UFC 132

Longtime readers of the blog will remember that I last attended a UFC show for UFC 121, headlined by Brock Lesnar losing his Heavyweight Championship to Cain Velasquez. My wife and I are taking a trip to Las Vegas to coincide with our fourth anniversary, and our big Vegas show that we will grace with our presence is UFC 132, her second and my sixth Ultimate Fighting Championship event.

This is a card that has a lot to offer in terms of star power despite a main event that will probably fail to resonate too much with mainstream viewers. While the undercard is stacked in terms of good fights, there are few big names or huge prospects fighting outside of Brian Bowles taking on Takeya Mizugaki and Melvin Guillard fighting Shane Roller. I expect the former of both fights to win, and Bowles should really be on the fast track to fighting the winner of the Faber/Cruz title fight on this show. Bowles spent a year on the shelf after breaking his hand and throwing in the towel in between the first and second round to current champ Dominick Cruz. He's won one fight since then and, as a former champ, deserves a shot to reclaim the gold.

Dennis Siver vs. Matt Wiman - This is a classic striker versus wrestler match up. Siver showed good takedown defense against George Sotiropoulos, but Sotiropoulos isn't known for his wrestling, while Wiman is a grinder who doesn't mind making fights ugly, ironic since his nickname is "Handsome." Matt Wiman should take this one by decision as long as his chin holds up and he avoids the spinning body kick that's become Siver's specialty.

Carlos Condit vs. Dong Hyun Kim - Speaking of grinding, this match presents two different types of fighters who specialize in it. The difference between them is that Condit rarely has a boring fight and Kim almost always has a boring fight. Suffice to say, regardless of who wins, I hope Condit's habit overrules Kim's. Condit has superior and exciting stand up, but Kim has the wrestling and grappling edge, which determines the direction of a fight more often than not. This doesn't look good for Condit unless he has a really solid game plan for Kim's skill set, and I don't suspect that even a Greg Jackson strategy will save him. This will go to a decision and Kim will take it.

Tito Ortiz vs. Ryan Bader - Darth Bader's sole loss in his career is to current Light Heavyweight Champion Jon Jones while Tito Ortiz hasn't won a fight since 2006. This goes a long way to show how valuable it is to be a star as opposed to a guy that just wins. Ortiz's last win came five years ago against a washed-up Ken Shamrock, a dude who headlined the very FIRST UFC back in 1993 (*).

(*) As an interesting sidenote/humblebrag, this will be the fifth Tito Ortiz fight I attend live. The first was against Ken Shamrock in 2002, then his first loss to Chuck Liddell, followed by his split decision win over Forrest Griffin, and the recent loss to Matt Hamill. 

Any other guy with this many losses in a row normally would have been released from his contract, but because Tito Ortiz is a star (albeit a falling one) and gets people to talk about him, he remains employed. Each one of his recent fights has been accompanied by rumors that it's his last in the UFC should he lose because he can no longer hang at the top level in the sport due to a litany of injuries and the game passing him by. His stand up has always been mediocre and his archaic game plan is to take a guy down and pound them out from their guard. Fighters are so well-rounded now that it's a strategy most can see through, and more and more people with better wrestling are taking up MMA. In fact, Ortiz has become the go-to guy for up and coming fighters to challenge because they figure it's an easy win, and the best way to become a star is to beat one. The privilege has fallen to Ryan Bader, a guy who is reminiscent of a young Tito Ortiz for how he incorporates wrestling but also has the knockout power that Ortiz has never possessed. This fight is the nail in the coffin of Tito Ortiz's long UFC career and Ryan Bader is the hammer. Bader will beat Ortiz by TKO in the second round, and hopefully Tito will announce his retirement because otherwise it'll just be sad. However, this is Tito Ortiz we're talking about, and smart decisions are not his strong suit.

Wanderlei Silva vs. Chris Leben - Think of every fighting cliche available and they will all be employed here. It's got "barroom brawl," "slugfest," "slobberknocker," "dream match," and "fight of the night" written all over it. Both of these guys throw wild, swing-for-the-fences punches looking for the knockout and have the ability to get knocked out cold. Either guy has the ability to win this fight, which is another really stupid and obvious cliche but also one that applies. Leben is coming off a devastating first round TKO loss by Brian Stann back in January, while Silva has taken a long time to recover from knee surgery and broken ribs, last fighting in February of 2010. Leben is best when he's fighting regularly because he tends to get into trouble when given time to himself, whereas Silva is well past his prime. Perhaps finally fixing his knee will be the missing component that has prevented Silva from stringing together more than two wins in a row, but I doubt it'll show in this fight due to the seventeen month layoff and subsequent ring rust that will accompany it. Leben will knockout Silva in the second round.

Urijah Faber vs. Dominick Cruz (c) for the UFC Bantamweight Championship - The story behind the animosity between Urijah Faber and Dominick Cruz is one of my favorite of the many rivalries that exist in MMA. Four years ago, on the second WEC card under the Zuffa umbrella, Dominick Cruz challenged Urijah Faber for the Featherweight Championship. Cruz felt slighted that the promotional poster only showcased Faber, as opposed to both fighters. As retribution, Cruz decided to sign any and all autographs for the show on said promo poster directly over Faber's face, thinking that it would totally show Urijah who was boss and not make Dominick look like a whiny little baby. Faber retaliated by choking Cruz out with a guillotine inside of two minutes into the first round. The two have continued to hate each other ever since (**).

(**) Of course, Urijah Faber's version of hating someone is a lot different than most people because he's the happiest, most upbeat fighter in MMA. For him, hating someone just means that he says he doesn't think the person in question is "cool."

That was in 2007. Today, circumstances have changed. Faber defended his title, lost his title, lost his attempts at winning the title back, and has moved down to bantamweight. Faber is the most marketable fighter out of the two new weight classes UFC introduced earlier this year, but this is realistically his last chance at a belt for a very long time. He's lost two attempts to reclaim the Featherweight Championship, and this is his third championship fight in two years. It's rare to get one championship fight in that span of time, let alone three, making this do or die for the challenger in terms of title contention and capitalizing on his marketability in making these lighter weight classes matter.

Meanwhile, Cruz moved down to 135 lbs. since their initial outing, employing a stick and move style that has become his trademark and went on a winning streak that involved earning the Bantamweight Championship. He has yet to finish a fight as a bantamweight, unless you count the aforementioned Brian Bowles breaking his hand and giving up the title, but that was more Bowles taking himself out of the equation than Cruz finishing him. The fact is that Dominick Cruz is a boring fighter, but one that is incredibly difficult to fight and beat. He's quick, constantly moving, and approaches his stand up from weird angles, making it tough to land a takedown or a counter. What he lacks in power, he makes up for in technique, so, while he may not knock someone out or even knock them down, he'll consistently land and make sure that his opponent doesn't.

Faber is everything Cruz isn't as a fighter: entertaining, uses flashy moves, isn't afraid to engage, and works towards a finish. As a bantamweight, Faber is finally fighting from the position of being the more powerful guy, something he's rarely been able to do in the past. His two previous fights at bantamweight show that he hasn't given up his speed in the weight cut, nor does it seem like he's lost any of his cardio. Faber has great grappling and submissions along with power in his hands that can knock out most folks.

Recently, Dominick Cruz wrote a blog for Sportsnet in Canada discussing how he finally understood that working towards being a star in the eyes of the public is as much a part of his job as training is for an upcoming fight. He then went on to complain yet again about the perceived slight he felt from four years ago, and what he fails to understand is how much he comes off like a jerkbag by constantly complaining about being left off a poster in lieu of the then champion FOUR YEARS AGO. In pro wrestling, the greatest heels (the bad guys) are always the dudes that feel like they're righteous in doing dastardly things. Dominick Cruz thinks he's right, and yet he's the biggest heel in the bantamweight division. In my heart, I want Urijah Faber to win and not just because my wife thinks he's cute. He's just more fun and, seemingly, just a better person by not being so boring. It is entirely possible that Cruz will win by a frustrating decision wherein he constantly avoids contact and sneaks in a punch here or there, I'm going with my heart on this one and calling it for Urijah Faber by guillotine in the first round. Because sometimes justice can be poetic.

TNS Update: Midsummer Night's Movie Reviews

Of the eight movies I discussed previously, I've now seen four of them. Let's discuss.

The Hangover Part II - I own the DVD of the original movie, which was a very funny, enjoyable and quotable film. Unfortunately, like I suspected, there was no difference between this film and the sequel. The plot hits all of the same beats as the original, goes for the same jokes and never once attempts a single thing that could be confused for original. Considering how surprisingly great I found The Hangover to be, and how fun Todd Phillips films usually are, this was a big disappointment. And poor Justin Bartha; would it kill them to include Doug in the festivities? Just once?

X-Men: First Class - While I still think that Thor has won the summer so far, in terms of superhero movies, this one is a close second. Seeing a Sixties era X-Men movie without mainstay characters like Wolverine or Cyclops would have sounded like crazy talk ten years ago. But now superhero movies are mainstream enough that this not only exists at all but is also neck and neck with X2: X-Men United for the honor of best of the X-Men films. Kevin Bacon oozes charm as Sebastian Shaw, Michael Fassbender plays Magneto like a cross between James Bond and Charles Bronson, and James Macavoy plays Professor X like the arrogant jerk he needs to be in order for him to be the benevolent and wise leader he'll later become. It's not a perfect film, mind you. January Jones proves that her range is solely that of Betty Draper from Mad Men, and, in a larger mythology that works as an allegory for both the Civil Rights Movement and LGBT equality, killing off one of the two minority characters and having the other one become a traitor in the first third of the film seems to show that someone misses the point. Still, this is a movie worth seeing and an argument can be made that it's the best of the X-Films.

Super 8 - My formative years were spent watching movies like E.T., The Goonies and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and JJ Abrams does a great job paying homage to those movies while never feeling derivative. The best part about the film is the chemistry between the group of friends, and that's something that's been missing from movies lately. Too many movies play adolescents off as either mindless stereotypes or mini-adults. The actors and Abrams find the balance of smart kids that don't sound like adults when they talk or interact with each other and still sound believable when having conversations with actual adults. It's a lost art that many movies I remember fondly from a long time ago got right, so I enjoyed that Super 8 nailed it in the midst of telling a simultaneously frightening and touching story about loss and hope. In short, this movie made my wife cry which is a category usually reserved for films like The Notebook.

Green Lantern - There's been more debate about this movie than any superhero flick I can recall. The two camps boil down to "It was completely terrible" or "It wasn't as terrible as people say." Either way, it fell way below my personal expectations. For me, many of the problems surrounded the fact that there felt like scenes were missing throughout the film. For instance, our supposed hero Hal Jordan and the bad guy Hector Hammond meet for the first time on screen at a big party more than half-way through the film, and it's a scene played as if the two know each other. There are also hints that Hammond has an unrequited crush on Carol Ferris, Jordan's love interest. However, none of this is ever spelled out or clarified. Not only does it make the bad guy come off as more sympathetic, but it doesn't give the viewer a reason to root for Hal Jordan. In fact, despite Ryan Reynolds doing a passable job and being a solid pick as Hal Jordan, the character comes off as a jerk who doesn't care about anyone or anything around him until the story gets to the point where he has to save Earth. Usually, this is known as a character arc, but his change of heart is completely false and arbitrary, meaning that Hal Jordan is a lousy hero in what is supposed to be a superhero movie. And it's not Reynolds' fault; this is clearly a writing or editing problem.

Nothing ever exists in a vacuum. On its own, Green Lantern as a summer popcorn movie has lots of explosions, some nifty special effects and really cool things that should be present in a movie about an intergalactic police force that gives every member a magical ring that can create anything the wearer wills. Unfortunately, Green Lantern exists in a world with Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Iron Man, Thor, The Incredibles, Kick Ass, the first two Spider-Man films, Hellboy, Hellboy II, and the aforementioned X-Men movies (the first, second and First Class). Granted, not everything can or should be The Dark Knight, but there's a lot of room for variation where storytelling makes sense. The last decade in superhero movies has shown that it's possible for a film to be both a special effects extravaganza AND tell a great story. When the two aren't mutually exclusive, it's fair to be disappointed when a film fails to have both. Instead, Green Lantern gives us redundant voice overs, thin characters with motivation lost on the cutting room floor, and a bad guy borrowed from the Fantastic Four sequel all in a very transparent and arrogant notion that it's setting up a sequel that may or may not happen due to relatively poor box office performance.

My favorite take on the film appears here, but know that the language may not be appropriate and that spoilers abound.

Book 23 of 2011

I finished this at the gym while using the stationary bike.

22) Point Omega by Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo tells the story in his own roundabout way of an older man who helped orchestrate the Iraq war, his daughter, and the guy who wants to make a movie about him. All of this takes place in between book ended chapters where a man watches Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho slowed down to a 24 hour pace at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Book 22 of 2011

My Sunday afternoon was lazy, allowing me to finish this through my Kindle app. The second book, A Clash of Kings, is the only one left in my Kindle archive that I have yet to finish. So that's exciting.

22) A Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire #1 by George R.R. Martin
The people in charge of marketing the Scott Pilgrim movie got it wrong because the first book in the A Song of Ice and Fire truly is an epic tale of epic epicness; this coming from a person who doesn't like using that word in such a flippant fashion. Also notable? Fantasy isn't my thing. The Lord of the Rings trilogy was a great series of films, but I've never taken the time to read the books. Sure, I own two different editions, but the scope of most fantasy worlds (and some of the stigma surrounding them) have always put me off giving the genre a shot. That changes now.

Book 21 of 2011

This is the second of three works I'm annotating in preparation for taking over the frosh honors classes for the next school year. Of the three (Animal Farm and Othello being the other two), this is one I haven't read before.

21) Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Bradbury foretells a dystopic future where books are outlawed because they make people think too much, and thinking can lead to unhappiness. As for what amounts to happiness, people are both out of control (in the case of crazy teenagers running people over for the sake of something to do) and totally in the dark (as in the case of Montag's wife, Mildred, and her clueless friends). Without the influence of literature, people have lost the ability to ask why and with that all sense of meaning in life.

The story also comes across as muddled in parts, which I'm hoping can be a topic for discussion in class. For what's been described to me as a junior high book, I was surprised at how challenging it came across in the beginning. Too much of the world feels poorly realized in Bradbury's overly flowery diction. The book is at odds with itself: it at once attempts to be very pointedly describing a world without literature and showing the consequences of that idea in practice but also tries to capture the world using the influence of the same.

Those two ideas seem like they would go well together but it feels jarring. Seeing more of the home life of Montag prior to his awakening by Clarisse (GET IT!?) would have helped to make the setting more established. In fact, my edition contains an essay where Bradbury describes two scenes that he included in a play adaptation that would have gone a long way towards, if not fixing my problems, at least addressing them. Reading those last few pages felt like watching a few really great deleted scenes from a movie I sort of liked. He says that he had the chance to include them in a later, revised edition but chose not to because Bradbury felt like changing the book after people have read it betrays the message of the book. I'm not sure where I stand on that idea but I think I agree with him, as art no longer belongs to the artist once other people get their hands on it since it's open to interpretation and analysis. However, it should make for some interesting discussion come class time.

The Digital Domain (or Here is the cake I own. Now go away so I can eat it.)

Jim Lee's redesigned Justice League
includes lots of raised collars.

This week, DC Comics (1) announced that it will be restarting all of their series at issue #1, introducing costumes redesigned by Jim Lee in order to "to make characters more identifiable and accessible to comic fans new and old." The press release announcing this new initiative implies that the characters will be rebooted to some unknown extent since the company plans to tell stories that are "grounded in each characters' specific legend but also reflect today's real world themes and events" and also stated "[t]his was a chance to start, not at the beginning, but at a point where our characters are younger and the stories are being told for today's audience." The line will begin with a new Justice League drawn by Lee and written by DC golden boy and Chief Creative Officer, Geoff Johns. Finally, starting in September when DC launches all 52 "new" series, all titles will be available digitally on the same day as release, a stark contrast to both DC and Marvel's current digital stance.


(1) It always strikes me as odd whenever I call DC Comic by that name because DC stands for Detective Comics, it's old flagship title. When you say or type DC Comics, you're actually saying Detective Comics Comics. And I am a nerd.


So what does this mean? There are two things to consider here: the creative side and the business side. And the two overlap to a degree since I fall into the category of lapsed fan that DC would love to bring back to the fold, although that is actually up for debate.

From a creative standpoint, this appears, like many ideas brought about by Dan DiDio, the co-publisher of DC Comics, to be a quick fix plan that hasn't been thought out very well. If the plan were given much consideration beyond "let's blow everything up and start over but only sort of," then I'd imagine that the architects of the plan would have more concrete answers for their chief fan base about the kinds of things they care about, namely continuity and timelines that allow the readers to know what "counts." This is mostly because comic book fans are a bunch of negative, self-hating, twenty to fifty-something sticks in the mud who are overly concerned with making sure that the stories they read change the status quo but also keep everything exactly as it was when they first got into comics.

In gambling to bring in a new audience, the DC brass also risks losing the existing one. Providing such a short time before everything changes forever again doesn't allow for the excitement of the new line to take effect or for the fans of the current status quo to see their stories wrapped up. Plus, no one who follows trends in the comic industry honestly believes that the status quo will change. Between Crisis on the Infinite Earths, Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis and Final Crisis, there have been four major events since 1985 that have reconfigured the timeline to make everything more reader friendly that has only caused things to be more confusing. There used to be a multiverse, but the first Crisis changed it all to one Earth. Zero Hour attempted to make sense of the timeline that resulted. Meanwhile Infinite Crisis brought the multiverse back because Superboy punched reality (2), and Final Crisis...well, I don't know what that did except make Batman a cave man and a pirate (3).


(2) Seriously.

(3) No, seriously.


See, all of these "fixes" tend to not fix anything when the goal should be to just tell decent stories that are exciting and out of this world and make them available to the largest audience possible. And starting from scratch could do that, but it makes the existing audience feel like a bunch of chumps for not being good enough for the company already since what they like will be abandoned to attempt to capture new customers. To placate them and prevent their departure, DC has stated that some of the existing continuity will still be around. DC wants to have its cake and eat it, too.

The comic industry needs a shot in the arm if it hopes to survive because they face an actual crisis similar to the one the music industry failed to confront ten years ago. They need to grow a new audience but are afraid to lose the one they have. However, the audience they have is old, getting older, and shrinking.  While their characters are more popular than ever thanks to the boom of superhero movies, toys and cartoons, the medium from which they originated isn't faring so well because it's often cost-prohibitive and daunting to become a new fan. Instead of embracing the new audience by catering to the different ways they take in content, they've shunned it and only focused on the direct market. The comic book industry has become the Ouroboros. Add to this the fact that the violent content in some comics isn't necessarily inviting to the kids that would otherwise might want to become fans, or at least it's not to their parents. The answer might be to embrace digital content and market it effectively, but DC, in going the with same day digital release, still isn't doing that because they (and Marvel, too, for that matter) haven't managed to figure out that digital content should be cheaper. Instead, they're charging the newsstand price for new issues and exorbitantly higher prices (in comparison to the original cover price) for older issues.

The numbering of a series and whether or not Superman wears a turtleneck ultimately doesn't matter. The first issue of The Amazing Spider-Man that I bought was in the high 200's; Action Comics and Detective Comics were both in the 400's when I started  wanting to read about Superman and Batman. The fact that the stories were accessible and good is what kept me coming back and the numbering didn't keep me from reading. Having convoluted stories that required me to read five other concurrent issues just to understand what was happening to the one character I cared about is what forced me to stop buying comics on a regular basis. Digital distribution does matter, but it has to be incorporated in such a way that it doesn't deter new customers from trying out the product. I originally bought an iPad over a Kindle because I wanted to be able to read comics on it and felt it would be more cost and space-effective compared to purchasing single issues at stores. This doesn't mean that comic book stores have to die in order for comic book companies to live, either. Just like books will always exist in a physical format of some kind, so will comics. But avoiding progress and the new audience that progress can bring only serves to make things worse for everyone involved who stand to make a living in the industry.