Month: January 2023

Michelle Yeohwned

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

All hail: Michelle Yeoh wins Golden Globe for Best Actress, tells pianist to shut up when event tries to play her off the stage

I obviously don’t pay much attention to the world outside of my little bubble, and I’m very reliant on headlines to even attempt to get my finger on the pulse of the happenings around the world.  Rarely, there will be headlines that are pretty succinct and get to the point and they’re stories that I just know I’m going to like when I click on them.

A headline of Michelle Yeoh winning a Golden Globe is appealing enough as it is, as the woman is a legend in the film industry, in both Asia as well as the United States at this point, and it’s about fucking time that Hollywhite give her the recognition that she so justly deserves.  But then to also hear that she told the event’s pianist to “shut up,” and that she “could beat you up,” and my jaw lowers and it goes from a story that’s nice to know, to oh shit I need details, and video if it’s available pls.

And it delivers everything as advertised.  For a woman that just turned 60, she’s still stunning, and still gives off the mythical oriental aura of someone who could still whoop your ass.  Her English is flawless and she speaks with confidence and context, and her speech as a whole was powerful and so very satisfying to all Asians.  And of course, the best part was when she not only told the event pianist to shut up and that she could beat them up, is the fact that the show didn’t really waste any time in yielding the stage to her to let her finish.

It’s hard to find the right words to describe just how incredible it was of her to do such.  Calling her a queen is so white or so black, whatever demo loves to use that cliché.  But it really was a genuine queen moment, because that really is what the Best Actress award really is, but I just think Michelle Yeoh deserves better than a cheap American euphemism.  She’s really like a badass sifu of Hollywood in doing such, and anyone who tries to do this themselves in future award shows is just being cheap imitators.

And because I don’t feel like writing another post to dedicate to the topic, big ups also goes to Ke Huy Quan for winning Best Supporting Actor in the same film, to which this is the perfect opportunity to reference the fact that Jeff Cohen AKA Chunk was his lawyer that negotiated the deal for the role which is just absolutely classic that over three decades later, Data and Chunk are still working together and that even over three decades isn’t enough time for Cohen to be able to shake the name Chunk.

I never saw Everything Everywhere at Once, regardless from how much praise I’ve heard about it from everyone who had seen it.  I’m sure it’s a great flick, and I will eventually get to it, but my opinion of it is already positive, solely based on Michelle Yeoh, Data and Chunk, and all the positive buzz it’s giving for Asians.

Stetson Bennett went to Grambling State??

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Because that golden G logo next to his name is Grambling State University’s logo, an HBCU in Louisiana.  Pretty big of Stetson Bennett IV to not see color, in spite of having the whitest name on the face of the planet.

Or more likely, pretty bad on ESPN to not consider the copyright infringement and flagrant disrespect to an HBCU by gold-washing the team logos just because it was the national championship.  No shock there that ESPN doesn’t notice stepping on a black school.

But all jokes aside, holy mary mother of god, was that an ass-whoopin’.  65-7 is basically a Madden score when you turn the difficulty down to very easy, turn off injuries and fatigue, and truck the shit out of the AI, whose lone TD comes on a successful Hail Mary because the game’s rubberband mechanics basically make it impossible for someone to get shutout.

In spite of the chips on the shoulders, the media disrespect and all other detractors that should have for all intents and purposes fired them up to put up something of a fight, TCU put up what surely has to be one of the most embarrassing and worst national championship game performances in history. [2011 LSU and 1991 Miami were both shutout, and 2000 FSU scored just 2 points lol safety]  Undoubtedly, it was the biggest blowout in natty history, and outside of Georgia, probably one of the most boring national championship games ever.

Seriously, seven points?  In a natty?  It’s flabbergasting just how wrong everything was about TCU, and hopefully we never see TCU anywhere near the playoff again, much less playing for another national championship.  Frankly, I think it’s time we stop using the phrase Power Five when it comes to talking about conferences, because the Big-12, or the Pac-12 haven’t proven shit when it comes to football, considering notwithstanding that fluky first 2014, every single natty has been won by an SEC school or Clemson.

I mean I know I’m coming off as a mega SEC blowhard, but the numbers are the numbers.  All of my zero readers know that I’m really an ACC blowhard, regardless of how much Virginia Tech pretends to be a football school. Any single SEC school would have put up a better fight against Georgia than TCU did, and so often times is the case, after an SEC school routs a non-SEC school for a natty, there’s always some player or coach that makes the backhanded remark about how conference games are more competitive.

For context, unranked Florida and Missouri put up 20 and 22 points against Georgia earlier in the year.  Georgia Tech put up 14 points.  Even Kent State hung 22 on Georgia and they’re not even a Power-Five Three program.

I mean everyone has bad games, but this was the national championship.  This is the game where nobody should have any bad games, this is the game where everyone has been duking it out for the last six months and where real contenders should be showing why they’re contenders.  It’s not even that I’m happy that as a Georgia resident, Grambling State Georgia won another natty, I’m just disappointed that TCU shit the bed so embarrassingly bad.  Of course I was hoping Georgia would beat them, but when they basically didn’t even try, it’s tantamount to as being as meaningful as a win as beating a bunch of blind paraplegics in any sort of physical contest.

Whatever though, the only reason this post even came to fruition was the hilarious observation that I’m sure that only I noticed, that Stetson Bennett IV was shown on screen as playing for Grambling State.  Being the logo master that I am that collated all the logos and team colors for NCAA.com, only a snob like me would have.

Netflix’s Resident Evil was terrible and I don’t know why I watched all of it

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

  1. Something that was surprisingly difficult to do for this post was finding a good image to use with it. Despite the fact that the show is about how the world is mostly overrun by zombies, they sure didn’t show a whole lot of zombies, and they ones that they did show really weren’t particularly impressive and for a Netflix production they sure weren’t much better than a low-budget HK zombie film.  The main cast were so often away from zombies or any of the traditional Resident Evil baddies, that a single solitary Cerberus dog image, wins by default.
  2. A long time ago, when I was in Las Vegas in my brother, we for some reason went to the ESPN Zone in New York, New York for dinner, instead of the numerous alternate places to go eat, like Ellis Island. I think there was a WWE pay-per-view on that night, and we thought that they would be showing it, which is what caused us to go in the first place.  There was no PPV and worse off we phoned it in and stayed for dinner, and it was so mediocrely unimpressive, it’s basically become a go-to analogy for us to describe anything at all that is as unimpressive, even to this day.

Speaking of my brother, it was while I was down in Texas visiting him, that we watched the first episode of Netflix’s Resident Evil rendition.  I remember when it was first announced, there was a lot of hullaballoo about how the show had the audacity to cast a black guy as Albert Wesker, and I theorized on whether who cared more about it between black people and white guilters.

But in spite of the general clunkers the Resident Evil franchise has had as far as live-action adaptations, Netflix still has a good track record of putting out hits, and I tend to favor television format over film, so that stories can breathe and have better pace, so I was optimistic that RE:Netflix couldn’t really be that bad.

Welp, I was fucking wrong.  I will admit that freely.  It was without question one of the worst things I’ve watched in recent memory, and I have nothing but regret in how much time I sunk into watching it, when I could’ve watched absolutely anything else in the seemingly endless queue of shit that I want to watch.  Mythical wife and my au pair, as well as everyone else I’ve ever brought up the series with all asked why the fuck I was continuing to watch it despite my complaining of how bad it was, and it really boils down to the fact that I’m a fan of the franchise and I was always holding on to hope that things would get better as the season progressed.

But it just didn’t.  It never even got any better as it went on.  It wasn’t like The Witcher S1, which started off slow as fuck but then started getting really interesting up until the end of the season.  It wasn’t like Moon Knight, which I thought also sucked, but did have a few moments here and there where I realized that I sort of cared of what was going on.  It just fucking sucked from start to finish.

None of the characters are really likeable.  Kid Jade and Billie are naïve obnoxious teens versus the world, and their adult counterparts aren’t much better.  As much as I was willing to give black Wesker a chance, since I didn’t think Lance Reddick was a bad actor, he clearly played down to his competition, and up until one of the plot twists, he was rigid, robotic and as putrid as the rest of the show.

Jade Wesker is about the stupidest character in television since like, Andrea from The Walking Dead in the sense that she just can’t stop fucking shit up, no matter how good intentioned she might be, there’s always some very critical and tragic collateral damage in the process.  There’s literally an episode where I’m resorting to yelling at the television to get the fuck out of here with this bullshit, because she’s written so recklessly stupid, that it’s just my natural instinct as a viewer with a brain to be that flabbergasted that someone be portrayed to being that goddamn stupid.

Aside from being about Albert Wesker and his kids, the show makes a few other references to core Resident Evil IP by having lickers, showed a Tyrant, a character named Barry, mentions of the Arklay mountains, and name dropping an actual RE character late in the season, but none of it really helps, nor does it really make you feel like you’re in the world of Resident Evil.  In fact, Netflix could really do Capcom a huge favor replace the names Wesker and Umbrella which are the two main things that anchor it to the RE franchise, and just call this show by a new name and chalk it up as a clunker, because the franchise already has a bad enough history of nobody seemingly being capable of turning such a successful video game franchise into a palatable live action series.

The funniest part of this series is that they clearly were banking on there being a second season, based on all the loose ends, unanswered questions, and plot ropes they set up at the end of the season.  They didn’t even really answer the question of how the world got to where it was in the present, although it doesn’t take a genius to make an easy assumption.  And the news of the show’s cancellation was something that I already knew going into it, which added to the amusement of how the show presented itself as something that was assuming was going to go beyond a first season.

All the same though, Netflix’s Resident Evil was basically like the ESPN Zone of television watching for me.  Completely mediocre and regrettable to have invested my precious time into, and I wish I had spent that time on so many other possible options instead.  It makes me sad that one of my favorite video game franchises just can’t ever get it right with a live-action adaptation, and at this point, I just want Hollywood to just stop trying, because they’re not doing the franchise any favors.

  1. One of the episodes I watched was on Plex, so I could watch it on a device that didn’t have Netflix. The version of the episode had audio narration for the visual impaired, and I couldn’t turn it off; but the funny thing?  It actually helped the viewing experience, because it filled in the gaps of character names that the show doesn’t really put much effort into trying to educate viewers on, and it really helped pinpoint the endless back-and-forth time skips between the past and the present.
  2. Netflix’s 1899 wasn’t a bad show. It was pretty intriguing up until the weird Matrix-like ending.  Resident Evil, however stunk from start to finish.  What do both have in common?  They’re both cancelled!

Looks like someone else forgot to carry a one

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Something to mull over in pound-me-in-the-ass federal prison: Zulily employee attempts similar scheme from Office Space to similar results, but isn’t bailed out by an arsonist

Ultimately, the best part about this whole story is that it’s just a great excuse for everyone to make Office Space references all over again.  Like, people don’t realize just how timeless of a film Office Space really is, and that it was so perfectly created that it could very easily be watched in any decade with minimal age cringe, and still be relatable.

I just like how there were people out there who actually thought 20 years was sufficient time past the release of the film to think that they could actually get away with trying to enact the same plan as from the movie.  But then they somehow manage to make the same critical error in their program, and basically come to the exact same result as in the film, which was roughly around $300,000.

I mean, if fictional Initech were going to notice $300k, then a real company like Zulily was definitely going to notice $300k.  I don’t know if this guy and his team forgot to carry a one over somewhere in their code, or more likely just weren’t particularly bright, but it’s hilarious to think that they thought they would get away with this.

Worst part about the changing of the times is that companies like Zulily are largely virtual and decentralized now, so even if they did have an arsonist in place to be their contingency plan, all their data was probably all cloud-based anyway, so short of knowing what server farm in what continent it was running off of, the likelihood of them burning down the right one probably wouldn’t have been very high.

All the same, thanks to this story, Office Space is back in the forefront again, and perhaps the worthless kids of today can watch it and get a glimpse of what waits for them in the future, and bring them back down to earth a peg or two.

Too bad this wasn’t a Waffle House market

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Mmm… sweet, savory butter: “River of butter” flows through Wisconsin town after fire rips through dairy plant

Although this wasn’t in Georgia, or any of its adjacent interstates, or even on a road at all, I still felt compelled by this news story, because I don’t know why, I’m always so fascinated when large quantities of food are spilled/strewn/exploded all over the place.  There’s just something so carnal, so chaotic and fantastical about the idea of food being wasted in such a horrifically tragic manner, especially considering the state of the planet and how there are so many more mouths to feed than food being produced.  It’s like vicariously being involved in a food fight, but without having to feel the guilt of wasting food myself or being responsible for any of the actions of it.

Either way, it’s the descriptions and imagery of this story that were fascinating and prompted a post in the first place.  I can only imagine being a resident of this small Wisconsin town, walking or driving down the street, but then there’s this giant stream of yellowish-white flowing down towards me, and not having any clue in the world what it is.  And when it’s inevitable to step or drive in it and realizing that it’s slippery as hell, knowing its butter, and being mortified at the thought of just how much butter had to have been incinerated to have ended up with such a tragic flow.

My first thought was that it must have smelled amazing, with all the butter in the dairy plant getting melted, and that there were probably dogs and fat humans going apeshit over the delicious savory scene that had to have been all over the air, but EPA and hazmat people kind of ruin the fun by stating that such events typically conclude with the stinkiness of dairy going rancid in the wild.

The visuals of the whole situation are what was really the most intriguing though.  A canal getting coated in melted butter is pretty incredible to see.  Sure, it’s a colossal mess, but I’d have to guess that they really just needed the stuff to settle and harden on top, and it should be somewhat manageable to remove it afterward, and in fact probably help clean the water somewhat by all the crap the butter can capture on the surface that will be disposed of with it once it is cleaned.

But going back to the introductory joke, had this been in a Waffle House market and not way the fuck up north in Wisconsin, Waffle House could have totally come to the rescue and sent 2-3 griddle masters to the streets and cooked maybe 10-12 All-Star Breakfasts with the ton of melted butter, so that it wouldn’t have to go to waste.  It’s not like regular Waffle House customers wouldn’t be used to dirt, debris and cigarette butts mixed in with their food in the first place.

Mercedes Mone and the inevitable journey back to Sasha Banks

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When the news broke that Sasha Banks and Naomi stormed out of the WWE, I thought it was all a work (read: wrestling speak for scripted).  Usually if it’s ever mentioned on the air, it is done so deliberately, but in the ever-shifting and moving machine that is the professional wrestling industry, it turned out to be something a little more real, regardless of the fact that they had acknowledged it on the air.

Long story short, the two of them walked out citing poor opportunities and just generally disagreeing with how Creative was going to be using them for the foreseeable future.  And although it was never confirmed, and probably will never be admitted, the whole thing really sounds more like it echoes the beliefs of Sasha Banks than it does Naomi. 

Naomi had been around long enough to have eaten her fair share of shit sandwiches and understand that everyone in history is going to have to deal with them on the menu from time to time, but Sasha on the other hand had already walked out once, on her own, stating a convoluted burnout excuse before, so it didn’t seem far-fetched for someone like me to think that it was happening again, but with an accomplice.

As time passed and news and the rumor mill churned, the general sentiment was that Sasha left because she didn’t think the company was taking the women’s division seriously, regardless of the evolutions and revolutions they’ve spouted throughout the last decade.  Frankly, I thought she was just salty over not being in a world title storyline, because it very much seemed like with her, she’s either in a world title picture, or she’s walked out; she hasn’t been around long enough for her history to show too contrary to this logic.

Eventually, when old man Vince stepped down and Triple H basically took over operations, there was a lot of speculation that Sasha would be back, because Trips didn’t waste much time undoing a lot of the bad for business choices that Vince had made over the last year.  But then there still was no Sasha, or Naomi for that matter. 

Eventually, news broke that Mercedes Varnado was going to be appearing at New Japan’s Wrestle Kingdom 17; confirming that there really was a separation between Sasha and the WWE.  Further news revealed that during attempts to renegotiate a return, Sasha wanted Charlotte Flair and Becky Lynch money, and the WWE was unwilling to acquiesce, and therefore Mercedes decided to take her talents elsewhere.

Here’s the thing though about the wrestling industry, especially in the WWE: this is a narrative that is hardly unique to Sasha Banks, and I think too many people are getting clouded by gender and the manner in which she ceased to be on television.  Respect and treatment of women’s wrestling aside, when it came time to come back, it fell through, due to money.  The WWE felt that Sasha Banks wasn’t worth the money she was asking for, so Sasha Banks formally left the company, and took her trade somewhere else.

Continue reading “Mercedes Mone and the inevitable journey back to Sasha Banks” →

Wrestle Kingdom 17 and the greatest dunk in history

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Despite my criticism of the ugliest blet in the industry and my oft-criticisms of Kenny Omega, I still thought that the card for NJPW’s Wrestle Kingdom 17 looked completely stacked, and if not for the whole eastern hemisphere timezone thing, I most definitely would have loved to have seen the show live.  I’m still interested in watching it after the fact, but only time will tell on if I can even find out how to watch it, much less actually have the available time in order to.

So like most wrestling on the other side of the world, I’m left with written results and YouTube clips to piece together how things went.  For the most part, as stacked as the show was, professional wrestling is still professional wrestling, and for the names and narratives that I was aware of going into the event, few things were really any surprises as far as the results went.

All jokes aside, Zack Sabre, Jr. winning the ugliest blet in the industry NJPW Television Championship seemed like a layup of a prediction, as did Kairi retaining the IWPG Women’s Championship.  FTR is clearly wrapping up the blet collector gimmick and were obviously dropping the IWGP Tag Team championships, presumably so that Cash Wheeler can actually heal up from whatever has been hampering him over the last six months.  And it was very obvious that Karl Anderson was going to drop the NEVER championship to Tama Tonga, considering he’s a contracted WWE talent, clearly loaned to the event solely to exchange the strap.

Kazuchika Okada winning the IWGP World Championship was also fairly predictable in my opinion, because NJPW’s formula seems to be, when in doubt, Okada, because he’s basically their Hulk Hogan, and will always draw no matter what, regardless of the fact that I think they could’ve gotten some more mileage out of Jay White being the guy.

The only real surprises of the night were, when Sasha Banks was going to show up, and the fact that Kenny Omega defeated Will Ospreay for the IWGP US Championship.  Obviously, Sasha, now going under Mercedes Mone showed up in the aftermath of Kairi’s match, because why wouldn’t she be immediately thrust into the World title picture?  But I’ve got lots of thoughts and words about Sasha Mercedes that I’ll get to in a separate post, but the rest of this one is basically going to be about Ospreay and Omega.

Firstly, I didn’t think there was chance that Omega was going to go over Ospreay, considering the fact that Omega is contractually obligated to another company, regardless of the positive working relationship between AEW and NJPW.  For the second time now, the IWGP US championship will be taken back to the United States, where it will get more screen time on another promotion’s television time than its own, and it may as well be rechristened the AEW US championship [which they can maybe exchange for the IWGP All-Atlantic Championship which gets equally no domestic television screen timeWill Ospreay is also one of NJPW’s top guys, but he’s still not necessarily a household name to the global audience, and a rub from Kenny Omega would definitely have helped him out tremendously.  Now the loss could very well be a promotion disguised as a demotion, and Ospreay could be positioned for a World title storyline, but considering the post-match press conference, it looks more like a potential character reset is impending, seeing as how he’s now lost the IWGP US and the RevPro championship over the span of the last four months.

But speaking of the post-match press conference, what happened during it is what spawned this entire post coming to fruition.  And as much as I’ve blathered tons of words questioning Kenny Omega the performer, I will have to give credit to him for delivering possibly the greatest verbal dunking on an adversary in the history of the business:

Don Callis: Will Ospreay, you wanted to be Michael Jordan, you wanted to be the man, you wanted to be the GOAT.

Kenny Omega (mumbling): you’ll have to settle for being scottie pippen

DC: Tonight, you’re Scottie Pippen.  That’s what you are, right now.

I legitimately had one of those OHHHHHHHHH moments when I heard that line.  Followed by raucous laughter, and replaying the quip about 15 times.  And then another 15 times with the volume cranked up so that I could actually make out Kenny Omega’s precise words so that I could meme-ify caption the above image to immortalize it and hope it shows up in Google images when people search for “Ospreay Omega Wrestle Kingdom.”

I just don’t think anyone other than me understands just how insulting it is to be called Scottie Pippen.  It’s not just being called a metaphor for being a #2 guy.  A silver medalist.  B+ performer.  It’s not entirely accurate to compare it to being called a Robin to Batman or a Luigi to Mario.  Those are guys that are content and know their role as being sidekicks, second-in-commands.

Scottie Pippen is a guy who believed in his heart that he was on the same level as Michael Jordan.  He thought he didn’t need MJ to win a championship, and on multiple instances, had his chance, and failed.  He’s the living totem of being supremely talented, but not THE man, not QB1, not the first pick in the draft.  He’s just Scottie Pippen, the guy that’s not the best, not the GOAT, and the guy that falls short when it really matters the most.

I’ve said a lot of things about how I don’t think Kenny Omega isn’t as complete of a package as he and the rest of the internet might think.  I think his in-ring work is amazing, but still has some struggles connecting to American audiences.   I think his mic work is average at best, and there’s a reason why he is paired with Don Callis, so he can do the heavy lifting in promos for him.  I still don’t think his heart will ever truly be with AEW in spite of being one of the foundation blocks of the company.

But as far as delivering an atom bomb of a strike in a promo goes, short of the instances where people have crossed lines in digging into the personal, real-lives of their opponents, I don’t think anyone has ever dropped such a devastating, legendary dunking-on, than Kenny Omega did to Will Ospreay at Wrestle Kingdom 17.  I’m hard pressed to believe anyone ever will surpass it, unless they make a better, harder comparison to Scottie Pippen.