Author: Colette Arrand
-
Absolute Intense Wrestling Behind the Curtain: Willie Mack
If you read any of the wrestling-related posts here on Fear of a Ghost Planet, I’m sure you’ve noticed my interviews with Davey Vega, Rickey Shane Page, UltraMantis Black, and Jakob Hammermeier, indie wrestlers who took time out of their schedule to talk to some schmuck with a blog that’s only sometimes dedicated to wrestling. As fun as those interviews were and as good as I think they turned out, they were conducted either via e-mail or through Facebook Messenger, and, in my opinion, lacked the same spark as a face-to-face conversation. At Absolute Intense Wrestling’s JT Lightning Invitational Tournament, I was given a chance to do a face-to-face interview with one of the weekend’s special guests, “Milk Chocolate” Willie Mack. The #JLIT was an absolutely hectic weekend for me, as I quickly went from being “women’s match announcer” to “all-purpose announcer,” something I wasn’t really prepared for, and I had no clue I’d be shooting an interview with Willie until a camera was pointing at us. So if I come across as nervous in this video, it’s because I am. Horribly so. (more…) -
First Issue Collector’s Item: Fashion Beast #1 (2012)
First Issue Collector’s Item is a periodic, ongoing look at that most illusive (and, in many instances, ultimately valueless) pop-culture artifact: The first issue of a comic book series. This week, Alan Moore returns to monthly comic books with Fashion Beast #1.
I can’t exactly say I was shocked to learn that the genesis of Fashion Beast was an unrealized script from the mind of punk rock provocateur Malcom McLaren. Afterall, McLaren had as chaotic a relationship with film as he did with music. In 1977, McLaren hired Russ Meyer to make a movie about the Sex Pistols. Meyer, in turn, hired Roger Ebert to write the movie, and the two men responsible for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls set out to create a film about a band neither had listened too. Ebert’s brilliant script, Who Killed Bambi, includes scenes wherein Johnny Rotten confronts a religious group quite like the Church of Scientology and Sid Vicious shoots heroin with his mother. When Russ Meyer—whose tastes were good and clean, if perverse—asked McClaren if Vicious would be up for that sort of thing, he shrugged the question off entirely. “Why wouldn’t he?” McClaren said. “It’s all based on fact.” Why not, indeed? McClaren, after all, was just throwing every idea he had into a manic, potentially unfilmable script. (more…)
-
Vader vs. Ken Shamrock (5/11/97)
I have a scary-good memory for the wrestling I grew up with, but I’ve got to admit that I didn’t really remember what made Ken Shamrock so damn special to my group of wrestling-loving friends in elementary school. I was a die-hard WCW fan until 1999, and, when I made the switch to WWF, Ken Shamrock was a dude who screamed a lot, hit himself, and suplexed the occasional referee while Jim Ross or Jerry Lawler screamed about him being in THE ZONE, which, compared to Mankind or The Rock—the other two participants in the most talked about match of Shamrock’s career—or even WWF midcard stalwarts like D-Lo Brown or Val Venis, was decidedly boring. Coupled with the fact that you had to spend hard-earned WWF Dollars at the SmackDown! Mall in WWF No Mercy on the Nintendo 64 (which, before home internet service was fast enough to load pictures, was the way to learn about wrestlers you’d never heard of before), and I just never got on the Ken Shamrock bandwagon. And yet, there he is refereeing the classic Submission Match between Bret Hart and Steve Austin. There he is again fighting Owen Hart in the Hart family dungeon. And here he is, in his first WWF match, against the man they call Vader. (more…) -
Movie Review: The Expendables 2 (2012)
Two years ago, I called The Expendables “the official movie of the 13-year-old boy.” With The Expendables 2, star/screenwriter Sylvester Stallone doubles down, ramping up the violence while making an action movie for the Chuck Norris Facts crowd. Personally, I don’t think the whole Chuck Norris Facts thing has improved much with age. Neither has the core concept of Stallone’s budding franchise, which is to gather the elder statesmen of dumb action movies together with the titans of straight-to-DVD sport-to-actor crossovers and set their combined unstoppable juggernaut against some exaggerated, outdated kind of villainy. In the first movie, The Expendables visited the isle of Villena. Here, they take on a dude named Villain (Jean-Claude Van Damme), emphasis on whichever syllable you like. Here’s a guy so evil he only takes off his sunglasses before an intended kill. (more…)
-
Movie Review: Premium Rush (2012)
Premium Rush is the sort of title that works two ways, both as the kind of delivery service proffered by the bike messengers of David Koepp‘s film, and as a description of the sort of thrill one of those messengers—Wilee (Joseph Gordon-Levitt)—gets from his chosen profession. Let’s get the former out of the way quickly: The envelope handed to Wilee is a MacGuffin, the object that sets him pedaling across Manhattan, dodging pedestrians, taxi cabs, buses, and bicycle cops. Though the movie backtracks a bit to establish the particular importance of this envelope and its contents, it only matters so much as another man—Detective Bobby Monday (Michael Shannon)—wants it for himself. See, Det. Monday’s in deep with a Chinese gambling concern, and he has a very tight deadline, by which he needs to have his debt paid. The envelope is worth enough money to do just that, but, unfortunately for him, what goes in Wilee’s bag stays there until it’s delivered. (more…)
-
Movie Review: Lawless (2012)
Were it not for Killer Joe, Lawless would almost certainly be 2012’s standard-bearer for stylized violence, regarding blood and guts as substances just as important to its function as plot or character. That’s fair, given the particular violence of the era, but what’s so striking about the throat-slittings and tommy-gun massacres of John Hillcoat‘s film isn’t the level of violence, but the calm its characters exhibit in the face of it. Its protagonists, the Bondurant brothers, are a trio of outlaw bootleggers, the leader of which survived the Great War, the flu, and all manner of worldly calamity. When you’ve got a reputation as an immortal, I guess it’s no big thing, watching another man get perforated. (more…)