Most porn is about as titillating as a Yule log on a loop, which is why I never watch it. Except if I happen to be flipping channels on a Friday night, when World Wrestling Entertainment broadcasts its Friday Night SmackDown, a steroid-enhanced, S&M-laced, hard-bodied orgy of enormous proportions. It’s long been my fantasy to sit ringside, to smell the virile sweat and gape in awe at the blown up muscles, so freaky they’re sexy, akin to any porn star’s massively inflated tits. The homoerotic, dominant man on dominant man action, each bulging star vying to become the ultimate top, to slam his rival to the mat and make him his bitch, drives me wild. To this day The Rock’s The People’s Champ still ranks right alongside the remake of Casino Royale as my favorite gay porn.
So naturally I breathlessly awaited the press screening of Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler starring Mickey Rourke – who decades ago honed his S&M chops in 9 1/2 Weeks – as Randy “The Ram” Robinson. …Read more
There are two kinds of people in the world: hardcore fans of professional wrestling and those of us who think the “sport” is a big joke. But Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler may change all that. It may not influence the WWE’s television ratings or increase pay-per-view sales for the next Wrestlemania, but it could create more sympathy for the staged spectacle. And this is something that hasn’t really been achieved with past attempts to showcase the sad realities found within one of the fakest forms of showbiz there is.
I’ve listened to the audiobook of Hulk Hogan’s memoir, mostly for laughs. And I’ve seen the great documentary Beyond the Mat and learned enough of the truth to have gained some appreciation for wrestlers like Mick “Mankind” Foley, though it mostly made me feel bad for that guy’s wife and children. Meanwhile, the should-have-been most heartbreaking story from that film, Jake “The Snake” Roberts’ confession that he’s the product of incest, is so unbelievable that it’s hard to take completely serious. I hate to say it, but I couldn’t help laughing then, too.
Rick Kissell says we shouldn’t be surprised that Sunday night’s Oscar telecast earned its lowest ratings, um, ever: “A batch of films with mostly grim themes, combined with an awards season that lacked any real momentum thanks to the writers strike, contributed to this year’s alarming 20% falloff.” The people, they just want to laugh! And Hollywood labor wars really get them down!
The WWE has signed a deal with 20th Century Fox to make theatrical and direct-to-DVD releases aimed at teens, starring wrestlers. The goal is, apparently, to crank out PG-13 content that will appeal to WWE’s current, young male fanbase, while at the same time, “establish these guys not to our audience so much but to the other moviegoing audience, so that they cross over.”
A personal interrogative doc, more Morgan Spurlock than Doug Block, Christopher Bell’s Bigger, Stronger, Faster uses his family’s experiences with steroids as the in point to tackle the larger roles of body perception, performance inhancement and competition in contemporary American culture. The voice of the film, delivered via Bell’s narration, can be hackneyed and a bit too cute, but on the whole Bell mounts a surprisingly sophisticated argument––surprising because he’s a first time feature-maker, surprising because it’s clearly on Bell’s agenda to please his crowd, surprising because this is a film that uses footage from Rocky 4 to make its thesis argument––that steroid criminalization amounts to hating the player whilst willfully ignoring the dynamics of the game.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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