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If you are a person who has somehow happened upon this blog, or whatever this is, then you will know that I unashamedly love WWF (now WWE) wrestling. Back in the day I loved it so much that I dressed up as a wrestler for my 10th birthday, and that wrestler was Bret 'The Hitman' Hart. Well, I was actually Jim 'The Anvil' Neidhart because the kid I was sharing a birthday with was harder and cooler than me, but that's beside the point. The point is, in the early 1990s no one was

When you really take a moment to think it through, the movie career of Arnold Schwarzenegger is amazing. From a small mining town in the mountains of deepest Austria, he rose to become the biggest movie star in the world. This being despite the fact that he can't really act, if we're being honest. Indeed such is the power and charisma of the man that his, shall we say, limited range became it's own sub-genre in the 1980s, and an extremely successful one at that. You didn't tu

Politics has always been a tricky subject to represent in a meaningful way. The problem is, by and large, that the subjects involved are almost beyond portrayal a lot of the time, such is the vacuous, used car salesman veneer of most politicians on the entire planet. How do you tell stories about non-people pretending to be people? The best efforts are often satirical (2009's 'In The Loop' being a fine example) or overly-glossy and not realistic (any episode of 'The West Wing

Obviously, in this day and age, the subject of Sean "Puffy" Combs, aka Puff Daddy, aka Diddy, is a touchy one. At the time of this writing, he is sitting in county jail awaiting trial on a variety of charges, including assault and sex trafficking (among other things). As a human being, he has always been suspect. Even way back when the east coast / west coast beef was destroying hip hop, famously taking the lives of 2pac and Puffy's best-selling artist The Notorious BIG, if y

In 1988, not that much was widely known about the escalating gang situation in Los Angeles. This was the time of the Showtime Lakers, Planet Hollywood, and Box Office Hits. No one wanted to hear that there was a war going on south of the 10 freeway that had, at that point, claimed thousands of lives. Perhaps it was because the victims in this war were almost exclusively young black and latino males. That is a wider topic that, fortunately,  as we sit in 2025, there have been

This isn't a popular opinion but here it is anyway. I'm not a huge fan of Brian De Palma. To film buffs, this idea is largely considered sacrilege as he is often viewed as the heir to Alfred Hitchcock's throne. The new master of suspense. Quentin Tarantino went as far as to call him 'the greatest director of his generation', which is high praise indeed considering his classmates include Spielberg, Coppola and Scorsese. My beef is similar to my beef with, you guessed it, Hitch

“You're gorgeous, you old hag, and if I could give you just one gift ever for the rest of your life it would be this. Confidence. It would be the gift of confidence. Either that or a scented candle” This book, now a popular series on Netflix, is a romantic comedy steeped very much in the Richard Curtis / Nick Hornby tradition of middle class white people doing middle class white people things. On paper, this sounds potentially irritating, instead it's written in such an earn

It's been 30 years since the murder trial of one Orenthal James Simpson where, despite a seemingly overwhelming amount of physical evidence, he was remarkably acquitted of killing his ex-wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend Ron Goldman. The whole saga was really the first time something of this magnitude had played out mostly on live television and, at the time, was a watershed moment in not only American history, but in the history of media itself. You could even make the poin