tombreihan Page 2 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Daniel Bryan's <i>Yes! </i>Is The Worked Shoot Of Wrestling Books
Late in Yes!, the new memoir from the great pro wrestler Daniel Bryan, there’s a moment where Bryan comes to an epiphany about what he’s doing in the WWE—the place where he’s been employed since 2009: “I came to the realization that what we were doing in WWE was no longer pro wrestling,” he writes. ...
<i>The Warriors </i>Gives Us The Best Fantasy Version Of NYC Ever Filmed
When Bill de Blasio was running for the New York mayor’s office a few years ago, Matt Drudge expressed the fear that de Blasio’s New York would look like the great 1979 gang movie The Warriors. The obvious retort to that: Wouldn’t that make you want to vote for de Blasio? Who wouldn’t want to live i...
<i>Road House </i>Is Patrick Swayze's Finest Hour, And Also America's
Here’s something fun: Imagine the conversations that Terry Funk, the eternally grizzled pro wrestler, and John Doe, the co-leader of the great art-punk band X, had on the set of Road House. By 1989, the year that this beautifully ridiculous action flick hit theaters, those two were legends in their ...
All White Everything: The Glorious Badness Of <i>Enter The Ninja </i>
Ninjas tend to wear all black because they want to move around in the dark without being seen, right? Like, that’s the whole point of being a ninja? I’m asking this because the hero of 1981’s Enter the Ninja is a white ninja, in both senses of the word: He’s a Caucasian man who’s become a ninja, and...
Jet Li's <i>Fist of Legend </i>Is One Of The Best Fight Movies Ever Made
In the very first scene of Fist of Legend, a group of Japanese karate students burst into a college engineering classroom. They’re mad because there’s one Chinese student in the class, and they think Japan should be for Japanese people only. Their idea, I guess, is that they’re going to find that on...
<i>Hot Fuzz </i>Is The Ultra-Rare Action-Comedy That Doesn't Suck
I don’t know who came up with the idea of the action-comedy, but that person deserves our entire scorn. The genre, which flourished in the late ’80s and early ’90s, was built around the idea that a comedy wasn’t really a movie unless it had a shoddily edited car chase at the end. This was the sort o...
<i>Vengeance </i>Proves That French Rock Stars And Hong Kong Hitmen Can Mix
Johnny Hallyday has a fascinating, crazy face. He’s old and rich and famous enough that of course he’s had work done: His eyes are unnaturally tight, and they have that weird skin-stretched-back thing that Sylvester Stallone has these days. But those eyes themselves were already something before any...
John Carpenter's <i>Assault On Precinct 13 </i>Is Ice Cold And Just Right
John Carpenter’s original Assault on Precinct 13 is one of the greatest zombie movies of all time, and there’s not a single zombie in it. The elements are all there: The chilling synth score, a cast of randoms thrown together by chance, an isolated siege site, the narrow escapes and eerie moments be...
Kevin Owens Has Arrived In WWE, And He's The Truth
Welcome to Deadspin’s irregular pro wrestling column, in which Tom Breihan and Ernest Wilkins will comb through the past month or so of superkicks, lariats, and 450 splashes in search of the greatest things that this most American of artforms has given us....
John Woo's Mesmerizing <i>The Killer </i>Changed Action-Movie History Forever
The best John Woo movie, and the main reason action-movie dorks speak the guy’s name in hushed tones, is 1992’s Hard-Boiled. That’s the last one he made in Hong Kong before he came over to America and found ways to inject his bullet-riddled absurdism into Hollywood’s system, and it’s the one where h...
<i>Payback</i> Is Mel Gibson At His Nastiest, And Therefore Best
After one viewing, I’m ready to call Mad Max: Fury Road the best English-language action flick since Terminator 2, if not Die Hard. It’s a motherfucker of a movie, a new benchmark in violent cinematic mayhem. I’ve you’ve ever read this column and you haven’t seen it yet, stop reading and go now. You...
Hyper-Violent Cartoon Westerns Don't Get Better (Or Weirder) Than This
If you get hopelessly lost watching the 2008 South Korean adventure The Good, the Bad, the Weird, don’t worry about it. You’re not alone. In fact, during the absurd and complicated horses-and-jeeps-and-motorcycles chase that ends the movie, some of the bandits ask each other, “Who’s that?” when anot...
<i>The Professional </i>Is Deeply Problematic, Profoundly Cool, And Very '90s
Imagine the elevator pitch for The Professional. “Okay, so we’ve got this hitman, right? Only he’s not a cool hitman: He’s great at killing, but he’s also childlike, off-kilter, possibly on the spectrum. He doesn’t really have any friends or talk to anyone outside of ‘work.’ We’ll make sure he doesn...
<i>The Way of the Dragon </i>Is A Stone-Cold Classic For That One Fight Alone
There used to be this DVD store in the Times Square subway station. Maybe it's still there. Probably not. Why was there ever a DVD store in the Times Square subway station? Some things just make no sense. But one day, maybe seven or eight years ago, I was walking through that hellmouth, and I saw ...
<i>Skyfall</i> Isn't The Best Bond Flick, But It Does Kick The Most Ass
There's no good answer to the "What's the best James Bond movie?" question, since the best James Bond movie will always be the first one you saw when you were a kid. (I ride for Live and Let Die until death.) And there's no good answer as to which James Bond is the best James Bond, since everyone ...
WrestleMania Was Ridiculous And Amazing
Welcome to Deadspin’s irregular pro wrestling column, in which Tom Breihan and Ernest Wilkins will comb through the past month of superkicks, lariats, and 450 splashes in search of the greatest things that this most American of artforms has given us. ...
<i>Chocolate </i>Is A Martial-Arts Classic If You Just Focus On The Kicking
So Chocolate is not Chocolat, the 2000 Johnny Depp/Juliet Binoche movie where people eat chocolate from a particular shop and it somehow makes them fall in love with each other. Chocolat is the sort of movie where you know it takes place in France because people speak English in French accents. It w...
<i>Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry </i>Is Acidic B-Movie Nihilism Done Right
The car-chase movies of the '70s really only had one plot: Someone drives a muscle car really fast, hoping to avoid police cars, some of which end up driving into streams or ponds. But each movie found a vastly different way to tell that one story. Vanishing Point, the genre's real masterpiece, to...
Is WrestleMania Going To Be Garbage, Or What?
Welcome to Deadspin's new irregular pro wrestling column, in which Tom Breihan and Ernest Wilkins will comb through the past month of superkicks, lariats, and 450 splashes in search of the greatest things that this most American of artforms has given us....
<i>Iron Monkey </i>Is An Underrated Goof From Hong Kong's '90s Golden Era
Somehow, in the early '90s, the Hong Kong film industry just had the action movie figured out. You'll see something like this every once in a while: A particular locale just going ham on some particular art form. It's like New York rap in the mid-'90s: All these classics coming out at a dizzying s...