Chris B

Stretching the definition of 'celebrity' straight away, but Dominic Cummings referencing WWE and kayfabe was one of those weird things when you remember that some famous/infamous people are big wrestling fans.

I am also entertained that there's a non-zero chance that Cummings has been on this board and is aware of the 'All Tories Are Cunts' thread.

But... what other famous people are wrestling fans? I can't find it, but I remember Alan Moore mentioning watching Wrestlemania at least once in an interview.

2 minutes ago, air_raid said:

Is that a kayfabe reason though? If the wrestlers in storyline are liable for damages then the Dudley Boys will have virtually been wrestling for free for all the tables they obliterated in 2000. And Big Show destroyed a Titan Tron once.

The Dudley Boys weren't exactly known for their good decision-making. Nor was Big Show Besides, one table out of their pay is enough without having to add a couple of monitors on the top of it. Those monitors would add up.

Basically, tables are cheaper than monitors.

11 hours ago, IronSheik said:

I always found it silly when wrestlers removed the monitors (because they're sharp and dense I assume) before doing spots on the announce table. 

They'd have to pay the cost of the monitors being replaced.

1 hour ago, RedRooster said:

But that should be the least of his concerns right now, given that he’s hired a man who is known to have exposed himself to multiple women. 

I saw someone suggest that the announcement probably was Ric Flair being All Elite, but they backed off after the response to Flair has been so negative. That wouldn't surprise me. Khan clearly has large enough blinkers on that he sees Flair as a get, rather than something he needs to do damage control over. 

It's the kind of thing where it's not the last straw, but could be something that makes even the hardcore fans realise that there are more straws than they thought.

So, what do we think of the new Beatles song?

I really like it, but it'll take a little bit to separate it out from 'this is new, and I found the documentary they posted the other day nice and emotional'. 

Mind you, I also really liked Free as a Bird, quality of the recording of John's voice aside - I'd love to hear that redone with the technology they've used here too.

50 minutes ago, SaitoRyo said:

The show was  just comforting and a pleasant and easy way to spend twenty minutes, to me. I was never an obsessive or anything. I'm also not into the revisionists coming out now with the 'Erm, it was problematic actually, mate'. I'm sure some if it has aged badly, but what TV show from that era hasn't? That's a rhetorical question, by the way, before you come at me with examples!

I think there's a difference between and 'you shouldn't watch or like it because it's problematic' and 'it was problematic in ways that would result in it being made differently now'. When you say 'what TV show from that era hasn't' - yeah, exactly, that's the whole point. It's about the cultural issues of the time. And the idea that even progressive-for-its-time stuff was also problematic is worth talking about, especially when something is SO popular and often watched uncritically.

I get that it can feel like it's just catching people out and calling stuff bad, but I don't think it's revisionism as much as it is genuinely engaging with it. That said, it's poorly represented by Buzzfeed listicles and the like.

On 10/22/2023 at 6:46 PM, Supremo said:

Most note-worthy thing on this show was the Sky Blue stuff. Originally, I just thought it was the girls shooting their own angle because of how little was ever actually written for them. But now the replays, vignettes and commentary have made it official. She’s been, “infected,” by the mist and is getting spookier and more heelish by the week, as not-so-subtly displayed by her eye makeup. At the best of times, this lore shit belongs in the bin, but did I hear the commentators mention the same transformation is happening with Willow Nightingale, too? Willow?! You’re going to turn Willow into a spooky heel?! The most natural babyface of the last decade?! You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

They seem to be going with the storyline that Skye Blue is being corrupted, while Willow is fighting it and will likely overcome it.

I'm sorry to hear that @Chili - this sounds far more like a them thing than a you thing. Nobody keeps someone on for 10 months who just isn't picking the job up, and certainly not without more in the way of a heads-up that change is needed. It's more likely it's the job role itself that's the issue, rather than the person in it. I wouldn't be surprised if it was something of a cost-saving exercise.

What would be really useful would be if, during the Okada match, they maybe had some sort of experts that could explain how some of the wrestlers have history, or how some of them know each other. Something like that would really help those watching understand what's going on without having to read loads of stuff. 

I watched part of the first episode (it's on Facebook), and while it was likeable enough, is the rest of it so fast? It feels like every scene is desperately running into the next one, and just cramming as much stuff as possible into the run-time. It felt more like Big Bang Theory in terms of pacing.

The TV version was released in the early 2000s as an extended cut. Pretty sure the extra scenes were also in the 25th anniversary set, although not with the rest of the film.

7 hours ago, BomberPat said:

It made me realise why I find WWE so unfulfilling to watch - none of the wrestling matters. Outside of the finish, nothing in any match has any consequence whatsoever. And after the finish, nine times out of ten that stops mattering too - whether it's John Cena doing a "nice speech" promo to someone who just beat him, or someone who got put through hell in a big bump filled hardcore match wrestling with no sign of wear and tear the following night, nothing that happens in the ring has meaning. 

This is why one of the points where I really started feeling excited about AEW and storytelling was a small moment, but so different to anything I'd seen in a while.

It was after the hardcore match between Omega and Mox. Omega, beaten up, goes to get cleared and the Doctor won't do it. After a bit, Omega accepts it - "after that match, I guess neither Moxley or I can be cleared". "No, Mox is cleared." Followed by Omega leaving, dejected.

Loved that.

To be fair, Exorcist III is really actually quite good, and has one of the greatest jump scares in cinema.

33 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

Thankfully I'm going to a screening of Haxan this week and the 1925 Lon Chaney Phantom Of The Opera later in the month, both far more to my Halloween-y tastes. 

A friend of mine does live scores to classic silent films, and he did the Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera last year. I'd never fully seen it before, and the colour sequences are astonishing.

The Exorcist: Believer

In a TV-movie kind of way, the first half is pretty good. Leslie Odom Jr and Leslie Jewett are both strong, and the missing kids element works pretty well. Looking at that, and the basic 'choice' bit that's tied in, this really feels like a totally different story, which someone decided to spray paint 'The Exorcist' over. And it's all the bits where they try to force the franchise in that fall apart. As a stand-alone film, it's not great, but it's okay. As a franchise relaunch? Utter disaster. It works against the movie and the franchise. 

While I get the idea of the multi-denominational exorcism, it felt a bit weak. I'd have rather they just used two different religions and made the contrast against them more of a thing. Instead, it just felt a bit wishy-washy and not so much about the forces of goodness and faith as much as about 'Live, Laugh, Love' spirituality vs Evil.

Frankenstein / Bride of Frankenstein double bill (Cinema)

These are just fantastic. I'd seen them before but not for ages. But considering how stagey Dracula felt, this really felt like it was made by a movie maker. And as good as Frankenstein is, Bride is even better.

Karloff's performance is just as good as you remember. Watching them back to back, I was surprised how different his face looked in Bride, but it's because he had a dialogue, which prevented him from removing his dental plate as he did in the first one. That said, Elsa Lanchester, in barely two minutes of screen-time, manages to give a totally unexpected, iconic performance as well.

And the supporting cast generally is great - Dwight Frye seems to have been poorly under-served for his career, considering how great he is in both this and Dracula. It's a bizarre choice to have Una O'Connor in basically every scene in Bride, but I enjoyed her this time. 

We still don't have clarification who has the rights to Cult of Personality at the moment. I still want Tony Khan to give it to Jack Perry.

The dynamic between Frasier and Niles was incredible, not least because it was pretty flexible. As much as you're right, @BomberPat, that's just one of their dynamics. It's also equally as likely that Frasier will be playing the straight man to Niles's clowning - or that they'll just out-prissy each other.

I can't think of many dynamics like that, where they could freshen things up by just taking turns playing the more reasonable one - and how quickly they could reverse that dynamic, in single scenes or episodes. It's why episodes like the one where they try to write a book together work so well, while Del Boy and Rodney trying to do the same thing wouldn't work.

11 minutes ago, Devon Malcolm said:

McMahon's never used Twitter for anything other than the odd promotional tweet, has he? Bischoff would be the Tony Khan of this tweet feud, he would definitely have embarrassed himself.

McMahon's AOL chats back in the day were fun though. He could have been a twitter disaster.

While I suspect the quarters thing was an MJF idea and there may be some good intentions, that was some seriously poor judgement and timing.

4 minutes ago, Infinity Land said:

Except Prince Nana and Shane Taylor have been explained on AEW television.

When I put together a (long, overly-indulgent) twitter thread explaining the Hangman Page storyline leading up to the Omega feud, I went in assuming that too much of the story had been on BTE - all the subtleties, etc. I was genuinely surprised by how much of the story had been told on Dynamite. Almost all of it was.

That said, I think there is an assumption people watch via other means, not least because the AEW audience skews (or skewed) younger than most of the WWE audience. Which, to my mind, means they're less likely to be watching live TV or see that as the main medium to learn from. Add in that the received wisdom is that the matches are the all-important thing for live TV, and I can see why their recap/hype packages are generally put on YouTube. It goes back to that idea that 'casual viewers' aren't as much of a thing any more.

12 minutes ago, RedRooster said:

This is interesting, because this is a big reason for why I voted "no" for AEW. The potential is so obvious, but it's very rarely fulfilled - take the masked man angle from a few weeks ago. It was really intriguing, but it was made to feel like it doesn't matter through its subsequent treatment. AEW isn't good at making storylines feel like they matter at the moment, and I think that's partly down to there being too much content - imagine concentrating the best elements of Dynamite, Rampage and Collision all into one show - you'd have a red-hot show each week. As it stands, it all feels so diluted. 

Similarly, ROH hangs around like a bad smell, really taking away from AEW programming. Who is Shane Taylor, and what is Shane Taylor promotions? Who is Prince Nana; is he supposed to be a real prince? What's the exact nature of his relationship with Swerve? I find it all a bit confusing, and I can't be the only one. Plus there's the way Tony Khan treats his female roster. Athena is doing career-best work, but you wouldn't know it. Willow Nightingale has such obvious potential, but it doesn't matter. Then you have Emi Sakura, Shida, Nyla Rose, Statlander and others - a high potential women's roster that is made to feel superfluous. 

On the other hand, I voted "yes" to WWE. Raw and Smackdown aren't perfect, and WWE has made mistakes along the way with The Bloodline, but on the whole, I'm finding the shows very entertaining. The wrestling is good, and plot lines aren't suddenly dropped as they once were - there's reason to read into things they choose to do. It feels like anyone can show up, and shows generally feel hot, especially Smackdown. 

There's no reason why AEW couldn't feel that way too - they have the roster - and they have felt incredibly hot at various points in their existence. Hopefully they'll get back to feeling that way, but I do worry that Tony Khan is going to end up his own worst enemy; much as Vince McMahon was for WWE, for the longest time. 

 

I don't disagree with any of that. 'Satisfied' can mean different things though - "My hotel room was satisfactory" vs "My hotel room was fantastic". 

It's satisfactory, not thrilling. It meets the minimum requirements for me - which, to be fair, was only very rarely met by WWE when I watched that. WWE was generally good at setting things up in an exciting way (think of the amount of times we all thought 'oh, this could be different' or 'they might finally make Randy Orton interesting'), but it didn't tend to move forward or pay off in a satisfying way. 

I'm satisfied with AEW - there's enough good stuff in there that I don't find what I watch (Dynamite, PPVs and occasional other shows) to be a chore, and there's usually some really good stuff on it. It's easy, it's fun and occasionally excellent.

I'd love to be blown away more often, though. They tend to be a little clunky starting off feuds, and they hold off on the big matches enough that they just end up feeling like they never happen. And sometimes, I want focus where it gets crowded - like, Takeshita vs Omega should feel bigger than it is. But somehow, it's now become primarily about Chris Jericho.

But after years of not feeling like I was being catered to, a product that's isn't quite as good as it could be still feels like a step up.

10 minutes ago, SuperBacon said:

OK, but it's not a converted public toilet is it? 

There's one of those near Regent Street called The Convenience, and it's actually quite well done.

Could you add 'view results' as an option to both? I only watch AEW, but it's insisting on an answer to the WWE question as well.

There's a Frankie Boyle line that I keep thinking of: “Nothing can stop Labour from winning the next general election. And that nothing is Keir Starmer.”

6 minutes ago, Loki said:

And was heavily rejected.  You might want these things, I might want these things, but if championing them means returning a hefty Tory majority then it's pointless to keep shouting them at the electorate.

The manifesto was:

• released too close to the election to be all that useful
• ridiculed as unrealistic ('magic money tree')
• associated entirely with Corbyn, who was painted as an extremist.

I don't think most people could tell you what was in the damn thing anyway - so it turning out to have actually countered most of what the tories are now doing is something that could be useful.