WWE SummerSlam 2025 Preview & Predictions

It's SummerSlam time again, as WWE brings us the 38th annual event, this time spread over two nights so we get even more commercials and video packages!  Hoorah!

This year's lineup looks.....okay I guess?  There are a handful of promising matches and a handful of not promising matches.  I'm betting as usual SummerSlam falls in the 7 out of 10 range, but we'll see.

True to WWE PR form the big media story this week is "AEW bad."  Yes, Cody Rhodes, WWE's babyface, who pulls down probably a good $5 million a year in that role, went on The Ringer podcast and pissed and moaned that AEW "disrespected" him and he "wasn't going to stand for it anymore."  Keep in mind this was close to four years ago these alleged events took place, they directly led to his returning to WWE as a conquering hero and becoming literally the face of the company, and yet here he is blathering on like a jilted ex-lover, the same way Punk did last year.  This shit is just embarrassing; WWE can't ever focus on hyping their own product, they always have to throw shade at their distant number-two competition and pretend to be the underdogs.  Fuck's sake, you insufferable sociopaths, your company is literally too big to fail at this point, grow your stupid asses up.  Hey Cody, no one who watches AEW in 2025 misses you.  Both companies are better off now.

Alright, rant over, let's pick some winners.  Side note: SummerSlam has four black wrestlers across 12 matches, for those keeping score.  That's above average for them I guess?  There are also four women's matches though, so that's progress.

Night 1

Women's Tag Team Championship: Raquel Rodriguez & Roxanne Perez vs. Charlotte Flair & Alexa Bliss

The company's least meaningful titles are up for grabs here and I'm kinda surprised Charlotte is relegated to this position on the card.  This will be.....a match.

Pick: Charlotte and Alexa capture the straps

Top Ten Things: Black Sabbath Albums

Welcome to an emotionally charged Top Ten Things, here at Enuffa.com!

The world has just lost a legend.  One of the most influential figures in rock n' roll history, one of the founding fathers of what has for me been the life-altering genre of heavy metal, has left our existential plane.  This week, Ozzy Osbourne lost his battle with Parkinson's disease at the age of 76, only two weeks removed from his farewell concert in Birmingham.  The timing really supports the idea that when people have something they want to accomplish late in life, they tend to stay alive long enough to do it.  I can't imagine how thankful all those musicians must feel to have been part of what was truly Ozzy's swan song.  

As for my relationship with Ozzy and his work, I've always been sort of a casual fan.  I discovered, or more accurately sought out Black Sabbath when I was thirteen, motivated by having heard "Iron Man," or more accurately a knockoff of "Iron Man" used as the entrance theme for legendary wrestling tag team The Road Warriors.  So I decided to buy a cassette of Paranoid, and slowly explored that album.  But for a while that was as far as I got with Ozzy's music.  It wasn't until 1991's No More Tears album that I began to appreciate his solo work, and a couple years later the first of two Sabbath tribute albums, Nativity In Black came out, introducing me to many more of their classic songs.

One interesting thing I've noticed about Sabbath's songwriting: on the early albums especially there are almost no vocal chorus hooks.  Ozzy would sing verse sections and then leave the guitar riff as the main feature and de facto "chorus."  You don't notice it until you really stop and think about what's happening in the songs, but there it is.  Next time you hear "NIB" or "War Pigs" or "Symptom of the Universe" or "Black Sabbath," notice how its the guitar and not the vocals that get most of the glory.  This approach really did pave the way for bands like Metallica, Megadeth and Slayer, where the guitar riff is king.  

Having grown up with 60s rock n' roll parents, I wasn't exposed to much 1970s music as a kid, thus I was very late to the party in acquiring a taste for artists like Led Zeppelin, Queen, Rush, David Bowie, Stevie Wonder, and yes, Black Sabbath.  So my ranking of the band's best works may differ from some of yours.  But let's take a look.....

NJPW G1 Climax 35 Preview & Predictions

Well this snuck up on me fast.  It's already that time again - the most grueling four weeks in pro wrestling, the NJPW G1 Climax tournament!  The company is still scrambling to find the next It Guy to build the company around, and while there are numerous promising contenders to the throne, the new Ace has yet to fully emerge....

It's been a very challenging time in NJPW.  With a host of really strong talent JUST BELOW the very top, there hasn't been an obvious choice yet to truly succeed the retiring Hiroshi Tanahashi or the departed Kazuchika Okada and Tetsuya Naito.  Nor have Zack Sabre Jr., David Finlay or Gabe Kidd quite filled the void left by their gaijin predecessors Kenny Omega, Will Ospreay and Jay White.  The G1 can help the cream rise to the top, but the fans need to connect with and plunk down their money for the Ace before he can be considered as such.  This tournament has a ton of young talent but is missing the usual star power, with Naito gone and Tanahashi nowhere near his peak.  Even perennial G1 MVP Tomohiro Ishii is absent this year.

Still there is plenty of in-ring ability on display in these two blocks, and hopefully our next top star will cement himself in this tournament.

Let's look at the blocks below:

Block A: Boltin Oleg, Evil, David Finlay, Callum Newman, Ryohei Oiwa, Sanada, Taichi, Hiroshi Tanahashi, Yota Tsuji, Yuya Uemura

Block B: El Phantasmo, Gabe Kidd, Drilla Moloney, Ren Narita, Great-O-Khan, Zack Sabre Jr., Shingo Takagi, Konosuke Takeshita, Shota Umino, Yoshi-Hashi

 

As always I'll only go through the individual names who have a snowball's chance in hell of winning this thing (or at least their respective blocks), rather than the entire field.  

Block A: Evil, David Finlay, Yota Tsuji, Yuya Uemura

Block B: Gabe Kidd, Zack Sabre Jr., Shingo Takagi, Konosuke Takeshita, Shota Umino

AEW All In Texas Review: Hangman Adam Page Saves AEW

AEW All In Texas was a truly epic wrestling show, pushing the boundaries of how much hot graps an audience can endure.  The main show was an astonishing SIX hours, and yet somehow aside from a few lulls during the less important matches, the Arlington crowd was up for all of it, especially the main event.  That the fans were so nuclear for Jon Moxley vs. Hangman Page so far into the show says a lot about how compelling this story has been.  Compare that with WrestleMania 35 for example, where the WWE audience was super excited for Becky Lynch to headline the show, until she actually did, five and a half hours later in front of an exhausted crowd.  The level of heat for a match so deep into a show is in itself a remarkable achievement.  This was one of those shows where you want to say "That was amazing, Tony.  Now let's never do that again." 

The Texas Death Match was as expected a veritable bloodbath with a bunch of interference at the end.  But the rest of the show was wisely booked without blood and without much outside the ring shenanigans, to set the main event apart.  Mox and Page used lots of weapons (the most visceral moment came early when Page took out a fork and in real time poked holes in Mox's forehead), built to lots of false finishes, and incorporated run-ins by not only the Death Riders but Will Ospreay, the Young Bucks, and a returning Bryan Danielson and Darby Allin; the latter repelled from the stadium's ceiling.  But it was the involvement of Swerve Strickland that proved the most memorable, as after Prince Nana handcuffed Marina Shafir to a table, Swerve knocked out the Bucks with the chain Hangman had given him on Collision and slid it into the ring.  As Swerve looked on smiling, Hangman used the chain to once again choke Moxley out (after hitting a Buckshot Lariat that deposited Mox on a bed of nails), shades of their previous Texas Death Match.  Moxley sold this brilliantly, flailing for his life for several seconds, before tapping out.  And Globe Life Field EXPLODED in cheers.  This was one of the all-time great match-ending pops, the culmination of literal years of the emotional roller coaster that has been Hangman's arc.  Another incredible pop followed soon after, as Page finally freed the AEW Title from its briefcase prison and held it up, tears in his eyes.  An absolute masterpiece of a Texas Death match, followed by chill-inducing catharsis.  ******

Movie Review: Superman (2025)

In the words with which New York Times critic Janet Maslin kicked off her 1982 review of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, "Well that's more like it."

James Gunn's new Superman film is just the cinematic rebirth this character and his mythos needed after decades of failed reboots and reinventions, tacked-on latent sequels, and joyless, unpleasant "realistic" takes.  I've said for a long time that Superman is a simple character, but simultaneously a very easy one to screw up.  He needs to be a paragon of virtue and a symbol of hope, but also needs real human frailty and uncertainty to make him relatable to us screwed up mortals.  He needs to be nigh invincible but still vulnerable, both physically and especially emotionally.  Gunn and his collaborators have threaded this needle so deftly I found myself choking up at numerous points during this film.  Turns out there was a very simple but vital ingredient missing from Zack Snyder's dour Superman films: pathos.

AEW All In Texas Preview & Predictions

It's finally here, the biggest AEW show of 2025, All In Texas!  

At a time when AEW finally feels like it has real momentum and is becoming the hot wrestling promotion again (partly thanks to an incredibly dull, I mean more than usual, WWE product), what this company needs is another defining PPV event, like they had four years ago at All Out.  And this All In lineup fits that bill nicely.  The product has felt very focused in 2025 and the build for this show has been among the best for any PPV in company history.  The 25,000 or so in attendance this Saturday will no doubt be a very enthusiastic mob, comprising AEW's biggest North American crowd to date.  This is an historic show already, as the largest non-WWE wrestling gate ever on this continent.  And if the results are booked as expected there will be plenty of history to go around.

Men's Casino Gauntlet

This show will have not one but two Casino Gauntlet matches, which I'm not crazy about, but both should be entertaining and they've done a good job of building stories to be contained within them, as opposed to just throwing a bunch of people in the ring.  We know for sure Mark Briscoe and MJF will kick things off, and the build for just their exchanges has been pretty sharply drawn.  Mistico will also appear as well as Ricochet, Bandido, and Brody King.  Lotta good star power and athleticism already.  I assume we'll see Takeshita, Samoa Joe, Claudio, Hobbs, Gabe Kidd and Wheeler as well (unless they add a Trios Title match to the card, which I wouldn't be sad about).  Anyway the story seems to be building toward MJF getting another crack at the AEW Title at long last, so I'm picking him to win this.

Pick: MJF

Oscar Film Journal: Patton (1970)

Welcome back to the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com!

One of several calendar years where I have serious holes in my game is the year 1970.  Of the five nominees I'd only ever seen Five Easy Pieces, and that was decades ago (I'll need to give that a rewatch at some point).  So I decided to start at the top of the list and watch the Best Picture winner, Patton, starring George C. Scott as the titular controversial World War II General.

Patton is both a character study and a war film (some might even call it anti-war), which focuses specifically on George S. Patton's exploits and views the war mostly through his eyes.  We begin with the famous speech to his men, in the iconic opening scene depicting the General standing in front of a giant US flag that fills the entire frame, Patton himself lined up perfectly with the bottom edge, as though he's on a stage speaking directly to the audience.  This speech conveys a ton of information about the man, just through his attitude toward war.  "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country," he tells his troops, "He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country."  To call George Patton a war hawk would be an understatement.  War was his entire raison d'être.  "I love it more than my own life," he tells a colleague.  His passion for battle was so well-known even the German Captain Steiger, who had studied Patton's career, pitied his imminent obsolescence as the Allies took Berlin.  

Movie Review: Sinners (2025)

Hollywood is still battling to bring people back to the cinemas in a marketplace soaked to the skin with at-home streaming content, and one of its early 2025 success stories is Ryan Coogler's latest film Sinners.  Shot on a combination of 65mm and IMAX film stock, Sinners is a period vampire film set in the Jim Crow South of the early 1930s.  Twin entrepreneurs of sorts Elijah "Smoke" and Elias "Stack" Moore (a charismatic double performance by Michael B. Jordan) return home to Mississippi after a stint in Chicago gangland, with the intention of opening up a "juke joint," a house of live music, drinking and dancing, catered primarily to black clientele.  They recruit their cousin Sammie (a very natural Miles Caton), a prodigious blues guitarist, as one of the club's featured talents, as well as a host of friends and acquaintances to work on their staff.  The Juke Club's grand opening seems to be a rousing success, but things begin to go very awry when those damn vampires show up.....

***Some spoilers ahead***