Five Types of Wrestling

So I haven't been reviewing the WWE pay-per-views recently, because a) I've been very busy with work and b) they've been churning them out at a rate of approximately one every three weeks and they've all sort of merged into one.  You'll get nothing offensively horrible, a couple of great matches on each show, and a dodgy finish in the main event.  I think it'll start getting more interesting coming up to the Royal Rumble, which is always a highlight of the year.

But I want to keep my eye in, so I thought I'd do something different.  Basically, I'm going to give an example of a wrestling match that I think encapsulates a particular type of wrestling, whether you class 'type' in terms of the booking or the wrestling itself.  This won't necessarily be the best match in a certain style, but one that provides the most pertinent example of it.  And I'll do this with five distinct types, starting with a style of match that will probably be most familiar to the average wrestling fan.

Attitude Era Clusterfuck

The Match: Stone Cold Steve Austin (c) vs. Dude Love (For the WWF Championship, with Special Guest Referee Vince McMahon, Special Guest Ring Announcer Pat Patterson, Special Guest Timekeeper Gerald Briscoe, and Special Guest Enforcer The Undertaker)

WWF Over the Edge, 31 May 1998

The so-called Attitude Era is nebulous in terms of temporality, though most critics agree that it ended on 1 April 2001, for two main reasons.  Firstly, the WWF's main competitors, WCW and ECW, had gone out of business within weeks of each other, leaving the WWF as the only game in town.  Secondly, the event, widely regarded as one of the greatest pro wrestling shows of all time, ended with Stone Cold Steve Austin winning the WWF Championship with the aid of the villainous WWF owner Vince McMahon.  As for why that was such a big deal, this match should give you some indication.

Stone Cold vs. Vince McMahon was the defining feud of the Attitude Era.  Stone Cold was the pre-eminent anti-hero of pro wrestling, at a time when crowds were generally unreceptive to the traditional clean-cut hero that Hulk Hogan had been in the 1980s, the last boom period for the WWF.  He was a surly, beer-swilling redneck who would beat people up, sometimes women, for little reason.  But he became beloved for his take-no-prisoners attitude, and the fact that he was ranged against the corporate machine of McMahon, who needed Austin in his company because he was embroiled in a real-life ratings war with WCW, but couldn't stand to have the man representing the company as champion.  Following failed attempts to persuade Austin to become more corporate and well-behaved, McMahon hand-picked fun-loving hippy Dude Love (one of the three alter-egos of the legendary Mick Foley), gave him a 'corporate' makeover, and arranged this match with the deck stacked against Austin, so that Dude Love would emerge triumphant.

The style of storytelling in the Attitude Era consisted of edgy, adult-oriented content, coupled with shocking, often nonsensical storyline twists, in order to gain the precious ratings to beat WCW, and to propagate the idea that "anything can happen in the World Wrestling Federation".  The style of main event match in the Attitude Era generally relied upon wild brawling and outside interference, and this bout has the latter in spades.  McMahon is the referee, and his two stooges, Patterson and Briscoe, were on hand at ringside to ensure Dude Love's victory.  When Dude Love gets counted out, McMahon changes the rules so that there are no count-outs.  When Dude Love cheats, McMahon changes the rules so that there are no disqualifications.  And amidst all the chaos, Jim Ross, the greatest wrestling commentator of all time, is making clear his utter outrage at what is taking place.  And as if that wasn't enough, The Undertaker is there as 'enforcer' to stop the funny business getting too out of hand.  As for wild brawling, guys get slammed onto cars, through tables, get choked with barbed wire, and everything you can imagine.  If you looked up 'clusterfuck' in the dictionary, you'd see the finish to this match, as Stone Cold desperately fights against overwhelming odds, and The Undertaker finally decides to get involved and start wrecking shit.  This might actually be my favourite match of all time.  Watch it, it's awesome.

Alternatively...  The Rock (c) vs. Triple H (Iron Man Match for the WWF Championship, with Special Guest Referee Shawn Michaels)

WWF Judgement Day, 21 May 2000

An Iron Man Match is one in which the participants must gain as many pins or submissions over their opponent as they can in one hour.  The first Iron Man Match was between Shawn Michaels and Bret 'The Hitman' Hart at Wrestlemania XII.  It was an hour of pure wrestling which ended with the score tied at 0-0, and Michaels won in overtime.  As for this one...special guest referee?  Check.  McMahon family involvement?  Check.  Beloved face against corporate-backed heel?  Check.  Nearly a dozen falls inside the hour as opposed to none?  You bet.  And if you thought the WWF at the time could sink an hour's worth of time into a match and complement the effort by refraining from including shenanigans and interference at the climax, you should think again.

Puroresu

The Match: Kenta Kobashi and Mitsuharu Misawa (c) vs. The Holy Demon Army (Toshiaki Kawada and Akira Taue) (For the AJPW World Tag Team Championship)

AJPW Super Power Series, 9 June 1995

Puroresu (the term coming from a corruption of 'pro wrestling') is Japan's particular form of staged in-ring combat, and like its Mexican variant, is distinct from the Western style.  Japanese wrestling is presented more as a legitimate athletic contest (wrestling results still appear in the 'Sports' section of Japanese newspapers), and there are fewer theatrics.  Storylines rarely, if ever, get more complex than two competitors trying to prove their supremacy or win a certain tournament of championship belt, or the trope of the Japanese patriot defending their promotion against a foreign invading force, usually American, which is a tradition that goes back to the 1950s, when wrestling first became popular in the country, and Japanese people, still resentful of defeat in World War 2, would come in their thousands to see Japanese heroes, such as the former sumo Rikidōzan, taking down huge Americans.  The style of wrestling is more reliant upon exchanges of martial arts strikes (which are not pulled in any way) than its American counterpart, with both competitors striving to show how tough they are, which is important in a culture than has traditionally respected stoicism and the warrior code.  There is also the trope of 'fighting spirit', in which the wrestlers will, by summoning up their strength and courage, shrug off their opponent's moves seemingly unharmed, which will be familiar to anyone who's watched virtually any Hulk Hogan match (the Hulkster was actually a huge star in Japan before he became famous in America.  Unlike in America, however, the Hulkster had to put some effort into his Japanese matches, as with no storylines for a promotion to fall back on, more emphasis has to be place on the quality of the in-ring entertainment).

All Japan Pro Wrestling (AJPW) in the 1990s is the most critically-acclaimed wrestling of all time in terms of match quality.  Their big main event matches were festooned with 5-star reviews by doyen of wrestling journalists Dave Meltzer, to the point where some All Japan wrestlers have more 5-star matches to their name than every North American promotion combined.  I could have chosen from literally dozens of 90s All Japan matches to illustrate puroresu, but I've chosen this one because of who the participants are.  Misawa, Kobashi and Kawada are frequently cited as amongst the best wrestlers of all time, and Taue is merely very good.  Collectively they became known as 'The Four Pillars of Heaven', and were mainstays of the promotion's main event scene for a decade.  This match illustrates all the main features of Japanese wrestling, from the strike exchanges, to 'fighting spirit', to the fact that All Japan at the time was engaged in a sort of finishing move arms race, as wrestlers needed more and more devastating moves to finish their battle-hardened opponents off, hence the numerous finisher kick-outs in this match (this arms race would eventually lead to the creation of so-called 'super finishers', which usually involved dropping a guy on his head, such as Kawada's Ganso Bomb, Misawa's Tiger Driver '91, and most famous of all, Kobashi's Burning Hammer).  This match, without having to resort to the use of weapons, is a hard-hitting, brutal contest, and a crowning moment in puroresu history.

I should also add that 'The Holy Demon Army' is a truly great name.  Like all good Japanese tag team names, it's bombastically awesome (my all-time favourites are 'Sternness' and 'Stack of Arms', for the record), and like all good Japanese tag team names, it makes no goddamn sense.

Alternatively...  Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. Tomohiro Ishii

NJPW G1 Climax, 2 August 2013

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWVqJNIUgJ0

I could have chosen many, many matches from this year's G1 Climax tournament, staged by New Japan Pro Wrestling (NJPW), All Japan's traditional rivals (although All Japan is now a shell of what it once was, while New Japan goes from strength to strength.  I basically chose this one at random, but it's useful in order to illustrate a couple of particular facets of puroresu.  Firstly, Japanese promotions love their tournaments; New Japan holds singles and tag teams tournaments for both heavyweights and junior heavyweights (i.e. wrestlers under 220 pounds).  Secondly, this match shows how the face/heel dynamic works in Japan.  With storylines being simple or non-existent, there is less back story to each character, and thus while most wrestlers are still positioned as good guy or bad guy, the crowd often chooses who to cheer and boo during a match of their own accord.  This is what happens here.  Tanahashi is the top star of the company and generally beloved by the fanbase.  However, Ishii is a cult favourite and a scrappy underdog, and the crowd get behind him more, so Tanahashi, realizing that he's less popular, starts to wrestle in more of a villainous manner as a result, which is a nicely organic way of telling stories in the ring.  Being a round-robin tournament in which two ostensible faces often end up fighting each other (and the same with heels), the G1 Climax is full of matches where the crowd picks a side without being guided there by a storyline, as in America.  This match is much more accessible to those who are used to American wrestling, and is wrestled at a fast pace while retaining traditional tropes of the Japanese style, including a truly brutal finish.

Lucha Libre

The Match: El Hijo del Santo and Octagón vs. Los Gringos Locos (Eddie Guerrero and 'Love Machine' Art Barr) (2 out of 3 falls Mask vs. Hair Tag Team Match)

AAA When Worlds Collide, 6 November 1994

Lucha libre (literally, 'free wrestling') is the particularly Mexican version of pro wrestling.  More emphasis is placed on high-flying and acrobatic artistry than big power moves, and its cultural status is different to something like the WWF/E, particularly when we consider the characteristic use of masks.  After the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, a reinscription of the Mexican national ideal occurred that embraced indigenous, pre-Columbian cultures and aesthetics, which led to masks gaining greater prominence in Mexican culture.  When pro wrestling first became popular in the country in the 1930s, many of the top stars wore masks, used to symbolise certain ideals and traits.  Pre-eminent amongst these was El Santo, the father of one of the participants in this match.  El Santo was arguably a bigger star in Mexico than Hulk Hogan was in America, not only wrestling but appearing in films and comic books.  As with comic book superheroes, masks are also used to hide the secret identities of the wrestlers, although the tradition pre-dates the so-called 'Golden Age' of comics.  When El Hijo del Santo's wife filed for divorce, she sent photos to the media purporting to be of him without his mask, thus hoping to humiliate him.  Of course, because El Hijo del Santo had never appeared in public without the mask, nobody knew what he actually looked like, and consequently the newspapers that received the pictures couldn't tell if they were genuine or not.

Because masks are so prized in Mexico, many of the big matches are what are called luchas de apuestas ('matches with wagers'), in which the participants must unmask if they lose.  Sometimes the forfeit is to be shaved bald, but losing the mask is more serious, as to be unmasked involuntarily is considered humiliating, and wrestlers who are unmasked must face their public uncertain if their new guise will be accepted or not.  Both masks and hair are on the line in this match, run by the Mexican promotion AAA but taking place in Los Angeles (known for its large Hispanic community).  Wagering their masks are the duo of the martial arts-inspired Octagón, and El Hijo del Santo, the son of the legend himself.  Wagering their hair are the nefarious Americans Eddie Guerrero and Art Barr.  So not only are masks and hair on the line, but national pride as well, and this dynamic has always been a feature of wrestling, from Hulk Hogan's battles with The Iron Sheik to Rikidōzan fighting off giant Americans in post-war Japan.  Guerrero and Barr do everything they can to cheat their way to victory, while the Mexicans just as tenaciously resist.  Considering that in WWF/E Eddie Guerrero (born in Texas but of Mexican descent) played up his Mexican heritage, it's quite a shock to see him in stars-and-stripes tights, but he plays the role of the arrogant Yankee very well here, as does his phenomenally talented partner, who sadly died of a drug overdose a couple of months after this match.

One thing to note is that this match is 2 out of 3 falls, which has been the traditional format for wrestling matches in Mexico.  AAA has moved away from it in recent years, but in CMLL, the oldest wrestling company in the world (founded in 1933), you'll barely find a match that is one fall to a finish.  In addition, the teams must pin both of their opponents to win a fall, and if you are pinned then your partner must fight alone until the next fall.  This makes the match a little tricky to follow at times, but once you get your head around the format, the spectacle is rewarding, with the combination of high-flying, national rivalry, and above all the sheer emotional weight the masks have for the fans.

Alternatively...  Eddie Guerrero (c) vs. Rey Mysterio (Title vs. Mask Match for the WCW Cruiserweight Championship)

WCW Halloween Havoc, 26 October 1997

Eddie Guerrero is my favourite wrestler of all time.  When I was younger I loved his roguish character and his dazzling in-ring ability, and count myself fortunate that I got to see him wrestle in person before he passed on.  Rey Mysterio, who was only 22 years old at the time of this match, is one of the all time greats in lucha libre, and indeed in pro wrestling in general.

In the late 90s, everyone said that WWF had great matches in the main event but dodgy wrestling on the undercard.  In WCW the reverse was true.  Their main event was filled with guys who were past it (Rowdy Roddy Piper, Macho Man Randy Savage), guys who were never that good in the first place (Kevin Nash, Scott Hall), or guys who were both (Hulk Hogan, Lex Luger).  On the undercard, however, they had some fantastic wrestlers, especially their imports from Mexico, and WCW exposed a great number of viewers north of the border to lucha.  The Mexican wrestlers invariably lost when they came up against the big white guys who monopolized the main event scene, but when they faced each other and were given enough time to put on a quality match, the results could be spectacular.  So it is here.  This isn't traditional lucha libre in that it's one fall to a finish, but it's a wonderful match, and Mysterio in particular pulls out some jaw-dropping manoeuvres.  And, of course, there's a mask on the line.

Comedy Match

The Match: John Cena vs. Alberto del Rio (Miracle on 34th Street Fight)

WWE Monday Night Raw, 24 December 2012

Sadly I don't have a youtube video for this, but you'll be able to find this match elsewhere if you look hard enough.  Last Christmas Eve, the WWE, probably knowing that nobody would really be watching their TV show anyway, had a bit of fun and produced a Christmas-themed episode of Raw, centred around this match.  At the start of the show, Alberto del Rio, who at the time would drive to the ring in a fancy car, accidentally runs over Santa Claus (played by wrestling legend Mick Foley).  Backstage, del Rio is confronted by the entire locker room, faces and heels alike appalled at what he's done (indeed, even del Rio's own personal ring announcer, Ricardo Rodriguez, can barely introduce his employer at the start of the bout because he's so distraught by the possible death of Father Christmas).  Before he falls unconscious, Santa requests that his injuries be avenged by John Cena, which leads to this match, a festive version of a regular Street Fight (hence the puntastic name of the bout) in which weapons can be found inside Christmas present boxes.  Inevitably, Cena's boxes include proper weapons like steel chairs and TV monitors, whereas the villain del Rio ends up with a pumpkin pie and a teddy bear, both of which he nevertheless attempts to use to take down Cena (throwing the latter item at his opponent with a cry like Braveheart).  The commentators, wonderfully, play the storyline completely straight and really sell the idea that Cena, with his battle cry, 'FOR SANTAAAAAAAAAAA!', is fighting to save Christmas.  The crowd get properly into it as well, regaling del Rio with chants of 'YOU KILLED SANTA', and urge Cena to 'USE THE TREE' as a weapon (Cena does).  Physical comedy, when done well, can be a beautiful thing, and this match delivers in spades, including, most hilariously of all, the idea that Cena is in danger of losing to a mere sleeper hold.  Not a technical masterpiece, of course, but really damn entertaining.

Alternatively...  3.0 (Scott 'Jagged' Parker and Shane Matthews) and Ultimate Gundam (Ebessan and Takoyakida) vs. Colt Cabana, Yohnel Sanders, Darkness Crabtree and The Swamp Monster (Eight-Man Tag Team Match)

CHIKARA King of Trios Night 3, 16 September 2012

No video link for this either.  Clearly the internet gods hate laughter.  CHIKARA is a small Pennsylvania-based promotion which has a cult following based on its family-friendly action, wacky characters (the number of wrestlers on their roster with ant gimmicks is almost at double figures) and fiendishly intricate comic-inspired storylines involving time travel, corporate conspiracies, ancient Egyptian artifacts, and much more.  One thing they do very well is comedy wrestling, and most of their matches will feature at least one moment in the action that is played for laughs.  However, rarely do they go as all-out on the hilarity front as in this contest.  On one team are two accomplished tag teams, one from CHIKARA and one from Japanese outfit Osaka Pro, and on the other team are noted comedy wrestler Colt Cabana, a Japanese man dressed like the KFC mascot (Yohel Sanders), a painfully slow and geriatric luchador (Darkness Crabtree, played by CHIKARA owner Mike Quackenbush under a mask), and a swamp monster (The Swamp Monster).  This match is a wonderfully deconstructive look at the tropes and idiosyncracies of pro wrestling, as both teams embark upon a series of events including; an introductory sing-song of the Canadian national anthem, intentionally botched rope-running and strike exchange sequences, seven men putting submission moves on each other at the same time, the referee attempting to win the match, impressions of Big Daddy and Hulk Hogan, and a mid-match game of Duck, Duck, Goose.  The CHIKARA crowd are characteristically awesome, at one point regaling Sanders with a chorus of 'The Birdie Song' as he runs wild on the other team.  I cannot fully conjure up the hilarious lunacy of this match with mere words, so seek it out if you can, it's well worth it.

Hardcore Wrestling

The Match: Edge, Mick Foley and Lita vs. Terry Funk, Tommy Dreamer and Beulah McGillicutty (No Disqualification Six-Person Intergender Tag Team Match)

ECW One Night Stand, 11 June 2006

Hardcore was a major element in the edgy WWF product in the Attitude Era, but was popularized by a small operation running out of a bingo hall in Philadelphia, called Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW).  All ECW matches were no-disqualification, and made liberal use of weapons.  Yet simply using weapons in a match does not denote 'hardcore' in itself; the Miracle on 34th Street Fight (see above) was family fun, despite all the chair shots.  Hardcore is an intensification of violence; even beyond such commonly used foreign objects as tables, ladders and chairs, ECW wrestlers used barbed wire, cheese graters, thumbtacks, and even let the fans supply their own instruments of pain.  Hardcore is also an aesthetic; ECW presented a TV show full of swearing and adult content, with much lower production values that WWF or WCW, and a DIY ethos (wrestlers pitched in with the running of the promotion, by organizing merchandise, answering phones or driving the bus).

Sad to say, I really haven't watched much of the original ECW.  But WWE, which bought the promotion after it went bankrupt in 2001, staged a pair of ECW reunion shows, named One Night Stand, in the mid-2000s.  The 2006 edition was less true to the spirit of ECW than the 2005 iteration (I'm not sure what Kurt Angle vs. Randy Orton was doing on an ostensible ECW card), but it did contain this truly hardcore match.  WWE superstar Edge and 'Hardcore Legend' Mick Foley (who was actually a heel in ECW for most of his stint there) declared themselves co-holders of the Hardcore Championship and challenged ECW's finest to take them on.  Answering the challenge were 'The Innovator of Violence' Tommy Dreamer (the face of the original ECW promotion) and Terry Funk, 61 years old at the time of this match and still kicking ass.  Following a pre-match promo in which Foley hilariously trolls the rabid ECW crowd, Lita (the real-life girlfriend of Edge) and Beulah McGillicutty (the real-life wife of Dreamer) get added to the match.  This bout is a visceral feast of blood, violence (weapons include a board covered in barbed wire and a flaming 2-by-4, also wrapped in barbed wire), and a sexualized menace emanating from Edge towards non-wrestler Beulah, which adds up to make a rewarding, but actually slightly uncomfortable viewing experience.  But if you want hardcore, you won't do much better.

Alternatively...  Masato Tanaka vs. Mike Awesome

ECW One Night Stand, 12 June 2005

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x15vq3d_mike-awesome-vs-masato-tanaka-one-night-stand-2005_sport

This match is from the first One Night Stand, and is a recapitulation of one of the original ECW's most heated feuds.  There isn't much more to this match other than two really hard bastards beating the shit out of each other for ten minutes, but it's incredibly well done, and very brutal indeed.  Also of note is commentator Joey Styles flipping his lid at Awesome, having still not forgiven him for signing with WCW while still ECW Champion in 2000, thus banging another nail into the coffin of the dying promotion (ECW, not WCW, although the latter only outlived the former by a few weeks).

Not got enough time to watch these matches?  No problem!  If you're really in a rush but still want to see quality wrestling, here's some pocket-sized gems.

Best Match Under 10 Minutes

The Match: Kurt Angle vs. Rey Mysterio

WWE Summerslam, 25 August 2002

One issue I (and many people) have with lucha is that quite often the balletic, high-flying action can end up looking overly contrived, for example if the recipient of a dive from the ring to the outside seems to be waiting in place for longer than would be plausible.  There are no such issues with this match, as luchador par excellence Rey Mysterio comes up against Olympic gold medallist and submission expert Kurt Angle.  Angle makes a perfect base for Mysterio's breathtaking acrobatics, being in the right place at the right time in every instance, and making the entire spectacle look as organic as professional wrestling can.  A dizzyingly-paced contest that ranks as probably the best opening match on any wrestling show in history.

Not got ten minutes?  Fear not!

Best Match Under 5 Minutes

The Match: Jun Akiyama (c) vs. Masakatsu Funaki (For the AJPW Triple Crown Championship)

AJPW 40th Anniversary Year Summer Impact, 26 August 2012

The story behind this match is simple and easily communicable even if you don't speak a word of Japanese.  In one corner is Jun Akiyama, a performer tipped for greatness in the 90s who failed to quite hit the heights predicted, but a dependable and greatly accomplished wrestler nonetheless.  His opponent is Masakatsu Funaki, a former MMA fighter of the type that are fairly common in puroresu, a man who in 1993 co-founded a promotion called Pancrase, which used the same rules as wrestling, except the fights were real.  Akiyama knows Funaki is a very dangerous man and thus, after a brief feeling-out period, assaults him with all his killer moves to try and end the match before it gets going.  Funaki responds in kind, and the end result is an entertaining sprint that compresses your typical half-hour epic Japanese main event into just under 5 minutes.

Still a bit too lengthy?  No worries, I've got you covered.

Best Match Under 3 Minutes

The Match: Alberto del Rio (c) vs. Dolph Ziggler (For the World Heavyweight Championship)

WWE Monday Night Raw, 8 April 2013

In the WWE, there exists a type of match called Money in the Bank, where the participants compete to retrieve a briefcase from the top of a ladder.  Inside the briefcase is a contract entitling the holder to a world title match at a time of their choosing within the next twelve months.  Generally, good guys will try to meet the champion on a level playing field, whereas villains look for opportunities to strike when the champion in hurt.  The latter occurs here, as World Champion Alberto del Rio, just after competing in a gruelling match and having his arm battered, is forced to face show-off heel and cult favourite Dolph Ziggler.  This match happened the night after Wrestlemania 29, and so the crowd is full of hardcore fans from all over the world who chose to stay in the States an extra night.  These hardcore fans love them some Dolph, and consequently when his music hits to announce that he's cashing in his contract, the arena goes absolutely ballistic.  Now usually these Money in the Bank cash-in matches end in seconds; the challenger hits the champion with his finishing move, pins him and wins.  Ziggler tries to put away del Rio with a single move, and del Rio, incredibly, kicks out.  What follows is two and a bit minutes of spirited resistance as the stricken del Rio desperately tries to fight off his fresh opponent, and Ziggler, urged on by the rabid crowd, attempts finally to put the champion away.  Dramatic as anything, and better than many matches ten times the length.

Mr. 420: Enter-ger the Integer

When I was a small child I used to love maths.  So many people who only knew me up until the age of about eleven or twelve assumed I'd study it at university, and I remember Mr. Betts, the lovely man who taught the extra maths classes at my primary school, being astonished and amused when a few years ago I told him that I'd ended up making my way in the academic world of English Literature.

I ended up falling out of love with maths at secondary school, which isn't to say that we didn't have excellent teachers who did their best to infuse their students with a passion for the subject; in particular I would rate Barrie Smith, a laconic and drily amusing Yorkshireman, to be the best schoolteacher I ever had the privilege to study under.  But it quickly became apparent to me that I had only liked maths as a child because I could easily cope with the simple operations; the adding, multiplication, subtraction, division, long multiplication, long division.  Gradually, as I studied it for GCSE and A-Level, the work got more difficult, my natural facility for maths got me less and less far, and I didn't feel enough passion or curiosity to find the answer, or satisfaction at solving a problem, to really put in the effort to master the really tricky stuff.  The tipping point came during an A-Level Further Maths lesson concerning the calculation of the escape velocity of a rocket exiting the earth's atmosphere, after which I immediately went to the head of sixth form and requested the right to drop the subject.  Considering that I was going on to study literature and that I really didn't need 6 A-Levels, I think I made the right call, particularly as the most complicated maths I have ever needed to use in life is the equation to find the area of a circle, which has come in very handy when working out which pizza is most cost-effective to buy, or how many 12-inch pizzas add up to make an 18-inch pizza when I rather unwisely bet my friends I could finish one of the massive bastards off.  Two and a quarter is the answer.  But I could have done that equation as an eleven-year-old (albeit an especially greedy one).  I remember feeling a great weight lift from my shoulders when I dropped Further Maths and felt the blessed realization that I would never have to spend any more time doing complex calculus, mechanics, or anything similar that, truthfully, I had long ceased to give the tiniest shit about.

However, as an arts student, and one interested in cultural phenomena, I've remained interested in what certain numbers come to symbolize.  A good example is sports, where certain shirt numbers will forever remain associated with a particular player; Johan Cruyff was 14, Michael Jordan was 23, and Jackie Robinson, the first black baseball player to grace the major leagues, wore 42, a number of such significance in the sport that it has been retired by every single major league team.  Famously, Diego Maradona was so associated with the number 10 that even when, at the 1982 and 1986 World Cups, the rest of the Argentinian squad was numbered alphabetically, he retained that number.  And at the 1998 World Cup, after Maradona's retirement, Argentina refused, in defiance of FIFA regulations, to assign the number 10 to anybody in their squad, eventually backing down and giving it to Ariel Ortega, who spoke of the pressure of trying to follow in Maradona's footsteps.

Even outside of the sporting realm, we have phone numbers like 999 and 118 118 and years like 1066 and 1966, but there are also less well-known integers which have come, through very different means to an organization's wish for an easy-to-recall phone number, or the merciless march of time, to gain some and unusual significance.  The integer I'd like to focus on here is 420, which might not mean that much to you, but has some fascinating meanings in certain parts of the world, and in certain cultures and subcultures.  I promise I won't be overtly thorough and obsessive like Jim Carrey in that terrible film about the number 23, whose title I forget, but I will give a brief overview of the meaning of 420 in America, and in India.

In the United States, 420 has come to be a code for marijuana.  The origins of this association are murky, but it seems that in 1971 a group of friends in San Rafael, California known as 'The Waldos' would get together at 4:20pm every afternoon to search for an abandoned cannabis crop.  They never did find it, but the time that they would meet became their slang term for weed, so they could talk openly about it without the authorities cottoning on.  San Rafael was also the home of The Grateful Dead, a jam band who have long been associated with cannabis culture, and use of the term '420' spread from The Waldos to the community of 'Dead-Heads' within the town, and eventually beyond.  The influential stoner magazine High Times picked up on the term, which helped disseminate it to a more spatially diffuse public.  Nowadays, many pot smokers symbolically light up at 4:20pm in honour of The Waldos, and April 20th (4/20 in the American notation) has become a counterculture holiday.  Online, there is an internet forum for the discussion of drugs, modelled after the baffling meme-spewing monolith 4chan, called 420chan (I must point out at this point that I only ever frequent 420chan for the part of the forum that is strictly dedicated to professional wrestling).

I'm sure there are pockets of people in India who ape American drug culture, but for the vast, vast majority of Indians, 420 has a different meaning.  Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code, established by the British colonizers in 1860, covers offences relating to fraud, cheating and dishonesty.  In Salman Rushdie's seminal Indian novel Midnight's Children, the narrator Saleem Sinai, head of a convocation of 1001 magical children born at the hour of India's independence, remarks, 'Malnutrition, disease, and the misfortunes of everyday life had accounted for no less than four hundred and twenty of them by the time I became conscious of their existence; although it is possible to hypothesize that these deaths[...]had their purpose, since 420 has been, since time immemorial, the number associated with fraud, deception and trickery.  Can it be, then, that the missing infants were eliminated because they had turned out to be somehow inadequate, and were not the true children of that midnight hour?'  He goes on to add that this idea 'depends on a view of life which is both excessively theological and barbarically cruel', but he is still keenly aware of the malign meaning of 420 within the Indian context.  Most notably, there is the 1955 Bollywood film Mr. 420, or Shri 420 in Hindi (or श्री 420, because I learned the Devanagari alphabet months ago and dammit, I'm going to use it!)  This is one of the most famous films in the history of India, and concerns the world of confidence tricksters.  Earlier this year, when the Indian cricketer Sreesanth was charged with match-fixing, some genius of a headline writer came up with the pun 'Sree 420'; I've never felt so simultaneously nerdy and proud as when I got the joke.  Since 1955, 'Mr. 420' has entered the Indian lexicon as slang for, to use the parlance of our capital, a dodgy geezer.

Whatever your views on whether marijuana should be legalized or not, the fact remains that in most of the world lighting up a fat doobie is illegal, and pot smokers are looked down on by much of society; those who partake of '420' are seen as 'Mr. 420'.  I may have ceased to become interested in mathematical equations, but I will never fail to be fascinated by the fact that despite the differences between how 420 came to acquire its meanings in America and India - one signification instituted from 'below' by counterculture and word-of-mouth, the other from 'above' by legal codes and mainstream popular culture - there is such a remarkable overlap.

Wrestling Review: WWE Summerslam 2013

Since a fairly predictable and (for the most part) lacklustre Wrestlemania, WWE has been on something of a hot streak where PPVs are concerned, with Payback and Money in the Bank in particular being very strong offerings.  Summerslam has traditionally been one of the biggest events of the year, but this year's card looked a little thin at the outset.  No Tag Title match, no Intercontinental Title match, no Divas Title match, and superstars lacking scheduled matches included Big Show, Mark Henry, Randy Orton (or so it would seem...), Antonio Cesaro, Kofi Kingston, Jack Swagger, Ryback, Seth Rollins, Roman Reigns, and many more.  In addition, the build-up - the two main event matches excepted - was underwhelming; the trope of 'challenger beats champion in a non-title match to set up a title match' which has been overused recently to set up midcard championship bouts seems to have infested the World Heavyweight Title scene.  However, the show was basically being sold almost entirely on the back of these two main event face-offs; John Cena vs. Daniel Bryan and Brock Lesnar vs. CM Punk.  The storylines behind both of these matches were developed brilliantly, and there was a real 'big fight feel' surrounding them.  But did Summerslam as a whole live up to the very high standards of recent WWE?  Well, that's what I'm here for!

Pre-Show: Dean Ambrose (c) vs. Rob Van Dam (WWE United States Championship)

As my previous reviews have made clear, I bloody love RVD.  Yet I viewed his return to WWE with some trepidation.  He's in his forties now, and his work during his spell in TNA wasn't exactly inspiring; it was, shall we say, a little ponderous.  Happily, it seems that this state of affairs was more due to lack of motivation than his losing a step in the ring (and honestly, if I'd been working for TNA around the time Hulk Hogan and Eric Bischoff started running the show, I wouldn't have been too motivated either), and since reappearing in WWE, he's put on several very fine matches, especially his first outing back on Raw in which he defeated Chris Jericho.  RVD earned his shot at Dean Ambrose by winning a battle royal in which he outlasted nineteen other superstars, most notably Mark Henry, who showed his respect to the victor after the match, and Ryback, who didn't, possibly because he and RVD get their leotards from the same place and it's become a little awkward.

My assumption was that RVD was in this match because he likes to take moves by landing right on the top of his head (like so - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n9EuysP4XQ), and Ambrose's as-yet-unnamed finisher impacts the opponent's head.  This isn't what happened.  But I'm not complaining, as this was yet another solid display from two very talented wrestlers; one coming towards the end of his career, and one just starting out.

The first thing to note is that Ambrose played the villain to absolute perfection here, turning his deranged, almost feral persona up to 11.  The crowd (mostly - there were a few chants of 'LET'S GO AMBROSE!') booed him like crazy, and cheered RVD to the rafters, which is exactly what you want to start off a show; a heel who can whip the crowd into a frenzy, and a high-flying exciting performer to go up against him.  The thing about RVD matches is that you know what you're getting; Rolling Thunder, split-legged moonsault, springboard attacks of various kinds, kicks that don't look entirely pulled, spinning leg drop to the outside, Five-Star Frog Splash (all being well).  But repetition isn't the point; first, all these moves are inherently awesome, and second, they're very fresh to the WWE crowd, because RVD has been away for so long.  It's hard to imagine a crowd in, say, Dragon Gate (a Japanese promotion specialising in all kinds of flippity-flips) treating RVD with such amazement, but he had the Staples Centre in Los Angeles eating out of the palm of his hand, and it was glorious.

RVD looked like he had the match won when he went up top to deliver the death blow to Ambrose, but his Shield cohorts Seth Rollins and Roman Reigns made their way through the audience in order to put 'The Whole F'N Show' off his stride.  Thankfully, Big Show and Mark Henry came out to even the odds and attempt to ensure that RVD could proceed unmolested.  This tactic worked well, until RVD finally hit the Frog Splash, at which point Reigns entered the ring and speared him out of his boots, drawing the disqualification but saving his ally's title.

Between Ambrose's heel mannerisms and RVD's spectacular offence, this was an ideal opening match.  I assume they're building up towards Show and Henry challenging for the tag titles, which I would personally love to see, if only for the morbid fascination of seeing the heaviest tag team WWE could possibly come up with, unless they brought Andre the Giant back from the dead and paired him up with the bloke from that Channel 4 documentary.  Anyway, I love RVD and Ambrose is a great heel, so thumbs up here.  Rating: ***

One criticism I'd make of the show is that it took a while to get going; we had commercials, The Miz's opening spiel, Fandango's interrupting of said spiel, The Star-Spangled Banner (at least with the British national anthem, it's bad but it's over quickly), and the opening pyro.  You might have thought that after all that, they'd have scheduled another exciting, fast-paced match.  You'd have thought wrong...

Match 1: Kane vs. Bray Wyatt (w/ Luke Harper and Erick Rowan) (Ring of Fire Match)

This match, like that in the pre-show, had an established veteran paired with a young prospect bolstered by two stablemates.  That's about where the similarities end.

Regarding the match stipulation, no, WWE hasn't started naming match types after songs by overrated singers.  A Ring of Fire match closely resembles an Inferno Match, which is to Kane as the Buried Alive Match is to his brother The Undertaker; i.e. it's his signature gimmick match, but he almost never wins.  Sadly, however, this wasn't an Inferno Match; the object of the match was not to set your opponent on fire, but simply to pin them.  The flames were simply there to stop the other two members of Bray Wyatt's 'family' from interfering.  And to look cool.  Which they did.

Kane, in recent months, has been something of a comedy character, but the beauty of Kane is that he's so imposing and has such a rich backstory that he can be 'reset' to being an absolute monster at a moment's notice.  The Wyatt Family are a unique and disturbing cult of Deep South backwoodsmen, led by the charismatic preacher-figure Bray Wyatt, whose professed motives are wreathed in opaque, almost poetic language.  Their attack on Kane, WWE's resident eldritch abomination, appears to be a proclamation of their lack of fear of even the monstrous, and when Wyatt was challenged to this match by Kane, he simply laughed.  All very interesting stuff.

Then we got the match itself, which is where the problems arise.  On one hand, the visuals were very striking, with the flames surrounding the ring shooting up in the air with every slam.  The contest started out promisingly, with both men showing surprising agility for their size, trading attempted strikes and reactive dodges.  Kane eventually got the upper hand, at which point Wyatt decided to call on his followers for aid.  They attempted to hand him a kendo stick, but it caught on fire.  Then they tried to use a fire extinguisher to...well, extinguish the flames.  No dice.  Kane then chokeslammed Wyatt, chokeslammed him again, decided that wasn't enough, then set him up for the Tombstone.  Finally, Harper and Rowan remembered what they were taught at school and used a massive towel to quell the flames, rushed the ring and beat up Kane, allowing Wyatt to hit his finisher and pin the Big Red Machine.

My first issue with the match is that the business with the kendo stick and the fire extinguisher was funny, both to me and to the crowd.  Considering the eerie and often disquieting build to the match, the dynamic between the characters, and the inherent danger of the fire, it was tonally jarring.  My second, and much more major, issue, was that Kane used his finisher twice on Wyatt, and was attempting a third when the interference came.  In both this match and the pre-show, the veteran would have emerged triumphant were it not for the cheating of their opponents.  The difference is that Ambrose and RVD had a competitive match, and looked like equals.  Kane obliterated Wyatt in the end, to the point of castiga excesivo.  I will allow that Kane's repeated chokeslamming of Wyatt made the newcomer look like a psychological threat, in that Kane was so caught up in inflicting punishment on his tormentor that he forgot about the match.  But a contest in which Wyatt looked like more of a physical threat to Kane would have done more for him, particularly as this was Wyatt's first match on WWE television.

So all in all, I'm honestly not sure how to rate this match.  I'll be adding points because the flames were cool; sue me.  But the lack of time and substance afforded to the match, coupled with the issues with the booking, lead me to conclude that this was not all that it could have been. And new wrestlers need a good first match to give them the best chance at succeeding; look at The Shield's first match.  Now that was epic. Rating: *1/2

Match 2: Cody Rhodes vs. Damien Sandow

On one hand, I'm bemoaning the loss of Team Rhodes Scholars, a delightfully despicable heel tag team, due to the falling out between its members (Sandow beat Rhodes for the Money in the Bank contract, acted condescending and superior about it, Rhodes got the hump, started brawling with Sandow, stole the briefcase and threw it in the Gulf of Mexico, Sandow unveiled a fine leather replacement in keeping with his upper-class intellectual character).  On the other hand, this match ruled.  It was wrestled at a fair lick, which I enjoyed, considering that Sandow is more known for his methodical, albeit intense, offense.  In short, it felt like a grudge match.  No opening mat-based exchanges here, just two rivals wanting to beat the crap out of each other.  Diversity in match styles is always good.

The finish, with Rhodes simply pulling Sandow away from the ropes and hitting CrossRhodes, came a little abruptly, but that's a minor fault in what was a thoroughly entertaining match.  Rhodes, now that he's a face, has incorporated flashier manoeuvres into his arsenal (especially the Muscle Buster, which invariably looks brutal even if it's being delivered by a man much less beefy than Samoa Joe, its most notable exponent.)  Looking at the durations of the night's bouts, I'm staggered that this one lasted less than seven minutes.  They packed so much in, and in so intense a fashion, that it felt much longer, and much more substantial than your average short Raw or Smackdown match.  I assume this is only the start of their rivalry, so I look forward to seeing what else these two men can conjure up. Rating: ***1/4

Match 3: Alberto del Rio (c) vs. Christian (World Heavyweight Championship)

This was predictably great.  Both of these men would struggle to have a bad match with anyone, and when put together they delivered a gem that will probably be overlooked in favour of the two main event matches when assessments of this PPV are delivered in the coming years.  But while it wasn't up to the standards of those bouts, it was excellent on its own merits.

The thing I like most about WWE PPVs is that the wrestlers expand their movesets from what you see on free TV; you might see John Cena essaying a hurracanrana, or CM Punk delivering a moonsault (they don't do those moves that well, but there are other examples).  You also get counters to expected signature moves; part of the pleasure of watching a major Cena match is when his predictable shoulderblock-shoulderblock-Protobomb-Five Knuckle Shuffle combination is interrupted.  Christian was especially good at that here, playing the part of the wily veteran to perfection to stay one step ahead of the younger man's corner enzuguiri and Cross Armbreaker.

He held out in this way for as long as he could, but del Rio's targeting of his arm paid off in the end.  I'm a sucker for limb targeting by wrestlers with a submission finisher.  You'd think that was the bare minimum to expect, but I've watched a lot of Miz matches in which his work softening up his opponents for the Figure Four Leg Lock entirely consists of a single kick to the thigh.  Del Rio's different; he's clinical and forensic.  I remember last year watching a match in which del Rio challenged Sheamus for the World Heavyweight Championship, and I was with a friend who has barely watched wrestling since 2001 (but who knows enough to know that Kane and The Undertaker are both awesome).  He saw del Rio working over Sheamus' arm and said "Wow, he's actually using a strategy and targeting a single body part...he's going to lose, isn't he?"  Sure enough, Sheamus shrugged off del Rio's arm work and hit his finisher out of nowhere for the win.  So it's nice when limb targeting plays into the finish of a match.  Christian nailed del Rio with a spear, and could have pinned him, but in hitting the move he aggravated his already damaged shoulder, which gave del Rio an opening to apply his submission and force Christian to tap out.

The finish and the inventive counters were by no means the only great things about this match.  Like Rhodes vs. Sandow, they fit a lot into the time they had, and there were some inventive spots, such as del Rio's Backstabber off the second rope.  This would have been the best match on a lot of shows, but then Summerslam 2013 was not most shows.  Maybe Christian will get another opportunity at the World Title, and if he does, I hope he comes armed with a finisher that takes less than ten minutes to set up.  Rating: ***3/4

Match 4: Natalya (w/ Cameron and Naomi) vs. Brie Bella (w/ Nikki Bella and Eva Marie)

This came about due to happenings on Total Divas.  If you're not aware, Total Divas is a reality show starring the women involved in this match, which is running on the E! Network.  I've not watched it and have no plans to, but it's drawing higher ratings than TNA.  Awkward.  Anyway, while I may dislike reality television as a whole, I don't see any harm in the concept if it helps get divas apart from AJ and Kaitlyn over with the crowd.

Judging by the audience reaction to this match, it's going to be a long old process.  The Staples Centre was chanting for JBL and Jerry Lawler throughout.  Look, LA; you were a great crowd for the most part, but stop trying to be East Rutherford.  No crowd should try to be East Rutherford; the Raw after Wrestlemania comes about once a year, and any lesser attempts to recreate the atmosphere end up smacking of hipsterdom.  Furthermore, the 'chant random things' game played in East Rutherford happened in a different context than it did here.  The New Jersey crowd shitting all over Sheamus vs. Randy Orton could be seen as justified for a few reasons; it was a match between two (fairly directionless at the time) faces, it was a bait-and-switch to replace a promised encounter involving the Big Show, and it was pretty chinlock-heavy.  East Rutherford at least waited a few minutes before deciding to shit all over the match, whereas here, LA seemed determined not to take an interest in Natalya vs. Brie from the get-go, which seemed pretty disrespectful to the performers.

As it happens, there wasn't much wrong with this match at all.  It was fairly basic, but not bad (except I wish Natalya would sit down on her Sharpshooter a little more).  It started off with an exchange of slaps, which made me uneasy at first, because the performers in women's wrestling tend to be written differently to the men (how many times do we see a male performer having a temper tantrum after a loss?)  However, later in the night Cena and Bryan had an exchange of slaps, because someone had clearly been watching Minoru Suzuki - a Japanese MMA badass-cum-wrestler nicknamed 'The Ill-Natured Man', who will slap the shit out of you and everything you care about - and realized that far from being a technique for catfights, slapping someone in the face actually really bloody hurts.  So that was fine.  What was less fine was the usual 'catfight' spot from the women on the outside, where they rush each other and start clawing and choking each other on the floor, which resembles wrestling about as much as my lethargic roundhouse kick attempts resemble Chuck Norris.  But you can't have everything.  Following some botched interference from her seconds, Brie got caught in the Sharpshooter and was forced to tap.  Short but competently executed, and inoffensive.  Rating: **1/4

Match 5: Brock Lesnar (w/ Paul Heyman) vs. CM Punk (No Disqualification Match)

Before this match, Heyman did an interview where he called the Bible revisionist history and suggested that Goliath recovered from the slingshot and defeated David.  This is a promotion that once ran a tag match on pay-per-view in which Vince and Shane McMahon faced off against Shawn Michaels and GOD, so I shouldn't expect any reverence for religious orthodoxy, nor indeed would I want to.  Heyman's a heel, so he can basically do what the hell he likes.  And he does.

The first thing to note here is that the build-up did a fantastic job of making Punk seem the underdog, playing up the size difference, and Lesnar's freakish physical strength.  This continued into the match; nobody can dish out a pro wrestling beating like Brock Lesnar, and the brutality on show (even when Brock wasn't using weapons) made the crowd get even more behind Punk than they already were, as the smaller man used his speed and high-flying ability to try and get the upper hand.  Big Man vs. Small Man contests are a staple of wrestling, and you'll rarely find it done better than it was here.  Punk looked tough as hell even in defeat, by simply withstanding the onslaught from the Beast Incarnate, and notably by no-selling a powerbomb at one point, such was his will to win.  You don't need to beat Brock Lesnar to look like a million dollars, which is why having John Cena beat him in his return match was a stupid decision (despite the fact that the contest was fantastic).

Where the two main event matches were concerned, the stars really did align on this night.  Even the botches added to Punk vs. Lesnar.  Punk's Diving Elbow Drop is, in all honesty, a little bit sloppy, and the first one he did at Summerslam was one of the worst.  He pretty much just fell from the top rope in an ungainly manner, and landed on Lesnar's face with his thigh.  It wasn't a thing of beauty, but within the context of the match it fit perfectly, adding to the kitchen-sink approach to offense by both men.

Another thing that was done really well were the MMA elements.  Punk, while he's no expert, and would probably get destroyed in UFC, has some knowledge of jiu-jitsu, and used it to good effect, not just in his usual kicks, but in assailing Lesnar with a triangle choke and a cross armbreaker at a couple of points.  I do find it funny that in MMA these two holds appear in the arsenal of most, if not all, fighters, whereas in the WWE context, Punk was stealing the finishers of The Undertaker and Alberto del Rio, but that's by the by.  It wasn't overdone, and the match appeared less like a shoot-style contest than a proper pro wrestling match with MMA influence, which I think is the right way to play it in a WWE ring.  Incorporating MMA is a good thing as long as a promotion doesn't dilute the essence of wrestling by going too far (for example, by putting your heavyweight title on Bob freaking Sapp.  NJPW hasn't always been awesome).

The two wrestlers made great use of the No Disqualification stipulation, in more inventive ways than you see in your common or garden TV hardcore match.  Lesnar took the covering from the announcers' table, placed in on top of Punk then stomped on it; Punk did a Diving Elbow Drop while holding a chair and driving said chair into Lesnar's skull; Punk bit Lesnar's ear to get out of a submission.  Coupled with the stiffness of Lesnar's moves (especially a couple of wince-inducing powerbombs), it all added up to a contest that felt like a real ordeal.

In the end, Punk finally managed to hit Lesnar with the GTS, which Brock sold wonderfully, going down like he'd been shot.  Heyman ran in and broke up the count.  Punk managed a second GTS, and tried to finish off Lesnar with the Anaconda Vice, whereupon Heyman ran in again, this time with a chair.  Punk, seeing an opportunity to at long last get his hands on Heyman, decked him and locked in the Anaconda Vice on his one-time manager.  Lesnar recovered, F5ed Punk onto the chair, and that was that.  There's a fine line between having outside interference detract from a match and having it add to the story.  At Money in the Bank, Heyman's interference in the match brought what was an exciting, high-flying six-way match to a grinding halt.  Here, it played into the dynamic that Punk's emotions got the better of him; he was more interested in hurting Heyman than beating Lesnar, and it cost him.  This was, all in all, one of the best matches you'll see all year.  And yet, you could make the argument that it wasn't even the best match on the show...  Rating: ****3/4

Match 6: Dolph Ziggler and Kaitlyn vs. Big E. Langston and AJ Lee (Mixed Tag Team Match)

It's clear that WWE are holding out on blowing off the singles feuds between these two pairs for PPVs when they don't have two huge main events as guaranteed selling points, so this tag match is what we got instead.  It was too short to really mean a great deal, but provided some entertaining moments.  Big E. Langston has amazing agility for his size, and watching him go to work on Ziggler was exhilarating.  And I will never get tired of seeing Kaitlyn spear the hell out of AJ, which she did yet again, only this time on the outside of the ring.  This led to Ziggler nailing Langston with the Zig Zag and picking up the win.  I don't buy the Zig Zag as a one-hit kill move, as it really is quite a basic manoeuvre, so it looked odd that it slew Langston, despite the fact that Ziggler had only a fraction of the offense that his former lackey did.  Bit of a nothingy match, but perfectly serviceable.  Rating: **1/2

Main Event: John Cena (c) vs. Daniel Bryan (WWE Championship, with Special Guest Referee Triple H)

The story behind this requires a bit of unpacking.  Raw General Manager Brad Maddox allowed Cena to pick his own opponent, and Cena chose the uber-popular Daniel Bryan, an excellent technician struggling to have the WWE higher-ups take him seriously, on account of his small stature.  Maddox and WWE owner Vince McMahon belittled Bryan publicly, while WWE Chief Operating Officer Triple H backed him.  Bryan sought to draw a distinction between Cena as 'a sports entertainer' and himself as 'a wrestler' with a greater passion for the business.  Cena told him that HE'D HAVE TO EARN THIS WWE CHAMPIONSHIP, JACK.  Vince argued with Triple H while Triple H's wife (and Vince's daughter) Stephanie found herself caught in the middle of it all.  Vince tried to install his puppet Maddox as Special Referee for the title match, but Triple H overruled him and took on the role himself, to ensure a fair fight.  Meanwhile, Money in the Bank winner Randy Orton lurked in the background, reminding both participants in the title match that he could demand a shot at the gold at any time.

Have you got all that?

I know the 'YOU CAN'T WRESTLE' chants have become part of the John Cena Experience, the paradigm of the divisive superstar.  But this match demonstrated once and for all that the chant isn't based in truth.  Cena is by no means a bad wrestler (he got an entertaining match out of The Great Khali, for Heaven's sake), it's just that he tends to work at the level of his opponent.  If he's wrestling Big Show or Brodus Clay, it's probably not going to be that good.  When he's facing off with one of the best in the world, like CM Punk or Daniel Bryan, it's invariably fantastic.  The opening few minutes looked more like World of Sport than anything, with both competitors vying for supremacy on the mat.  It soon spilled to the outside, with Cena drilling Bryan with a suplex off the ring steps.  He followed that up with a Batista Bomb when they got back into the ring.  I thought it was a bit early in the match for a high-impact move such as that, but when the biggest criticism you can make of a match is that 'John Cena used a really awesome move at a weird time', you know a match was something special.

The technical aspect of the match was excellent; I've already mentioned the mat wrestling, but the submission counters, as STF transitioned into Yes Lock and back again, were very well implemented.  Bryan even got Cena with an STF of his own at one point, and characteristically did it much better.  But the high-impact moves were equally as good; Bryan used his kicks to great effect, and utilised a variety of throws including a leg-capture German Suplex which was particularly gorgeous.  Cena's more limited offense looked as good as it's ever done, especially his Flying Leg Drop to the back of the neck, and he even gave as good as he got in the strike department, countering Bryan's running dropkick with a stiff lariat that would make even Stan Hansen say, "Whoa, that's a bit much!"

As with Punk vs. Lesnar, even the botches added to the match.  At one point Bryan attempted to hurricanrana Cena off the top rope, only to get caught.  I'm not sure if Cena was going for a powerbomb or a Styles Clash, but he ended up caught between those two moves and accidentally giving Bryan a Ganso Bomb (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzhnSjCAmhE) which in terms of deadly 90s Japanese finishers ranks somewhere between Kenta Kobashi's Burning Hammer and Kenta Kobashi's MOONSAULT ONTO YOUR FUCKING FACE.  Don't mess with Kenta Kobashi, basically.  Thankfully Bryan wasn't hurt and Cena transitioned nicely into an STF, and the flub only served to make Bryan look tougher.

I have to say that before the match, I thought Bryan had a good chance of winning.  He was certainly a more credible threat to Cena than Ryback or Mark Henry, two strong but fairly one-dimensional wrestlers.  I just didn't know exactly how Bryan was going to beat Cena, considering that his finisher is a submission, and that Cena hasn't tapped out since 2003.  I thought that Bryan might win by catching Cena unawares with a small package (in ROH, Bryan became such a dominant champion that he decided to start trolling his opponents by trying to beat them with a small package, even, hilariously, taking on the moniker of 'Mr. Small Package'), but that would hardly have been a decisive or satisfying end to an epic match like this.  I needn't have worried.  Bryan went to the corner, then absolutely LEVELLED Cena with a running knee strike (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXJk3IQrdU0), pinning him to win the title for the first time.  Now that's how you debut a new finisher!

An absolutely wonderful match, and all the more remarkable considering that Cena's elbow was damaged, and that he went in for surgery the day after the match.  Simply sublime, and a great moment to have Bryan cleanly and decisively winning.  Great stuff.  Rating: ****3/4

After the match, streamers and confetti dropped from the ceiling as Bryan basked in the glow of his victory.  Then Randy Orton's music hit.  That's OK, I thought, it's not as though Bryan's in a vulnerable position to be cashed in on.  As soon as I had that notion, Triple H grabbed Bryan and hit the Pedigree, to much consternation.  Orton then handed his briefcase to the referee and the match began.

Money in the Bank Cash-In: Daniel Bryan (c) vs. Randy Orton (WWE Championship)

Orton rolled Bryan over and Triple H counted the pin.  The end.  I can't really give this a rating, even though technically every move in the match was executed flawlessly.  Rating: N/A

Orton and Triple H celebrated with the belt, so it looks like we have a new corporate heel faction.  Should be interesting.

Overall, Summerslam didn't have the consistency of the previous two WWE PPVs, but Cena vs. Bryan and Punk vs. Lesnar are both in my Top 3 matches of the year, and it was complemented by (mostly) solid action, so once again, my thumbs are in the upright position.

Glossary

Stable - A group of wrestlers allied to each other
Castiga excesivo - A rule from Mexican lucha libre; essentially, if one wrestler is more intent on inflicting extra punishment on an opponent at a point where they could have simply pinned them and won the match, they can be disqualified
Shoot-style - a wrestling match where the outcome is still predetermined, but it's presented to look like a legitimate MMA fight

The (Non)Sense of an Ending

  You can bet that the final entry on this blog probably won’t be a final sayonara to my readers (statistically, it’ll probably be a wrestling review).  The nature of the blog as a form is such that most writers start off with the best of intentions, gradually lose interest or find that they don’t have enough time to post frequently, and things come to a halt.  It happens.  What I mean to say is, Stone Cold Jane Austen is more likely to simply stop, than have a proper ending.

  I’ve been thinking about endings recently, as a couple of weeks ago I finished Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up!, a novel I’d been meaning to read for years.  I thought it was a fantastic, biting evisceration of the values of self-interest, ruthless free market capitalism, and the umbrella ideology of Thatcherism.  As a bleeding-heart leftie, I empathised with the book’s concerns, but independently of its politics, it’s a damn good read.  But the last hundred pages aren’t that great.  Don’t get me wrong; they’re not bad at all.  It’s just that the last section of the book changes tone in quite a jarring way, as Coe’s critique of 80s Britain is joined by a rather macabre aesthetic, as a string of gothic murders are committed by persons unknown, during a night in a creaking country pile.  In a way, the change of tone in the final part of What a Carve Up! is the point; the narrator essentially ‘checks out’ of his own narrative due to a trauma-induced dissociative episode, and the events at Winshaw Towers tie in with the novel’s echoes of the 1961 comedy film that shares a title with the novel, and which is an obsession of the hilariously-named protagonist, Michael Owen (the book was written in 1994, when the oft-injured starlet was sequestered within the bowels of Liverpool’s youth system).  I get what Coe’s doing, but I don’t feel that it was carried off as effectively as the previous chapters.  You can see each slaying coming from a mile off, and it’s just too different to the rest of the book, in my opinion.

  This isn’t the first time that Coe has disappointed me with an ending; the first novel of his I ever read was The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim (2010), his most recent effort.  This was an entirely different kettle of fish.  My gripe with the final section of What a Carve Up! is that merely that it doesn’t quite live up to the very high standards of the rest of it.  The last chapter of Maxwell Sim is, as I believe F.R. Leavis would have said, a complete shitfest.  The penultimate chapter, by contrast, seems to bring the narrative to an end in a very moving manner.  But then Coe adds a few more pages, in which he appears to his protagonist, informs poor Maxwell Sim that he is simply a created character in a book, and tells him that as soon as the novel ends, he will no longer exist.  Sucks to be him.  And indeed, to be me, for I had to read it.  Just in case you’re thinking that I’m being too harsh on an original and clever narrative device, I wrote my MA dissertation on authorial self-insertion, and read about two dozen novels, novellas and short stories that utilise this metafictional device (far more than I should have if I wanted an easy life), by authors like Borges, Calvino, Roth, Rushdie, Vonnegut, Ballard, and so on.  All of these tomes used the trope in far richer and more subtle ways than Coe.  Before I write another 12,000 words on the subject, let me make it clear.  I hate the ending of The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim.  Hope that clears everything up.

  But maybe I shouldn’t be too harsh on Maxwell Sim (actually, I regret nothing.  NOTHING.)  It really is hard to do a successful ending, whatever the medium.  Some endings are too predictable, whereas others are seen to give insufficient closure.  The literary critic Frank Kermode – no relation to everybody’s favourite giant-handed film critic – wrote a book called The Sense of an Ending in which he remarked upon this very difficulty.  He warned against predictability, writing that ‘the story that proceeded very simply to its obviously predestined end would be nearer myth than novel or drama[...]The more daring the peripeteia, the more we may feel that the work respects our sense of reality’.  This brings me to another disappointing reading experience of mine; Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84.  Like What a Carve Up!, I’d say the novel was good, and it’d be stretching it to call a book featuring blue pixies from another dimension ‘predictable’.  But the ending of 1Q84 combined the worst of both worlds mentioned above.  The relationship between the two main characters was resolved in the most predictable and ‘closed’ way, but pretty much nothing else was.  I know that if I railed against ambiguous endings I wouldn’t be even half the fan of the Coen Brothers that I am, but damn it all, I wanted to know what the deal with the pixies was!  The plot line with the pixies didn’t end so much ambiguously as not at all, and it was by no means the only thread left unfollowed to its termination.  What made it worse was that the book had gone on for 1300 pages, which only exacerbated a conclusion that I found weak and unsatisfying.  I’m glad that Murakami didn’t win the Nobel Prize for that, I can tell you, and he was predicted to.  He had odds of 2/1.  Because William Hill will allow you to bet on anything.

  On the other hand, endings which attempt to tie everything up are also tricky to pull off.  Let me move, like I do at the end of a long day’s work on my thesis, from books to TV.  The Wire did this kind of finale very well, with a wordless panorama of the lives of its characters, showing their fates and futures, while the show’s theme played in the background.  And then there was the last David Tennant episode of Doctor Who.  Oh, man.  The Doctor defeated the Master, saved the world/universe/multiverse (I really can’t remember), and received the lethal dose of radiation that meant that the tenth incarnation of the character was not long for this world.  There were still twenty minutes left.  How are they going to fill that, I wondered.  What we got was the Tenth Doctor touring all of his past acquaintances, saying his goodbyes, in one of the most egregiously tedious and self-indulgent televisual circlejerks it has ever been my misfortune to watch.  It made me wish that I myself had a TARDIS so that I could find Russell T. Davies, dissuade him of the notion that this was a good idea, and then as his penance for ‘Love and Monsters’ (the episode with Peter Kay as the Abzorbaloff, in a rare appearance where he wasn’t recycling a stand-up routine about growing up in the 80s), force him to listen to the phrase ‘wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey’ until he finds it as irritating as I did the first time I bloody heard it.

  Ahem.  There are also TV endings which are just unsatisfying for miscellaneous reasons.  Lost enraged legions of fans who for months had been speculating how all the mysterious signs and threads of the series’ convoluted narrative would play into the show’s finale, only for the ending to be ‘It Was All A Dream’, which is far below even ‘The Author Turns Up RIGHT AT THE BLOODY END FOR FUCK’S SAKE JONATHAN COE And Tells The Character He Isn’t Real’ in the pantheon of tropes that should go away forever.  The Sopranos, one of my favourite TV dramas of all time, notoriously finished its run with a cut to black, leaving it uncertain whether Tony Soprano got shot by the New York mafia, or whether he lived to fight another day and instead die of a heart attack in a hotel in Italy (God, I’m so sorry).  This wouldn’t have been so bad, except Journey’s classic song Don’t Stop Believin’ was playing in the background, in a complete misstep on the part of the writers.  I love that song, or at least I did until Glee ruined it like Glee ruins everything, but I have no idea what it was doing at that juncture.  As Coen Brothers films like No Country for Old Men and A Serious Man show, you can do an inconclusive ending, but you have to do it well.  Don’t have one of the greatest shows in history end with a power ballad and a blank screen.

  Maybe the best endings are deferred.  By which I mean, ones that haven’t happened yet.  You never find fans of soap operas like Emmerdale, Eastenders or WWE Raw complaining about endings, because there aren’t any.  Currently the two drama series held in the highest esteem by critics are Mad Men and Breaking Bad, both of which have just one more season announced.  However they conclude, you can bet that people like me will be on the internet complaining about them.  Because ultimately, a major part of the entertainment value of books or television lies in the imagining of narrative possibilities.  As soon as a novel or a TV series ends, these possibilities are closed off.  The fiction can never be what we imagined it could be.  We may find the ending too predictable, too open, or simply fundamentally misjudged.  But more than that, the ending is always much, much too final.

  Yeah, now that’s how you do an ending to a blogpost.  No need to add anything unnecessary like Coe did.  No need at all.

  Did I mention I hate the last chapter of The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim?

Lost in Translation

Last year, because I'm apparently an Anastasia Steele-level masochist, I wrote my MA dissertation on about a dozen different authors.  One of these authors was the Argentine short story writer and fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, specifically his tale 'The Garden of Forking Paths', which is probably one of the less mind-bending of his writings, although still pretty damn cool.  So I ventured down Durham University's 'Bill Bryson Library', which is sadly not a library just containing Bill Bryson books, in order to find some secondary criticism on Borges.  The library was actually pretty well stocked as far as books on the guy went, except a problem presented itself.  Upon closer examination, I found that about half of these tomes were in Spanish.

I don't know why I was surprised.  After all, Borges is more the preserve of the Spanish Literature department, and of course they read him in the original tongue.  So this was frustrating, but understandable.  My Spanish extends to what I remember from some Linguaphone CDs I listened to ahead of a trip to Spain seven years ago (this was in that lull after my GCSE exams, and I figured that I should do something more productive than watch countless episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer).  That is to say, not much, although for some reason I remember two separate words for stamps (sejos and estampillas, in case you're interested.  Who am I kidding, you're definitely not).  Whatever, I thought, I'll just take out all the Borges books written in English.

It got worse.  Quite apart from the fact that I only managed to find a few salient quotes about 'The Garden of Forking Paths', there was a curious quirk to a few of the critical studies that I couldn't quite get my head around; namely, that although they were written in English, whenever they quoted Borges' stories they did so in the original Spanish.  So the writer would make an interesting and perceptive point, which they'd back up by referring to a passage from 'Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' or some other such gnarly, befuddling piece of wonder, and I'd have no idea which part of the story they were citing.  I found this fairly baffling; if you're going to quote in Spanish, then you assume that the readers of your book have enough of a grasp of Spanish to understand Borges (and I barely have a good enough understanding of English to fully comprehend translations of his work!).  So why not just write the whole book in Spanish?  Otherwise, you're just targeting the bilingual.

I've been thinking about my Borges experience because I'm currently about halfway through The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by the Dominican-American author Junot Diaz.  Let me be clear, it's damn good, especially the amusing Sheldon Cooper-esque nerdiness of the eponymous protagonist, the by turns chilling and heartrending depictions of life in the Dominican Republic under the brutal dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, and the evocation of the immigrant experience that is so central to Diaz's writing.  On the basis of what I've read so far I'd recommend it, but with a caveat.  And it's a fairly big one.

Spanish, my old nemesis, rears its head again!  By which I mean I'm encountering the same problem I came across when trying to research Borges.  It's not sentences of untranslated Spanish this time, but odd words sprinkled into conversation here and there, which ties in with the idea of the immigrant experience; we have exiles from the Dominican diaspora whose knowledge of Spanish is less than total (though obviously still superior to mine), but who pepper their speech in the US with odd words here and there.  It's be churlish and pretty damn racist of me to complain about the fact that this happens in real life; America has a large (and growing) Hispanic population who speak in this sort of manner.  Spanish is more and more becoming a part of American life and culture - when you arrive at JFK Airport in New York there are signs in both English and Spanish, and this is by no means unusual in a city which boasts a Hispanic population of 29%, and which is the setting for most of Oscar Wao.

However, it makes for a frustrating reading experience.  It's rare that there's a page in the novel without any Spanish.  I know enough to translate 'hija de la gran puta' (p. 60) as 'daughter of a big whore' but that's about my lot.  Sometimes you get a passage like, 'Forget that hijo de la porra, that comehuevo.  Every desgraciado who walks in here is in love with you.  You could have the whole maldito world if you wanted.' (p. 113)  Here, the approximate meaning is apparent from the context - clearly, there's some insulting going on.  But the precise sense of such epithets remains obscured.  And finally, there's whole sentences of Spanish which I, as a non-speaker, cannot even begin to decode; 'Oye, pariguayo, y que paso con esa esposa tuya?  Gordo, no me digas que tu todavia tienes hambre?' (p. 108)

I will say at this point that I feel like such a massive jerk for lamenting about something that results from an insufficiency on my part.  And it's not as if in the modern age you can't simply use the internet to translate unfamiliar terms, or to look things up in general.  In fact, some thoughtful soul has set up a website - www.annotated-oscar-wao.com - which gives you the meanings of the Spanish words in the novel, and also informs the reader about the cultural context.  But what if I wanted to read Oscar Wao on the underground?  I can't lug a laptop around with me all the time so I can fully understand the Spanish.  And I don't have the money for a smartphone, or the inclination to buy one, considering that my procrastination is bad enough without having the whole internet in my pocket.

This happens a lot in contemporary fiction, which is the field in which I work.  Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children contains a decent amount of Hindi words (and those from other Indian languages), which produces a similar testament to the adaptability of English, and the possibilities for linguistic syncretism, to that which can be found in Oscar Wao.  But Diaz uses the interpolation of foreign words into Western speech on a far, far greater scale.  The other thing about contemporary fiction is that you will generally require a computer to uncover the meaning behind anything you don't understand; it's different to when you read your Penguin or Oxford World's Classics edition of Dickens, or Austen, or Defoe, and the editor has meticulously created pages and pages of endnotes pointing out every single allusion, and glossing any words, terms or expressions which have fallen out of use in the modern world.  Obviously, I'm not saying that modern writers can't use language that is unusual or foreign - that would be an absurd statement - and I still like Oscar Wao as a novel, and feel like a philistine for writing this.  But a glossary would have been nice.

Double Movie Review: Monsters University and The World's End

(SPOILER WARNING, OBVIOUSLY)

I don't watch that many films compared to certain people I know (until last week I hadn't seen Titanic) and so it's not very often that I watch more than one on the same day.  The exception was one day when, on a bus travelling through France, I saw no fewer than 5 movies, which can be summed up in two words; The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (inadequate adaptation), Fantastic Four (utter tosh), Wedding Crashers (seen before), Old School (fitfully amusing), and The Village (fucking Shyamalan).  Seriously, if you have to do a 30-hour bus ride, make sure you bring enough reading material.  But there is a difference between being subjected to multiple films in a day and going out of your way to do so, and it just so happened that two flicks I was very excited about have popped up at the same time.  And I'm very lazy and didn't fancy walking to town and back twice when once would do, so here come a pair of reviews, each of films I saw today.  Enjoy.

Monsters University:  I can take or leave Disney films as a whole (usually the latter), but I bow to nobody in my adoration of whatever Pixar has to offer.  After all, they made my favourite movie of all time, the by turns heartbreaking and exhilarating Up.  The pioneering CGI studio has, as of late, been putting their energies into new instalments of previously existing franchises, which is a double-edged sword.  While Toy Story 3 made my shrivelled heart dance with joy, did we really need a Cars 2?  Hell, did we really need a\Cars 1?  So when I read that Monsters University was on the way, I thought that while I loved Monsters, Inc. and certainly wouldn't mind seeing more from such an engaging cast of characters, I didn't think a prequel was strictly necessary.  And it isn't.  But is it good?  Absolutely.

The first thing to say is that it's a Pixar film, and so of course there's a huge array of striking visual details; God only knows how much time went into designing all the different monsters that populate the strikingly verdant and picturesque campus (York University it ain't).  And the full effect of this colourful panoply of sights only becomes truly apparent in the scenes where the characters visit the human world.  The original Monsters film was subversive in that it had the monsters appear just like regular guys, and the cute human child appear as something scary to them.  The human world in the prequel is genuinely scary to both characters and audience, and the animators do a great job of making it seem foreboding.  The darkness and dinginess of the settings in those scenes really contrast effectively with the general good-time aura and brightness of the realm of the monsters.  In a film that is fairly whimsical, it's nice that the Pixar team had the visual flair to really bring home what's at stake for the characters.

I'm referring in the above paragraph to one of the climactic scenes, and the film, up until then, is primarily concerned with an age-old frat-movie trope.  Namely, the protagonists screw up, and their continued presence at university depends on their victory in a competition, a la Revenge of the Nerds or Up the Creek.  Said competition involved scaring, so it tied into the movie, but the structure did seem fairly inorganic; there were a number of challenges, each with their own rules, and each had to be surmounted for Mike and Sully to survive (well, avoid expulsion).  This made the plot seem more on-rails than most of Pixar's output.  Call it Triwizard Tournament Syndrome.  Speaking of something like Revenge of the Nerds, Monsters University made use of all the usual archetypes of the frat-movie genre; jocks, nerds, peppy cheerleaders, goths, and even a 'crusty old Dean' (copyright Homer J. Simpson).  This isn't to say that it didn't do it well, but again, it made the film feel fairly safe.  There weren't a huge amount of surprises plot-wise.

But really, it's hard to find something to criticise about Monsters University.  I've already mentioned the visuals, but many other departments shone for me.  The voice acting was predictably great (although I can't listen to John Goodman's Sully without thinking of Walter Sobchak from The Big Lebowski), and it was laugh-out-loud funny on many occasions, my particular favourite gag being a slug who's late for class and desperately trying to get there as fast as he can, only he's...well, a slug.  As A Bug's Life proved, slugs are a rich vein of comedy gold.  Mike is the main character as opposed to Sully, and he makes an excellent underdog hero.  And I doubt that many children seeing this movie will have been to university (or at least have watched Animal House), but as a student - albeit a British one - I appreciated all the higher education jokes.  I don't think Monsters University is the equal of Monsters, Inc., but it's certainly a very worthy addition to the series, and best of all, didn't ride on the coattails of the much-beloved last film.  Previous antagonist Randall Boggs was present, but in a minor role, as was gravel-voices secretary Roz, but the fanservice was used sparingly, unlike some sequels I could mention (Star Trek: Into Darkness, how ya doing?), and didn't detract from the expertly-rendered and equally memorable cast of new monsters, especially salesman-turned-mature student Don.  In terms of Pixar's canon, Monsters University doesn't crack the Top 5 as far as I'm concerned (and even Top 10 is pushing it), but that really is more a reflection on the exceedingly high quality of Pixar's output than it is on Monsters University.  If you see it, you'll have a great time, and come out smiling.  And really, what more could you ask for?  Rating: ***3/4

The World's End: And now for another instalment in a popular series of films.  It really must be summer.  This is the third celluloid collaboration between director Edgar Wright and actors Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, after the modern classics Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.  Like the previous two films, it's what I'd call an 'action comedy', and synthesizes the main concerns of the other parts of the trilogy.  Namely; impending apocalypse, sleepy towns hiding dark secrets, and, of course, pubs.  Five old schoolfriends seek to recreate a pub crawl (aborted before its conclusion) from their halcyon days.  Four of them (Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Eddie Marsan and Martin Freeman) are successful professionals, and the fifth (Simon Pegg) is a loser alcoholic whose life hasn't moved on since that night.  They find that the people of their old hometown have been replaced by semi-robotic doubles by a higher alien intelligence in the name of, to quote the villains of Hot Fuzz, 'the greater good'.

Sometimes it's hard to explain just why a movie resonates.  Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz were successful in large part because they were pastiches of easily recognisable genres.  The World's End works mostly because of a successfully constructed sense of the unheimlich throughout.  Like Shaun of the Dead, it's actually, despite ostensibly being a comedy, as tense and scary as a lot of straight-up horror films.  The action scenes are, in my opinion, even stronger than the verbal exchanges, especially the first fight sequence in which our heroes take on five chavs-cum-replicants in the men's toilets, and which owed more to WWE than anything.  Simon Pegg giving a robot the freakin' Rock Bottom through a ceramic sink will live in my head forever (as a wrestling fan, I also counted La Mistica, the Chokeslam, the Shining Wizard, many Axe Bomber Lariats and an Argentina Backbreaker transitioned into an Inverted Gutbuster.  I should probably get out more.)

Unlike Hot Fuzz, which (not altogether seamlessly) transitioned from a comedy into a long, climactic shoot-em-up which owed more to its homages to classic action films than the previous verbal cleverness, The World's End gets the preamble out of the way relatively early on, with the aforementioned Rumble in the Restroom.  From then on, it's not just a comedy with five men trading barbs and malapropisms in a succession of identikit bars, funny though that is.  It's an action film with giant robots and simulants and kung fu and IF YA SMELLLLLLLLLL and diving through windows and exploding heads, and in the middle of all this, five men trade barbs and malapropisms.  The characters, while admittedly more human than their adversaries, just don't act the way that normal people would in this situation.  Their rationale for attempting to complete their pub crawl even in the face of incredible danger isn't really explained very well.  But then, this pig-headed attempt to pretend everything's normal is a consistent source of comedy, especially Pegg's character's increasingly desperate attempts to see off his drink even in the middle of a ruckus, although there's a twinge of pathos with the added dimension of his character being an alcoholic who can't let go of his memories of the good old days.  This gives the film an emotional import which could otherwise have been lost amongst all the sci-fi action, supernatural intrigue and comedic dialogue.

Speaking of the dialogue, I found it to be very different to Hot Fuzz, which was a picture in which a good proportion of the lines in the second half of the film were callbacks to lines from the first half.  I personally love comedy which is based on callbacks; after all, my favourite sitcom of all time is Arrested Development, which once had an episode that referenced a minor gag from TEN episodes previously.  But I feel such an approach may have hamstrung The World's End, particularly considering the often irrational actions and unnaturally mundane-comedic dialogue that the characters engage in, even as the world collapses around them.  There's a fine line between writing foolish characters, and making them so incredibly buffoonish and mannered that the audience can't identify or empathise with their plight.  I felt that The World's End stayed just the right side of that.

The ending came a little bit out of left field.  Basically what happens is that the aliens give up on trying to improve humanity, but in wrenching their support from the planet create a pulse that renders useless all technology on Earth, sending humanity into a new Dark Age.  The main problem was that it introduced all sorts of elements into the film that could have done with some elaboration; the formation of post-apocalyptic 'tribes', prejudice against the surviving replicants, and so on.  Those ideas were so intriguing that you could even construct a sequel out of them, although Pegg, Wright and Frost on no account should.  But this was, on the whole, a unique sci-fi action comedy, which didn't encumber itself by trying to ape Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz, and instead carved its own identity.  It married effective comedic scenes to visually striking action sequences in a seamless way, and marks a fitting conclusion to the Cornetto trilogy.  Thumbs way up.  Rating: ****1/4