Lorne Malvo

Christ, please end this tedious discussion!

18 hours ago, Supremo said:

 Papa Briscoe looks to have one of the best Spears in the game. 

Add him to the long list of people who have a better spear than Edge.

I just thought the show was really weird more than anything. Like the whole show just had this off vibe where everything seemed to exist in a vacuum.

If that Punk promo is the start of his heel turn then job done, otherwise I thought it was really fucking boring compared to his previous AEW promos. Hinting at the Bucks is one thing, but hinting at MJF? Just say his name if you want a title shot! 

I love Wardlow so it's such a shame how dead he is at the moment. Losing the TNT title again is one thing, but the whole finish was so weak. It used to be a herculean effort to beat Wardlow, now all it takes is a dodgy camera shot? Christian Cage is going to be fantastic value as the (not really) TNT champion.

I'm never sure if House of Black are meant to be heels or tweeners (Julia Hart came out of the face tunnel for example) so the whole face/heel divide in that match was strange to me. And teasing an injury with Andrade when he's just come back from one just took me out of the match more than anything. They won me back over by the end though, although I'm not sure about Andrade as a face going forwards.

Miro looked fantastic but I was hoping we'd see a little more in terms of future direction for him, and the tag match was decent enough with a great finish that hopefully leads to Skye or Willow getting another title shot soon. The Acclaimed promo was a whole load of nothing but when the act is that over, you can get away with little bits of sillyness like that.

The main event was a cracker. Compare it to the Trios match on Dynamite - one was a slower methodical affair and the other was a wild crazy spot-filled brawl but both were brilliant. I am at the point now where I wince everytime Punk does a big move expecting him to crumble into dust, but I think Punk is smart enough to play off that too. FTR are still fantastic if you don't read their Tweets (and nobody is forcing you to!), Joe looked fantastic but I'd really like to see Punk/Jay White go at it in the future too.

So yeah, as a show it had it's ups and downs but hopefully in the future it feels more integrated with AEW as a whole and doesn't seem so 'this is where the naughty kids play!'

Oh, and somebody get Excalibur on this show pronto. Kevin Kelly and Nigel McGuinness may aswell have been commentating on an episode of WWE Superstars from 2013, they were so bland.

5 minutes ago, The King Of Swing said:

 

Does McGuiness still say 'joint manipulation' a lot? 

Yeah, but he's toned down on the 'he used to work in a pub!' everytime he sees another Brit.

3 hours ago, jazzygeofferz said:

 cunt of personality.

CM Punk thread is in on-topic mate.

Absolute top tier Dynamite. They are on a cracking run of form at the moment.

MJF is just fantastic. I thought for the first few years of Dynamite that he was a Miz-level baddie but he's so much more than that. One of the most fascinating characters in all of AEW for me. Deep down he's a scared little boy and the edge-lord stuff (which he doesnt go to as often as people make out - I don't recall Ric Flair insulting the cowd ever being called edge-lord) only comes out when his back is up against the wall and he feels he has to lash out. And on top of all his good character work, he gives Adam Cole his best match since Cole's ROH run. Absolutely belting opener and the finish was perfect. More of this Adam Cole please!

I wasn't sure on them turning Guevara face at first but it'd be a nice bit of symmetry if he's turning face while Jack Perry turns elsewhere on the card. The Allin-Guevara respect feels earned more than forced and Jericho/Sting is mouthwatering. Le Sex Gods imploding should be a decent storyline to keep Jericho busy for a few months, although it is weird that the Guevara turn seems to be coming before the Daniel Garcia turn they hinted at ages back.

The 8-man was good fun and I'll never get tired of Orange Cassidy, Darby and Sting interacting. Wardlow/Hager was fine enough although it's quite sad seeing the lack of reponse for the Powerbomb Symphony compared to a year ago. Toni vs Skye was better than I expected, between this and her match against Athena on ROH Skye is developing really well, and after a rough start the Outsiders have turned into a strong unit.

The main event was everything I loved about AEW. The escalation as each new person ran in, building up to Ospreay looking like a killer at the end. Just a mad joyous interweaving of stories. Kingston being torn between his friendship with Mox and his desire for battering Claudio is a great angle for them to explore, and hopefully is leading to Kingston vs Claudio 2 at Death Before Dishonor. Love it.

I'm in complete agreement with @gmoney above though. How you can watch a show this good then turn that into some slight against CM Punk is beyond me. Just be happy we've had a fantastic Dynamite and this Saturday we've got one of the all-time greats returning. I know Punk is a miserable cynical bastard but there's no need to let that turn us into miserable cynical bastards too.

Tony, Excalibur & JR wouldn't surprise me, unfortuantely. I reckon Paul Wight will be doing Rampage with Daddy Magic and the occasional Jericho stint.

12 minutes ago, JLM said:

Also I don't know if this is only for ROH or across all AEW things, but on ROH at least they've said the challenger also gets a shot if they take the champion to a time limit draw in an eliminator match. I think there's great storytelling potential with that rule that I'd like to see explored. A plucky up and comer just refusing to die against the champ and earning a shot that way could be great. 

I think that's only for ROH Proving Ground matches. Basically title eliminators with the added 10-minute time limit stipulation.

It's a shame that AEW has found itself in that WWE-esque 'lets knock the company for the most minor of things' situation. It just shows a lot of wrestling fandom is based on goodwill. When people are enjoying your product, they don't care what you call your number one contendership matches or whatever. But when you're no longer the cool new company on the block you're going to get a lot more flack. Interested to see how AEW weathers this storm it's in at the moment.

23 hours ago, Fatty Facesitter said:

 

Regrettably ROH now falls into that category. There's some great stuff on every show, but it's just just far, far, far too much actual wrestling, which I know is an odd negative to throw out - but it does often feel like wrestling for wrestling's sake with only smatterings of additional consequence peppered throughout.

I don't think the Thursday night airdate helps either. When Collision starts, that'll be Wednesday straight through to Saturday of AEW/ROH programming every night. At least if it was on a Monday or Tuesday it would help break the week up a bit.

I watched last weeks show.  I quite enjoyed it for the most part, none of the matches outstayed their welcome and it had the usual high quality in-ring. Matt Sydal is an absolute waste of a mini-push at this stage though, and nobody is buying into him beating Joe. Gravity looks like a really underwhelming addition to their lucha roster too.

Tony Khan really needs to tone down his on-screen appearances, they're so cringeworthy. Stokely Hathaway should be good value as a GM-type figure though.

The best (only good) part of this entire Matt Hardy contracts storyline was that few weeks on Dark when Ethan Page was slowly being won over by Matt and was joining in with the Hardy dance and warming up to the crowds. So if they must continue this storyline I'm happy they seem to be revisiting that. I actually think Ethan Page could be a really strong face character if they pull it off right.

I thought this was another cracking Dynamite, but I've been mostly enjoying their output for a while now. The greatest title run in wrestling today continues! Blackpool Combat Club had another belter and Wheeler Yuta continues to excel as the little shit trying to impress his older mates. JungleHook looked like proper hardcases in that wild tag match, and Preston Vance getting cut open lead to him actually showing some personality and fire (Dralistico is still crap). The heat for Callis and Takeshita was insane yet again, a Kris Statlander match is always welcome and the main event was a good scrap. I'm not sure if it's where they're going, but The Gunns joining Bullet Club is the kind of thing that makes perfect sense in the daft world of pro-wrestling.

I really liked the Cole/MJF promo but I will say that it's ironic that Adam Cole has been doing the 'you know what makes me special? When they ring the freaking bell' thing for a few years now, because it's when they ring the bell that I lose all interest in him. He's a great promo, massively over, cracking theme and catchphrase, but I don't think there's been a match in the past 5 years of his which I've been invested in.

53 minutes ago, Dr. Alan Grant said:

Fast And The Furious 1-5 - They’re all dumb but fun until The Rock shows up in 5 and everything becomes even more ridiculous. Is 5 the highpoint? I’ll be watching 6 onwards soon enough.

They get progressively dumber and stupider but I find they're all pretty fun (although I haven't seen Fast X yet). Hobbs & Shaw is the point where it just becomes a superhero franchise though, it's a ridiculous film.

I agree with your assessment of Blade Runner 2049 and Dune too. Both looked incredible but were completely joyless and I didn't care about anything that was happening.

6 minutes ago, Chris B said:

To be fair, I think the string of announcements were always planned. An announcement each week leading up to the event feels pretty par for the course.

 

It's the kind of can't-win situation companies like AEW and WWE find themselves in all the time. If they hype the show up with a series of weekly announcements it gets sneered at and the old Dixie Carter 'another announcement?!' shite gets spouted.

Whereas if they didn't do this it's easy to imagine the criticism would be 'Collision starts in a few weeks and nothing has been announced, TK is clueless, do they even want it to succeed?' etc.

Basically, wrestling fans will take any oppportunity they can to have a snide moan.

The Other Fellow - A documentary about people called James Bond sounds like it would be dry and dull, but it turns out to be incredibly entertaining. It's almost played like a thriller at times. Only 90 minutes too, well recommended.

The Blue Caftan - A really well done intimate drama about a closeted Moroccan tailor and his wife. A little too slow-moving for my tastes at times but it snuck up on me  and I found the last 20 minutes quite powerful. 

Hypnotic - It's a fun Inception rip-off, but unlike that film it breezes by and doesn't take itself too seriously. The kind of B-movie picture we don't get enough of these days. But be warned, it is incredibly daft.

Sisu - An old war veteran goes John Wick on a load of Nazis. If you like blood-soaked gore, you'll enjoy this. I loved it and was laughing my arse off at points.

Book Club: The Next Chapter - I actually enjoyed the first one of these when I caught it by accident on TV once (I think I've explained before that sugary, soapy films made for mums are a bit of a guilty pleasure for me). This is well shite though. The first one at least had characters going through struggles and things actually happening, whereas nothing really happens in this; its just an excuse for the cast to go on holiday. Crap. 

Echoing the shouts for Palm Springs and The Map Of Tiny Perfect Things.

When it comes to timey-wimey Groundhog Day stuff, Source Code is fantastic too.

If this was anybody else I'd be giving it the eye-roll 'he can get fucked' treatment, but it's CM Punk. One banging promo later and 90% of us on here will be voting for him as Best Wrestler in the year-end awards.

I'm not entirely sure why but that photo is proper heartwarming.

TIL that Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth, is the sister of Ben Bailey Smith off of the telly. Talented family!

I don't know if they're related to Clare Short though.

3 minutes ago, Supremo said:

I can’t think of anyone who’s ever had greater fuck off heat than Matt Hardy in 2023.

 

His brother, for one.

On 5/18/2023 at 7:39 AM, BigJag said:

Does anyone know what this documentary is called and where I can find it?

Was it Kings of Pastry?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rhbcv

10 minutes ago, jazzygeofferz said:

I giuess we just wait and see. It'll be another shame if anything like that does happen to be the case as it'll be another monolith of our televisual childhoods tumbling down.

I dunno, I think Gordan The Gopher will be relatively unscathed by all this.

11 minutes ago, Chris B said:

 I also had some issues with how Menkes seems to purely position her own work as the answer. 

 

I found that quite annoying. It reminded me of a couple of my lecturers at Uni, who would bring up a subject somewhat tenuously linked to the lecture and say 'you can read more about this subject in my book - it's not on the reading list but you can buy it in the University bookshop for £30!'

Not the best week at the cinema/streaming;

Still: A Michael J Fox Movie - Engaging documentary about the life and career of Michael J Fox. It has a really good use of archive clips from his filmography. These type of documentaries live or die based on how interesting their subject is so it helps that Fox just seems like one of the sweetest and funniest guys around.

Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power - I thought this was a massive missed opportunity. It should be the easiest argument in the world to say that Hollywood is inherently sexist and that the male gaze in turn leads to #MeToo and the wage gap in the industry, but I dont feel like Nina Menkes makes those connections clearly at all and her choice of clips is puzzling at times. A big letdown.

Dead Shot - An action thriller about an SAS officer and an IRA terrorist on the hunt for one another. It starts off quite well (the first 5 minutes are pretty shocking) but gradually gets more conventional and dull as it goes on.

The Mother - A fine mid-level Netflix action-thriller. One of those which reeks of 'made by algorithm' but it's okay and J-Lo makes a decent action heroine.

The Eight Mountains - This looks absolutely beautiful and I found it quietly emotional at times, but it's probably half an hour too long and the story about a man who returns to his childhome home in the moutains each summer makes it feel increasingly repetitive in the last stretch.

Rampage is just the show now where never-ending feuds just rumble on forever. Ethan Page vs Matt Hardy and Swerve vs Keith Lee have both been going on longer than I've been alive. This week did reheat both feuds up quite well but I'm begging they all move on after Double or Nothing.

Swerve/Lee missed a trick by not doing their singles match as soon as Lee returned. Instead we've had what seems to be about 6 months of Swerve arsing about with neo-Nazis and the Embassy while Keith Lee's role now is to stroll to the ring slowly while Dustin Rhodes gets battered. Hopefully Collision is the start of Swerve getting featured more, he's so good. Dustin bled an absolute gusher here and it looked like he got cut hardway.

Ethan Page has been carrying this Hardys/Firm shite on his back for the past year. I really liked the Page/Hardy Party friendship that was built up on Dark/Elevation so Ethan's promo fooled me, the bastard. That chair spot on Brother Zay was nasty and gives the feud some much-needed heat before Double or Nothing. I'm praying for an Ethan Page win though, I really can't be doing with yet another contracts storyline.

The opener was match of the night and I liked Best Friends playing on their history with Yuta. Trent was right all along about Wheeler, he's a little shit!

Has anything been said yet about Collision the night before All In? I'm wondering if it will be held in the UK, or if it will be a B-team crew taking care of it in the States.