Oscar Film Journal: Fiddler on the Roof (1971)

Another day, another entry in the Oscar Film Journal.  Can't stop, won't stop....

Our latest subject is the 1971 adaptation of the uber-popular stage play Fiddler on the Roof, directed by Norman Jewison and starring Topol, with choreography by the legendary Jerome Robbins, and an adapted score by the even-more-legendary John Williams (who won his first Oscar for this film).  Fiddler is the story of a family of Ukrainian Jewish peasants - a middle-aged couple and their three adult daughters, all of whom have reached marrying age.  The parents are deeply traditional, expecting all their daughters to marry nice Jewish men of means, but of course none of them is interested in having her prospective husband chosen for her on the basis of wealth or security.  The father Tevye (Topol) is of course a big teddy bear despite his propensity for angry outbursts, and ultimately can't say no to his daughters' wishes (except in the case of the youngest, who wants to marry outside the Jewish faith).

Oscar Film Journal: Funny Girl (1968)

Time for yet another Oscar Film Journal entry here at Enuffa.com!

We're swingin' back to the 1960s for a look at Barbra Streisand's breakout performance, the one that won her an Oscar and made her a household name.  It's the 1968 Best Pic nominee Funny Girl, directed by Academy favorite William Wyler, based on the Broadway play.  Funny Girl is a very loose musical biopic about the rise of Vaudeville star Fanny Brice, a song and dance girl who made her fortune by leaning into her natural comic talents before marrying a rich gambler named Nicky Arnstein.  But his addiction to the card table coupled with his predilection for bad business deals led to his downfall and the eventual dissolving of their marriage.

WWE Clash in Paris Preview & Predictions

It's the end of an era once again in WWE, as this Saturday marks the final PPV to air on Peacock.  Yes, the ESPN+ deal is kicking off four months early due to ESPN reeeeellly wanting something big to offer during their launch.  And what better way to ring down the curtain on the Peacock-WWE era than a half-assed five-match show where their top champion is absent?

Saturday is WWE Clash in Paris, and once again the company has assembled a largely skippable show featuring mostly 40-plussers.  I'm not sure there's been a PPV field as old as this one since the men's Royal Rumble 2021 where the median age was 39 and a 47-year-old won the whole thing.  There are twelve wrestlers featured on this card and only four of them are under forty.  And aside from thirty-year-old Logan Paul, the remaining three are 37, 38 and 39.  Keep in mind the massive main event they have planned for Wrestlepalooza next month (Why are they recycling an ECW name of all things?) to go head to head with AEW's All Out features two 48-year-olds.  Man does WWE hate elevating young people again.  

There was supposed to be a Naomi-Stephanie Vaquer match for the women's title but Naomi had to vacate the belt after discovering she was pregnant, and the match was scrapped.  Given that they cut the match entirely rather than pit Stephanie against someone else for the vacant title I seriously doubt she was slated to beat Naomi. 

Update: Up until today's Smackdown episode there were zero black wrestlers on this show, but they just announced The Wyatt Sicks vs. Street Profits for the WWE Tag belts.  Is this Ford and Dawkins' first PPV match in 2025?  Remember when Ford was being primed for a big singles push?  Good times.

Side note: The poster for this PARIS-based show is a reference to The Starry Night by DUTCH painter Vincent Van Gogh, and the subject of said painting is the view from his St. Remy-de-Provence asylum window in the SOUTH of France (over seven hours away from the capital city), thus it has nothing to do with Paris.  Cultural illiteracy in action.

Side note 2: With WWE moving to a $30 a month service starting in September it's highly unlikely I'll be watching any more of their PPVs for the foreseeable future.  So unfortunately my reviewing their shows will largely be a thing of the past.  I already had a Peacock subscription prior to the existing deal, so I wasn't giving WWE any additional money.  But I sure as shit ain't shelling out thirty bucks a month to watch a subpar wrestling show from a company that openly embraces fascism, accepts blood money, or covers up human trafficking scandals.  WWE and everyone in charge of it can get fucked.

Alright, let's look at this thing....

WWE Tag Team Championship: Wyatt Sicks vs. Street Profits

As I said, this match just got added today.  Nothing like waiting till the absolute last minute.  Wyatt Sicks just won the belts a month and a half ago from the Street Profits, so I think they probably hold onto them here.

Pick: Wyatt Sicks retain

Women's Intercontinental Championship: Becky Lynch vs. Nikki Bella

Really, we're going with Nikki Bella as a challenger?  When was she last relevant, 2015?  Nikki was pretty good by 2013-14 women's roster standards but was rendered pretty obsolete when the Four Horsewomen were called up and the Divas Title went away.  Why are we pushing nostalgia acts from one of the company's lamest periods?  Is Adam Rose coming back too?

Pick: Becky retains

AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door 2025 Review: Lights Out Bedlam!

The fourth annual AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door PPV is in the books, and as expected it was a pretty excellent night of wrestling in front of a sold out O2 Arena crowd that apparently broke the wrestling attendance record for that venue.  The main show ran just over four and a half hours but because of the match order it never felt like it dragged.  AEW should always arrange the lineup like this, with the three or four most important matches saved for the end.  NJPW has done this for years and it makes the shows fly by.  We got some great wrestling, a couple big returns, and a show-closing injury angle to allow Will Ospreay the time to get a much-needed neck surgery.

After four very fun multi-man pre-show matches the PPV proper kicked off with Adam Copeland reuniting with Christian Cage for the first time in fifteen years or so, taking on Kip Sabian and Killswitch (subbing for an injured Nick Wayne).  The match was fine, if a little sloppy in spots, but the bigger story was that neither team fully got along.  Christian still hasn't fully bought in to teaming with his best friend again, and Killswitch wanted nothing to do with Kip.  Not sure where the Killswitch thing is going, unless he ends up back together with Jack Perry to feud with Cope and Cage later.  I wouldn't be sad about that.  Team ACCC won the match when Sabian tried to hit Cage with a Killswitch but Cage vaulted him into a Cope spear and pinned him.  ***

AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door 2025 Preview & Predictions

It's crossover time once again, and for us sickos that means the fourth annual AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door!

This year FD is a couple months later than usual, and it's also in London instead of All In.  So instead of a hard-to-fill Wembley Stadium, the show will emanate from an absolutely packed O2 Arena.  Since AEW is still struggling with US ticket sales for their weekly shows it's always a treat to see a show take place in a full large-scale venue to give the PPV that extra atmosphere.  It's also neat that this FD has outsold the previous three.

The Forbidden Door concept is definitely losing its novelty due to NJPW not at all being a hot promotion right now, coupled with my not wanting to see AEW's storylines interrupted for special one-off stuff.  But this year feels much more like an AEW show that happens to feature a handful of NJPW talents.  Most of the matches do involve ongoing AEW content, so it should fit right into their continuity.  The card is quite loaded up, albeit with a few caveats, and on paper looks like the strongest Forbidden Door lineup to date.  Let's take a look....

AEW Tag Team Championship: The Hurt Syndicate vs. FTR vs. Brodido

Well the long-running tournament to determine new #1 contenders ended in a time limit draw, which feels a bit like a copout, but on the bright side the addition of Brody King and Bandido to this match will undoubtedly improve it.  It will also be held under elimination rules, so THS is either retaining the titles or actually losing to another team.  Conventional wisdom would favor FTR to win the titles and then defend them in Toronto against Cope and Christian, although I don't see why that match needs the belts involved.  I'd actually love to see Brodido win here but I think that's kind of a longshot.  If THS retains I dunno who else they have to defend against.  I guess I'll go with FTR.

Pick: FTR

Oscar Film Journal: Avatar - The Way of Water (2022)

And we're back with another Oscar Film Journal entry, here at Enuffa.com!

The slate of films nominated for Best Picture in 2022 included not one but two popcorn blockbusters, both of them late sequels, both of them made with impressive technical innovations, and both of them more or less devoid of substance beyond that.  I already wrote about Top Gun: Maverick, so now it's time to take a deep dive into the other one, Avatar: The Way of Water.

Set sixteen years after the first Avatar, this film catches us up via a narrated montage, showing us that Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) now have a family - two teenage sons, an eight-year-old daughter, and an adopted teenage daughter inexplicably birthed from the dormant husk of Sigourney Weaver's character's avatar, for some reason voiced by Sigourney herself (yes the septuagenarian actress plays a 14-year-old) - and everything is good on Pandora.  

Oscar Film Journal: Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985)

Welcome back to the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com!  Even deep into August I'm still slowly chipping away at the list of Best Picture nominees....

Today's subject is the 1985 prison drama Kiss of the Spider Woman, directed by Héctor Babenco and starring William Hurt and Raul Julia.  Based on a 1976 Manuel Puig novel, the film would I guess be considered a character study of two men of very different backgrounds forming a friendship over the span a month of being trapped in a Brazilian prison cell.  Luis Molina (Hurt) is a gay man incarcerated for corrupting a minor, while Valentin Arregui (Julia) is a political prisoner who was arrested in a plot to overthrow the country's military dictatorship.  To pass the time and to take both their minds off their situation, Molina recounts in great detail the storyline of one of his favorite films, a German propaganda film (Molina confesses he doesn't care about its politics, he just likes the story).  KOTSW jumps back and forth between the real world and scenes from the fictitious movie, and we learn that Molina is a prison informant tasked with getting information from Valentin to pass onto the warden, in exchange for an early release.  

Oscar Film Journal: Airport (1970)

Welcome to another Oscar Film Journal entry here at Enuffa.com!

While perusing Netflix the other day I stumbled across one of the 1970 Best Picture nominees, the star-studded disaster drama Airport, featuring Burt Lancaster, Dean Martin, Jacqueline Bisset, George Kennedy, and Helen Hayes.  Based on a 1968 Arthur Hailey novel, the film takes place all in one 24-hour period during a crippling snowstorm at a fictional Chicago airport and involves multiple story threads playing out both on the ground and in the air.  

Lancaster's character is the airport manager Mel Bakersfield, whose wife is on the verge of leaving him because he's married to his job.  His brother-in-law Vernon Demerest (Martin) is a pilot on an ill-fated flight set for Rome.  Jean Seberg plays Tanya Livingston, Mel's coworker in charge of customer relations, with whom Mel has palpable romantic tension.  Bisset is stewardess Gwen Meighan, with whom Vernon is having an affair.  There are too many secondary characters to list, so I'll stop there, but the plot is set in motion when a blizzard forces Mel to work late (much to his wife's objections) to coordinate the clearing of the airport's two runways.  As it turns out, Vernon's flight to Rome includes a passenger who plans to blow up the plane over the Atlantic Ocean so his wife can collect on a life insurance policy he's taken out.  These two main threads are woven with smaller ones involving an elderly woman who serially stows away on planes, a pain-in-the-ass passenger who constantly complains about customer service, an unexpected pregnancy, and an airport Commissioner who's considering shutting down one of the runways due to customer complaints.

WWE SummerSlam 2025 Review: Night 2 was Good Anyway....

Well we've now entered the era of two-night shows for all of WWE's Big Four PPVs.  SummerSlam 2025, probably Royal Rumble and Survivor Series 2026, and maybe even Money in the Bank will now be spread over two shows.  Thus WrestleMania is no longer all that special.

SummerSlam 2025 was another mixed bag of an extravaganza.  The first night was a bad overall show, the second night was pretty good up until the appallingly tone deaf ending.  This company has no line it will not cross, no scandal it will not gladly sweep under the rug if it gets in the way of their bottom line.  Between sex trafficking accessory Brock Lesnar being back on television and WWE just openly aligning itself with MAGA, I'm honestly not sure how much more WWE content I'll even watch going forward.

Night 1 as I said was a pretty bad show, with a whole bunch of mostly nothing matches and a dull as fuck main event that for some reason WWE's faithful have convinced themselves was some kind of Bret Hart-esque masterpiece.  I don't seem to recall Bret ever needing to stall after every move to let his gassed opponent recover for a while.  Certainly not in his good matches anyhow.

The show opened, 22 minutes in (that's TWENTY-TWO) with a solid tag match as Roman Reigns and Jey Uso took on Seth Rollins' buddies Bron Breakker and Bronson Reed.  Things started out not so promisingly as after a few moments of action Jey called for his entrance music again just to get a stupid Yeet chant going.  This company is a parody of pro wrestling.  From there they had a pretty good match and Breakker looked really good as usual.  Side note: Wade Barrett, who I find pretty insufferable on commentary, keeps claiming Bron can run up to 23 miles per hour.  I'd buy that for a dollar.  They of course had to squeeze in yet another Roman spear through the barricade (which now isn't even attached at one side so this spot looks even dumber now).  The Brons did a Steiner doomsday bulldog spot which was cool.  At the end of the match Roman shoved Jey out of the way of a Breakker spear, and Jey hit his big splash on Reed to win the match.  This show would never get this good again.  ***1/2