Jingus

Kennel From Hell has gotta be a big contender. It would be awful enough if it was just a cage-in-a-cell match with escape-to-win rules; especially with those two wrestlers, Bossman and Snow were pretty useless at doing anything but backstage plunder brawls at that time. But I have no idea who the hell could've possibly thought it was a wise decision to bring actual LIVE ROTTWEILERS into the cage and then expect anything good to happen. Scaffold matches in general. I've only seen maybe two or three of 'em that were even watchable, and that's either because they had a super-reinforced scaffold or they just smartly jump-started the match on solid ground and only climbed up for the finish. All too often, it turns into a nightmare where the wrestlers are just trying desperately not to fall off this shaky, rickety structure which seems like it's built out of Tinkertoys. And I think literally half the time, whoever takes the fall inevitably winds up getting injured. And then... there's WCW Bash At The motherfucking Beach 1999. The Junkyard Match. This one had it all. Confusing and/or nonexistant angle to explain why it took place? Check. Stupid illogical rules which made figuring out how to win the match overly complicated and dumb? Check. Consisting entirely of (literal) garbage brawling with plunder shots? Check. Stretched out over a fucking endless agonizing eternity of time? Check. Bad camerawork and worse lighting which meant you couldn't see a goddamn thing? Check. Lousy special effects which never worked right? Check. No list of participants so even the announcers didn't know who was in the match, nor even how many guys were out there? Check. Wrestlers just aimlessly brawling instead of actually trying to win? Check. Absolutely nothing of value being given to the winner? Check. Brian Knobbs being a dick and trying to hurt people? Check. At least a couple of dangerous spots where it was legitimately possible that someone could've died on live PPV? Multiple serious injuries to about half the wrestlers? Check. Colossal waste of money on the set, effects, and a helicopter? Check. La Parka wearing street clothes with his mask on top? Check. Well, that last part was actually kinda cool. But believe me when I say that it was the only cool part. I wonder if Rob Black knew that it's illegal to intentionally feature nudity at a wrestling show in California BEFORE he booked this match. Was he just that ignorant and was actually willing to do the stripping until someone mentioned "hey Rob, this will get you thrown in prison (again)" or was he deliberately lying about it from the start?

For what it's worth, Cagematch says he's worked at least a couple matches last month for the WWW group that is running the old Anarchy building. Slim got a shot or two on TNA back when they were using half the Wildside roster in their early days, but I recall he somehow managed to piss off the management in a hurry. He was grabbing his dick on TV as part of his "douchebag white-bro rapper" gimmick, and apparently that peeved Jerry Jarrett something fierce. Might've pissed off Russo as well through some kind of backstage behavior, although I may be conflating some memories of the Lost Boys not even trying to ingratiate themselves with Vinny Roo back then. Having gotten to know Sal pretty well at the time, I'm fairly confident in saying there's no "seemingly" about it. Sal never had the same level of insane agility as a lot of the best Wildside cruiserweights, and he was kinda self-conscious about how a guy as small as him was expected to do a lot of flippy bullshit. That often led to him reluctantly trying to do some fucking crazy spots which he probably shouldn't have attempted due to their sheer level of difficulty for a guy who was never the springiest gymnast on the trampoline. He was one of those poor bastards who'd wind up slowly limping around the locker room in wince-inducing visible pain after his match, more often than not.

Slim was a spectacularly talented cruiserweight a dozen years ago, but I haven't seen much of his stuff in a long time. Any Youtube recommendations for post-Wildside-era matches?

What really sells that article is not just that he's an Ayn Rand fan, but instead of actually owning her books, he just has the damn Cliff Notes. Which, admittedly, might have much better writing than Rand's godawful clunky prose. Although one thing that mystifies me is, how did this guy ever get rich in the first place? He seemed to go from "poverty-stricken son of janitors, and eventually a high school dropout" to "spoiled college student and wealthy hedge fund manager" with seemingly no transition period in between. But as if he was trying to deliberately disprove the specific posts made in this thread, Shkreli comes right out in this interview and literally says he's playing a villain, while specifically using Damien Sandow's old gimmick as his cited example. So, yeah, he definitely qualifies for discussion here.

I think this match's reputation was hurt by the sheer height of everyone's arguably-unfair expectations. It's a rematch to their insanely great war at the Rumble, which wasn't ever going to have a chance to recapture that match's alchemical magic. And worse, it's the first time HELL IN A CELL had really been built up as this huge a deal, and this match's fine effort was almost lost in the shadow of the legendary bouts that preceded it. If Shawn/Taker was Star Wars and Taker/Mankind was The Empire Strikes Back, then poor HHH/Cactus might not even count as Return of the Jedi; it's more like The Force Awakens, with every moment in the narrative self-consciously calling back to some previous happenings in the Cell which had become mythical in hindsight. Then tack on Foley's retirement lasting about five minutes and the fact that No Way Out 2000 was otherwise a completely meaningless and forgettable show, and yeah, it's a perfect storm for this damn good match to be sadly underrated by too many people.

I remember Cornette and some others saying that Chicago was a fairly smarky and hardcore crowd even back in the 80s. They did boo Garvin against Flair. Come to think of it, who ran Chicago before the national takeover? Was it an AWA town? It's got a long history of being a big town for rassling, both of the legendary Gotch-Hackenschmidt matches took place there, as did Buddy Rogers' title win over Pat O'Connor.

Too short to be a truly all-time-greatest feud. Overall it was less than a year from start to non-finish. But they managed to make a hell of a lot of magic in that time, including what might've been the single most effective double-turn in wrestling history. Anyone else like the Survivor Series match more than the Mania one? I went into the latter a bit unappreciative for how revolutionary the work was, because I'd already seen Austin in a million other Attitude floor brawls before seeing this one (I started watching in '99). The SurSer match was more of a traditional wrestling bout, which was something that became sadly much more rare from Stone Cold during his hottest streak on top.

I'm the guy Dylan mentioned. I've worked with Chase on seemingly millions of shows, and he generally brings the goods. (I didn't say always because, well, once or twice I've seen him show up In Very Nearly No Condition To Perform after clearly having taken a drink or twelve; but eh, he's a southern rassler, whaddya expect?) Chase is a hard worker who can do a surprisingly varied amount of different things. He's good as both the plucky babyface fighting back from underneath, and a cocky heel dominating from above; and he's a hell of a heat magnet on these little redneck house shows as a villain, he damn near causes riots. He's mostly an old-school Southern brawler, but every once in a while he'll think something crazy like "ya know what this cage match really needs? For me to do a god-damned shooting star press off the top of the cage". I know for a fact that he can call every single spot in the ring, or memorize a thousand-page script in the back; he's comfortable working into the style of pretty much any opponent. While I dunno if I've ever seen him have a five-star match, I've seen plenty from him in the three-to-four range. He'll probably be kinda low on my ballot, but he'll definitely be there.

Maybe ol' handsome Jimmy was better back in his younger days, during his prime? I dunno, I don't really know enough about 19th century wrestling to have an informed opinion about him.

CZW also has a very negative reputation among large parts of the smarkiverse. Partly because of the deathmatch shit, partly because Botchamania has turned them into a running joke (and done so by nothing more than showing their own footage of bad wrestling).

Hirota's always been underrated as a wrestler. Yeah, she's a comedy wrestler and she's never gonna put on a five-star classic; but her lack of workrate isn't just lack of talent, it's a deliberate character choice. Her gimmick is being a clumsy goofball who can barely even attempt the most rudimentary spots without blowing them. In reality, it takes a surprising amount of athleticism, timing, and creativity to accomplish the wide variety of botches that she does. Also, there's nothing like a Sakura Hirota match to make me wish I spoke Japanese. What the hell is she saying to get such laughs from everyone? It's not just from the crowd, either, she's astonishingly good at making her opponents break character and crack up in the middle of the ring.

The fans have every right to do whatever the hell they want, as long as they're not jumping the barrier and literally trying to be part of the show. Who gives a shit if they do smarky chants or whatever? They're the ones who paid money to be there. Meanwhile, I've got zero sympathy for the WWE on this. Their modern attitude is the worst kind of hypocrisy, insisting that We Always Listen To What The Fans Want while usually doing the exact opposite of that and intentionally refusing to give the fans what they want. They're still trying to act like it's a carny kayfabe world, and the simple truth is that world is dead and gone.

I think that's true. I know for a fact that Russo was frequently hanging out at the original TNA office in Hendersonville, Tennessee long before he officially worked there as an employee.

Which specifically of those nine guys' names do you object to being on the list, Jaze? And what counts as "a CZW guy"? As mentioned, we've already got nominations for several dudes who've spent a lot of time working there.

IIRC, apparently he didn't really want to be there or didn't feel like they were taking him seriously, so he started pitching bad ideas on purpose. And when Russo is TRYING to suck... I mean, goddamn, the mind reels at such a possibility. Apparently the final straw that got him fired was pitching a gay gimmick for The Rock.

Depends on your definition of "great". He had about a million matches with Abyss which I thought were in the ***-ish range. TNA just never booked that many really big guys, and even AJ isn't going to be able to pull a great match out of the Matt Morgans of the world. EDIT: and oh yeah, if Samoa Joe counts, of course Styles had several legit great matches with him.

Brock's the only guy whose recent work definitely shoves him way up the list, when I probably wouldn't have picked him at all for just his 2002-04 run. Guys like Cesaro and Punk were definitely helped, but would have still been somewhere on the card anyway. I guess Sheamus would technically count, but it seems contrary to the spirit of the thread to name anyone whose work I haven't seen prior to the period of time under discussion.

While you do need a really strong base to pull off that move, half of it is Ziggler's effort in taking it. Cesaro's got no leverage there, he's literally bent in half at the beginning of the suplex motion and his arms are entirely below his own center of gravity. Ziggler is trying his damndest to go up for the move, you can see him post twice with his right hand, once off the turnbuckle and once off Cesaro's body. Yeah, week to week is the issue. Jericho hasn't worked a full-time schedule in years, he always picks whichever shows he feels like working and then spends the rest of the time touring with his band or doing whatever other side projects he wants to do. Ditto with Bryan, if he ever returns. The mechanic needs to be someone that can lose and not deflate the crowd by doing so.

It's not like historical inaccuracy (which is a sliding scale anyway) is an automatic on-off switch, a black-or-white dealbreaker. Brian De Palma's The Untouchables isn't any less of a masterpiece because it makes such a terrible hash of documented historical events (spoiler: in real life, Frank Nitti was not a trigger-happy assassin who was thrown off a rooftop by Eliot Ness). It's just one of many, many pieces of preconceived bias that you can carry in with you, when you watch a movie for the first time. If you despise slasher-horror movies in general, there's little I can say to make you enjoy Twitch of the Death Nerve, no matter how brilliant I thought it was. Meanwhile, if you're a hardcore fan of Roman imperial history, you're equally unlikely to make it all the way through Gladiator without having a series of minor strokes about how blatantly that film told historians to go fuck themselves. For me: if the movie's good enough in other ways, little details like that won't bother me so much. The submarine flick U-571 was deeply fictionalized (right down to misidentifying the nation which first grabbed one of the Nazi's Enigma code machines), but it's still a tightly-constructed thriller which does its job just fine as a piece of genre fiction. Meanwhile, connected to the same specific subject of defeating Enigma: The Imitation Game is a dull, preachy, predictable, self-important, self-indulgent piece of awards-bait nonsense which also completely botches a huge number of historical details. I'm much more likely to be forgiving of the former than the latter. Myths and Legends of the First World War by James Hayward. Used copies going cheap. The entire first chapter is about the (mostly groundless) English paranoid obsession with German spies and saboteurs in the early parts of the war. Including such delightful stories as "a car full of British officials, trying to detect possible German radio signals, are arrested three times in three different towns within a 24-hour period on suspicion of being German spies" and "that one time that Churchill got so drunk, he became convinced that a nearby mansion was sending secret Morse code by flashing a searchlight; upon dragging half the Admiralty's top brass with him on a drunken midnight raid, they discovered the house's searchlight didn't even work". Same author also wrote a sequel book about WWII myths, if you're interested.

There's a certain amount of history that we can pretty safely agree on. George III was indeed a king of England, and the American revolution happened on his watch. Nobody but the craziest of conspiracy theorists deny stuff like that. Going back to the Braveheart example, we're pretty sure that Princess Isabelle didn't actually arrive in England until three years after William Wallace died. If you know that fact, it makes the movie's earnest sincerity about those people's romance into something pretty laughable. Of course there's always going to be mistakes, omissions, misinterpretations, and outright lies in many historical records, for a wide variety of different reasons. (I'm currently reading James Hayward's book about contemporary popular myths during World War I which were at the time reported as fact, so believe me, I know what you're getting at.) But saying "there is no objective history" is, well, it's just wrong. History books will record that President Obama was first inaugurated in Washington DC on January 20th, 2009. I know for a fact that's objectively true, because I watched it happen live on television, and countless thousands of other people witnessed it happen live in person. We know for sure that's true. That's as objective as you can possibly get, outside of the realm of pure science or abstract mathematics.

I have, quite a few of them. There's plenty of movies which I'd say were actually better than the book: Blade Runner, The Godfather, Jaws, The Sweet Hereafter, and some others I'm blanking on. And really, I'd argue that making changes to a fictional source is way less problematic than making changes to genuine history involving real people.

How about Jimmy TODAY? He still "wrestles"!

For the record, I don't think this approach works by itself in a vacuum; like you said, things need a more holistic approach overall. One flaw with going purely reader-response is that sometimes readers simply get shit wrong. I can't begin to count the number of film reviews I've seen where the reviewer had made some blatant mistake in the course of watching the movie or writing the review, where they were reporting something that simply didn't happen that way in the movie. I don't mean interpretation, I mean like the film review equivalent of those times when Gorilla Monsoon doesn't see the finish and spends the next five minutes bitching about how the referee made the wrong call.

He's two inches taller than Eddie Guerrero was, and the exact same height as Daniel Bryan. He'll be fine.

There's a difference between cutting from one place to another with the safe assumption that time passed in between; and having, let's say, a conversation between two characters where, in mid-sentence, they walk around a corner and are suddenly in a completely different part of town. The former is, of course, perfectly acceptable. The latter can seriously deflate your suspension of disbelief if you notice it. And it's the film's fault for doing that bullshit in the first place, not your fault for being knowledgeable and attentive enough to catch it. If it seriously takes you out of the movie? Yes. Like I said, it's a specific choice that the filmmakers made to write them like that. And every specific choice is a fair target for critique. Everything you ever write is all about YOU. It always is. It can't not be. Every opinion we ever hold, every reaction we have to any given situation, it all involves some level of subjectivity. This idea that we should come in as a perfect tabula rasa to experience any particular piece of art is absolute horseshit. There's no way to be completely objective in our response to anything ever. We all bring our own baggage to the experience, our own biases and foreknowledge. Like, I've seen a lot of horror movies. When I saw the shockingly fucking terrible remake of Prom Night, I went: "whoa, in all my years watching crappy slasher flicks, that's one of the absolute worst that I've ever seen". A nominally "scary movie" didn't scare me at all, it inflicted an unintended combination of depression and outrage, based heavily upon my previous knowledge of other works in the same genre and how much better 99% of them were than this garbage. Now, if we take some blushing virgin who's never ever seen a horror film before and show them this: they might actually find it scary. And, in that one case: hooray, the filmmakers completely achieved their goals. That doesn't change the fact that it didn't work for ME at all, and it doesn't make it my fault that their movie failed in part because I've seen so many other movies that did the exact same thing but did it in such an infinitely superior manner. We cannot look at art or entertainment objectively. Ever. Period. Every single time, even if we're trying to keep the most open of spotless minds, we're still subconsciously comparing it to an entire checklist of prior knowledge.