explainer job of how it's not that Sexy Star. 

It's a AAA thing even more than a Lucha Libre in general thing. Antonio Pena, who founded AAA, was a genius for coming up with gimmicks and characters, and generally ended up owning the rights to whatever characters he created. That way, whenever someone left AAA, he would give the gimmick to a new wrestler, and the "original" was forced to come up with a new name - the most recent instance is AAA having just debuted a new Taurus, while the original Taurus/Black Taurus is apparently under an AEW/ROH deal but won't actually re-debut until he's come up with a new gimmick, as they won't let him use any variation of Taurus on TV.

The WCW La Parka was the original La Parka, but has now been L.A. Park for a lot longer. The second La Parka passed away in 2020, after injuries sustained in a match. In one of those weird only-in-wrestling stories, he died the same day as the Japanese Kendo Nagasaki, so on the same day La Parka and Kendo Nagasaki had both died but were both still alive.

EDIT: Just to note, as much as it's a AAA speciality, it's not solely a AAA thing, as evidenced by the confused mess of Misticos, Sin Caras, Mytezizes and Dragon Lees that I once tried to diagram.