A life less interesting.

HEY WEINSTEINS! WHERE'S THIS FOR US, BITCHES?

2007-12-30T22:13:00.001-05:00

From Movies At Midnight:

- GRINDHOUSE gets a massive six-disc DVD release in Japan this March.
It looks like the first four discs will be ports of what we've already
seen in the two-disc releases of DEATH PROOF and PLANET TERROR. The
fifth disc will include the 191 minute presentation of the theatrical
version, and the sixth disc includes the following Japanese exclusive
features:

- Grindhouse - US Trailer
- 2006 San Diego Comicon
- Tarantino Interview
- Staff/Cast comments
- The Directors of the Fake Trailers
- Coments on past Grindhouse Films
- Making Of Planet Terror

Not that I really need the two disc edition of Death Proof, but still...

A brief thought on the Mitchell report and ESPN.

2007-12-18T20:27:00.000-05:00

Two days before the Mitchell report came out, ESPN patted itself on the back with a primetime special celebrating their "This Is Sportscenter" ad campaign. The sports celebrity who'd appeared in the most Sportscenter ads? The same person who was, until Friday last anyway, one of the central figures in ESPN's promos for their Disney weekend in March? That would be Roger Clemens, ESPN's number one target on the day of the Mitchell report release, as well as the man who was outed by them prior to the release of the report.

Bet that ESPN:The Weekend commercial disappears for good now. ESPN's almost as good as the WWE about revisionist history when it comes to their own stuff.

2007 in Music.

2007-12-18T19:37:00.000-05:00

Top ten list time again. 2007 was a year that I spent a lot of time on the road in the car. Of course, I spent most of that time listening to talk radio. But I did listen to some good music this year. A lot of what I got this year was bootlegs from other years, and such, and I didn't actually buy a single album for myself. The only CDs I bought this year were "High School Musical 2", Hannah Montana's second album, and The Jonas Brothers' CD (all for the 5-year old, though I can't say I don't enjoy some of her music.)

I've had a hard time trying to come up with ten albums that I liked this year, so instead, here's ten songs/albums I liked this year. (It's possible that not all of them came out this year, but most probably did.)

Magic - Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band - I really liked the whole thing, which is the first time I can say that about the Boss since "Born In The USA"

"1-2-3-4" - Feist - Inescapable, but probably the single thing I liked most in 2007, even when I started hearing it in Lowe's. (Over the years, I've found that no matter how "alternative" you are, if you make the Muzak, it's all over for you.)

"Munich" - The Editors - Another band that wants to be Joy Division, but I enjoyed this much more than anything that The Killers have done in their attempts.

Playing With Fire - Kevin Federline - What? It's funny shit. PANCAKES!

Neil Young and Crazy Horse Live At The Fillmore East - The first in the series of Neil's Archives, and a great show to boot.

Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer - Of Montreal - I went on a downloading kick with Of Montreal. This one's not quite as good as The Sunlandic Twins, but it's still way better than a lot of stuff out there.

Fear of A Blank Planet - Porcupine Tree - Yay prog metal!

Straight Outta Lynnwood - Weird Al Yankovic - Another high-quality album from Mr. Al.

"Give Thanks And Praises" - Bad Brains - The first song from their new album, which I still haven't gotten yet. Sounded good to me, a lot like the old stuff.

Dylan Hears A Who - Someone who sounds remarkably like Bob Dylan singing/reading Dr. Seuss to the tune of Dylan classics. Awesome.

And you can add me to the list of people who liked "Umbrella". It's a good song. Bite me.

What's scarier here...

2007-12-16T23:34:00.000-05:00

isn't the fact that "I Am Legend" did $76 million.

It's the fact that the fucking CGI Chipmunk abortion did $45 million, thereby guaranteeing that Jason Lee will further destroy what little respect I had left for him by doing a sequel.

People, there are better movies to go see out there. Please, don't encourage Hollywood. Please.

Pouring one out for the schmaltz...

2007-12-16T23:30:00.000-05:00

I always liked Leader of The Band.

And Same Old Lang Syne.

As a kid of the late 70's and early 80's, I was exposed to a great deal of top 40 before I discovered rock and roll, and Fogelberg is right up there with Barry Manilow and Abba on my "guilty pleasures" list.

Chalk up two movies in two months...

2007-12-14T17:25:00.000-05:00

that I was really hyped up to see until I found out they changed the endings.

SPOILERS AHEAD. GO SOMEWHERE ELSE NOW IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW THE ENDING OF "THE MIST" OR THE NON-ENDING OF "I AM LEGEND"!

So, as some of you know, I read, and I like the horror. So I was pretty jazzed up to hear that Frank Darabont was making a version of "The Mist". The trailers looked really good. Then I read an interview with Stephen King where he discussed the fact that Darabont changed the ending, and he really liked it.

Shit, I thought, this is the man who thought his junky miniseries version of "The Shining" was better than Stanley Kubrick's classic. This can't be good.

Now, mind you, I haven't seen the movie. But apparently, Darabont decided that the ambiguous, tenuously hopeful ending wasn't any good. So he decided to turn "The Mist" into a Twilight Zone episode instead. Basically, the novella ends with the protagonist, his son, and a few others driving south through the mist, trying to get to Hartford, or at least to get out of the mist.

The film ends with Thomas Jane and his survivors running out of gas, Jane shooting the others, including his 10-year old son, then going into the mist to get eaten, only to have the Army save him moments later in a fit of ironic pique. BULLSHIT, says I. As a result, a movie I really wanted to see, I might watch on DVD instead. Maybe.

As for I Am Legend, apparently they've chucked Richard Matheson's admittedly TZ-esque ending for some semi-biblical end of days nonsense. From the reviews I've read, it sounds like the movie's really great for the first 90 minutes and then sort of falls apart. Of course, this is the third(fourth if you count the Asylum Entertainment mockbuster "I Am Omega") version of I Am Legend, and they still haven't gotten it right, so there you go. I would have been interested to see how Will Smith played the vampire(er, zombie) bogeyman of Matheson's story.

Guess I'll go and see The Golden Compass after all. I know they've screwed that one up too, but it's not a book I hold in high esteem.

The people who are trying to protect you from piracy...

2007-12-13T15:08:00.000-05:00

think you're a pirate anyway.

Apparently, they don't care about fair use when it comes to mp3s. And they wonder why we're still working on alternate ways to pirate.

They took away Napster, we got AudioGalaxy. They took away AudioGalaxy, we got Soulseeek, BearShare, Limewire. Then we got BitTorrent. If they take that away, we'll find something else. Piracy will always happen when you try to control the way we want to have our music, and when you charge $20 for a CD and $12 bucks for us to go to a movie.

Arrrrr.

The Mitchell report.

2007-12-13T14:39:00.000-05:00

Isn't a particular surprise. The one name I have to say I didn't expect to hear of the names I've heard so far is Andy Pettite, who didn't strike me as a 'roid ranger.

I haven't had a chance to digest it yet, but it sounds like most of what he's saying is what us baseball fans have been saying all along, that the players used, the union and the owners knew, and they kept it quiet because of the McGwire-Sosa chase, Bonds and his chase, and the return of jaded fans post-1994.

Damn.

2007-12-09T00:31:00.001-05:00

I may hate him, but he's the best goddamned fighter on the planet right now, and he made Ricky look baaaad.

It's almost a shame that Floyd claims to be quitting the sport. And, yeah, it was worth the $27.50, as sloppy and grabby and dirty a fight as it was.

Mayweather-Hatton.

2007-12-08T20:38:00.001-05:00

If it goes to a decision, Mayweather will probably win.

Hopefully, Ricky knocks Mayweather's head off.

- It's 11:30 now. This show has been completely not worth the $27.50 so far. Mayweather-Hatton had better be good.

Somebody help me here.

2007-12-07T21:49:00.000-05:00

What is this supposed to be, exactly? Is it camp? Is it supposed to be relatively serious? Emile Hirsch seems to be in it for seriouses, but John Goodman as Pops Racer? Christina Ricci channeling the girl from Lazy Town as Trixie?

Maybe it will look better on the big screen, but it looks terrible on my computer. Offhand prediction right now: either the biggest hit of the summer, or a bomb for me to cherish right along with The Apple, Xanadu, Sgt. Pepper, and Battlefield Earth. There doesn't seem to be any room for middle ground here.

Not sure if it's a sign of my age...

2007-12-07T18:28:00.000-05:00

But this really jumped out at me. Particularly since I do this a bit myself.

There's probably more of a post in this, but right now I'm not in the mood for a big post. Food for thought, though.

Today's Netflix Lesson.

2007-12-06T18:59:00.000-05:00

Make sure you look carefully at the box art AND the user comments/reviews. I rented the 1967 Peter O'Toole movie Night Of The Generals from the 'Flix, but neglected to look at the cover art, assuming that Sony had finally gotten around to releasing it on DVD.

Wrong.

The DVD is from a grey market house called The Castaways, who've also released The African Queen onto DVD. It's, well, the best way to describe it would be out of focus. Not horribly, as I've got some other bootlegs that are far worse than it. But it's a bit strange that both Netflix and Amazon would be carrying something that's about half a step up from a bootleg, but then, who can tell these days. But I'd definitely say renter beware.

On being an ex-internet smarky smark smark.

2007-12-05T21:46:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time, back in the days of Hulkamania, I was a young wrestling fan. I used to watch the syndicated WWF shows and Georgia Championship wrestling on TBS back in the days before there was an internet. I always kind of knew it was fake back then, but it was still something fun to watch. In the early 90's, as I started to work a lot more, I sort of drifted away from it(and none too soon, as I missed a great deal of terrible wrestling in the post Hulkamania years), though I do have memories of watching at least one really impressive show with Jushin Thunder Liger, and also of the 1991 Royal Rumble, which I watched with Mat and Butch Bacon.

In the mid-90's, I took a job working on the midnight shift at an alarm company. Most of the guys working with me were a few years younger, and they turned me on to a lot of different things that I'd missed. One of those things was a tape of a wrestling match. I wasn't expecting much. My memories of wrestling were limited to the stuff I'd watched as a kid, and as a result, I wasn't quite prepared for Mick Foley, the Undertaker, and the glorious orgy of violence and destruction that was their Hell In A Cell match at King Of The Ring 1998. By the time I finished watching the tape, I was sucked right back in. Luckily, my co-workers had tapes to offer, and I was instantly a fan again. It was a good time to be a fan, too.

1998-2001 was the last really great period for the business, with three separate promotions still operating. WWE, WCW, and ECW combined to offer 10 hours of wrestling every week plus pay-per-views, and it was a time when Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock, Mick Foley, De-Generation X, the NWO, and Goldberg were all ruling the business. Unfortunately, this period also coincided with my finally getting onto the webbernet, and I became a huge internet smark. A smark, for those who don't know, is someone who watches the show as a fan(mark), but also scours the internet for all the news ahead of time for the shows so that he knows what's coming(smart). It's a combination of two wrestling terms; smart and mark. For quite a long time, I was a smark. While there were three companies, that was fine. But in 2001, Vince McMahon managed to drive WCW and ECW out of business, and we were left with one decent but horribly overexposed product.

From 2001 until late in 2005, I was at my highest period of smarkness. I watched every week, but with the jaundiced eye of someone who knew what was coming and who knew deep in his heart that he could book the shows better than the people getting fabulously overpaid to do it. In fact, if you go back through the archives, particularly in 2004 and 2005, you'll see a lot of bitching by me along just those exact lines.

However, at the end of 2005, personal matters interfered in my life, and I sort of drifted away from being a smark. I still used to read the news sometimes, but I'd sort of stopped watching the product for the most part, save for the monthly PPVs that had become about the only true social event in my life. Wrestling became more important to me as a chance to see some of my friends, hang out, sort of watch the show, and just have a good time. I never even really thought about the fact that I'd given up being a smart fan until three events in the past couple of weeks made me realize it.

The first two events were the return of Chris Jericho to WWE after a nearly two-year absence and the signing of Booker T by TNA. These were nice surprises to me, and had I been smarking it up, I would have been well aware in advance that these things were happening, rather than finding out about them just before they happened.

The third thing occurred this past Sunday night on the TNA Turning Point PPV. Just as the main event was about to begin, everything got a little strange. A bit of background; the main event was scheduled to be Kurt Angle, A.J. Styles, and Tomko against Samoa Joe and the newly reunited team of Kevin Nash and Scott Hall. Hall has a history of alcohol issues and no-showing shows, and on Sunday, he was a no-show also. While I was watching, I genuinely wondered if Hall was legitimately ill or if we were getting worked, as opposed to knowing it. Strangely, it made it better for me, particularly after Samoa Joe cut a nasty promo(ignore the british guy, enjoy the vitriol by Joe) on Hall and Nash, and by extension, the TNA management. And not being a smark anymore, I wasn't aware until I actually made an effort to look for news on it that Joe was actually shooting(not working scripted) on Nash and Hall. Joe's promo was the highlight of a pretty entertaining show.

After the show, I went and looked at some of the news sites that I used to go to and was amazed that I'm apparently stupid for enjoying the product as much as I have been lately. If the dirt sites are to be believed, both WWE and TNA are putting out terrible product right now. I admit, WWE hasn't been amazing lately, but I guess I must just be a dumb mark.

I'm enjoying the product a lot more than I have in years.

Back.

2007-12-05T21:08:00.001-05:00

So, after nine months of inactivity, I've decided to return to blogging over here. I will probably be doing a lot of media stuff and not much else. I've amassed a collection of close to a thousand DVDs over the last couple of years, so now I'm going to be the millionth person on the webbernet to become an amateur movie reviewer, but I think I'm also going to try to get back to just writing the way this blog used to be, about wrestling, boxing, and whatever other media strikes my fancy.

So, yeah. Hopefully you'll find something interesting over here again.

Winter?

2007-03-16T16:55:00.000-04:00

Oh, yeah, winter.

That's what that was today.

Maybe I'm just insensitive to other people's religion...

2007-03-10T23:19:00.000-05:00

But I saw these today in a party store up in the Westbrook Factory Outlet, and I thought that they were completely freakin' hilarious.

According to the website I liberated this picture from, they're a teaching tool for kids to learn about the ten plagues. To me, they're wildly amusing. What can you say?

R.I.P Andy Sidaris

2007-03-09T21:41:00.001-05:00

B-Movie King Andy Sidaris, who I wasn't aware was involved with anything other than movies featuring Julie Strain and Buff Bagwell, has passed on.

To me, this was Andy Sidaris, but apparently, he was an award-winning TV director before he decided to challenge for the market in Skinemax/USA Up All Night-level stuff. But he was also the guy who "pioneered what he called the "honey shot," close-ups of cheerleaders and pretty girls in the stands at sporting events.", which my generation thanks him for.

Oscar picks:

2007-02-25T09:45:00.000-05:00

Letters From Iwo Jima
Peter O'Toole (Though Forest Whitaker should win)
Helen Mirren
Eddie Murphy
Jennifer Hudson
Martin Scorsese(Finally)
Little Miss Sunshine for original screenplay
The Departed for adapted (Seriously, how can a mostly improvised movie get a Screenplay nomination?)

And how is it that 3 songs from Dreamgirls were nominated and Jack Johnson and Ben Folds both got ignored?

Please, Lennox, don't.

2007-02-24T16:18:00.001-05:00

Lennox Lewis is considering a comeback to fight the also returning Vlad Klitschko. Unfortunately.

Deadspin has the best take on this. Maybe he just doesn't want to do HBO Boxing After Dark with Max Kellerman anymore. I don't know.

(Edit - Lennox says it's not true, as pointed out by my commenter(Brendan?))

Another pro wrestler dies young...

2007-02-19T21:11:00.000-05:00

Kind of surprising, but as I recall, he was pretty much persona non grata after the ECW thing. I remember him as being someone who hurt people, but there's no mention of it in the wiki article, and I'd forgotten he was part of the Invasion angle(mostly because I've blocked out the Invasion angle). He did have some legendary matches with Masato Tanaka, but ultimately I'll always remember him as "That 70's Guy" and the "Mad Fat Chick Thriller." I also didn't realize he was related to Hulk Hogan.

Former ECW world champion Mike Awesome, 42, has passed away. His real name was Mike Alfonso.

According to reports, Awesome was found dead on Saturday morning in the Tampa Area. Friends were coming to his home in Tampa to pick him up and go out Saturday night at about 10:30 p.m. and he never answered the door and found him hanging in the home. It is believed the death was due to suicide pending results of the autopsy.

In addition to working in the U.S., he also worked for FMW in Japan. He will probably be most remembered as the ECW champion that signed with WCW when he still held the title.

Tazz was brought in by WWE to take the title from him, as he jumped to WCW. Awesome announced his retirement from wrestling in early 2006.

Article from here.

Cool movie link today.

2007-02-15T19:36:00.001-05:00

This is really neat. Ghanian movie posters, several giving movies a better promotion than they deserve.

Posted with my new Firefox toy:

Pretty much all I'll post about Anna Nicole...

2007-02-09T16:44:00.000-05:00

This is an interesting opinion piece in today's Washington Post suggesting that Anna Nicole was a courtesan of sorts. A good read.

Barbaro, the musical?

2007-02-07T19:12:00.000-05:00

The comments section in this link may be the most bizarre but entertaining one ever devoted to a dead horse.

The Morning News' piece is pretty funny, too.

MTV's got a wrestling show.

2007-01-31T21:44:00.000-05:00

And it kinda rocks, and kinda sucks. (Yes, I know MTV used to run Sunday Night Heat, but this is a show that they produce themselves.)

Wrestling Society X premiered this week. I have to say that I was both encouraged and discouraged all in the same half hour. The opening match was very acrobatic and impressive, even though I'd never heard of either participant(Matt Sydal and someone whose last name was Evans.) The Evans guy busted out a nasty 630 splash as a finisher, and other than some ridiculous overselling of non-injuries, it was a good match.

Unfortunately, I had heard of many of the participants in the other match. When you have to fill your roster with the guys WWE/TNA don't want/got rid of, it's pretty bad. Justin Credible, Vampiro, New Jack, Chris Hamrick, and 6-Pac (okay, can't you come up with anything better than that?) among others. Exploding fake-ass wired up steel cage boxes (or something). More garbage than a month's worth of old Thunder reruns. And the threat of 6-Pac or Vampiro as the WSX "champion".

Overall, I'll probably watch next week, but I'm not sure I'd watch beyond that. The camerawork was very annoying, and having Zack Wylde as guest commentator was more aggravating than anything else, plus the two morons that MTV hired to do commentary go Joey Styles way too much.