(If you’re not into reading and you want to spoil the match-ups, then skip to the bottom of this post for the ROUND TWO bracket image.)

Enter the Dragon vs. DOA: Dead or Alive

Little known fact about Bruce Lee: he was also a champion beach volleyball player (and if you told him you were looking for a slightly more “mature” attitude, his pectoral muscles would inexplicably swell to three times their normal size). Facing this overwhelmingly talented, distressingly busty version of ’70s icon Bruce Lee, the shiny, comfortably 21st Century characters of DOA didn’t have a chance. “Based on a video game?” scoffed Lee, “Ha. Ha ha hahha haha ha.”

The grueling battle ended with victory for: Enter the Dragon!

Battle Creek Brawl vs. The Quick and the Dead

Two wildly different versions of the West butted heads in this instantly classic match-up:  a shanty-town were all the citizens like to stop-and-stare from time to time, and a Texas that is populated almost entirely by burly men. And those burly men were quite good at hugging each other and getting angry, but, well, they just couldn’t do much against gun-slinging A-list Hollywood actors. Staring down her gun at a critically wounded Jackie Chan, who knelt bleeding on the ground, pleading for her to take pity and just end his life, Sharon Stone snickered and walked away, leaving Chan’s barely breathing body to be picked at by the vultures that were swooping lower and lower.

The grueling battle ended with victory for: The Quick and the Dead!

Redbelt vs. Bronson Lee, Champion

The exploitation wizards that came up with Bronson Lee had no idea what they were in for, going up against David Mamet’s well-dialogued Redbelt. Who’d of thought that one of the all-stars of contemporary theatre would also be a macho douchebag who was way into MMA? Bronson Lee didn’t, and not only did he get his ass-kicked, but he was talked out of ever bothering trying to act again. Insult to injury, my friends, insult to injury. Perhaps either Charles Bronson or Bruce Lee would have stood a chance, but poor B.L. never did.

The grueling battle ended with victory for: Redbelt!

Sidekicks vs. Bloodfist

This was one of the toughest matches to call in the whole first round, because both of these movies are so… uh… good! Bloodfist fared well in the early goings, as it took immediate advantage of being readily available on DVD to control the early goings of the fight. But once Sidekicks realized that its cult status, being available almost exclusively on hard-to-find VHS tapes and bootleg DVDs snapped out of its racist day-dreaming to conjure an early-nineties Chuck Norris that was still more or less in fighting form. And also, Joe Piscopo beat Billy Blanks in a swimsuit competition. Sidekicks sneaks into round two! It might just be worth watching!

The grueling battle ended with victory for: Sidekicks!

Mortal Kombat vs. The Quest

The longest, knock-down drag-out fight of the first round. Mortal Kombat came out waving around it’s many shittily-animated arms, claiming re-watchability, and a superior level of Enter the Dragon knock-offery. But then Jean-Claude Van Damme ran around with some kids, took off his shirt, and did a split, and everyone in the audience, Christopher Lambert included, swooned. This one will be debated into the ages. Was it a fair fight? Were the judges biased by a bizarre, unhealthy fascination with the Muscles from Brussels? Are they rejecting all video-game based tournament movies until Marvel Vs. Capcom finally gets greenlighted? The world may never know.

The grueling battle ended with victory for: The Quest!

Bloodsport vs. Best of the Best

Come on people. Bloodsport wins. Duh. Bloodsport won with its eyes closed.

The grueling battle ended with victory for: Bloodsport!

The Karate Kid vs. Never Back Down

One of the greatest sports movies (let alone tournament movies) ever made faces it’s most successful (and not all that successful, at that) knock-off. There may well have been things about the 2000s that were okay, but Never Back Down wasn’t really one of them. No contest. Way to go, Daniel-son.

The grueling battle ended with victory for: The Karate Kid!

Over the Top vs. The Karate Kid, Part III

We’ve met many people over the years that have claimed to have been entertained by Over the Top, but we don’t really believe them. Meanwhile, KKPIII is a much better, way more over the top B-movie than Over the Top. It’s not even time yet, in just the first round, to even sing the full praises of The Karate Kid, Part III. A sleeper candidate? A wildcard? Could be, could be…

The grueling battle ended with victory for: The Karate Kid, part III!

Tournament Movie Tournament ROUND TWO Bracket:

Be back next week to see which movies fight their way into ROUND THREE!

The ROUND ONE contenders:

Battle Creek Brawl: They tried to make Jackie Chan famous right after his brief appearance in Enter the Dragon. Despite flashes of his amazing charisma, it would take another decade after this movie for Chan to make it big (as big as Billy Kiss from Pittsburgh).

Best of the Best: Eric Roberts leads a team of American characters in a charge against a superior Korean Taekwondo team.

Bloodfist: Low budget fighting in the Philippines that spawned eight sequels — more than any other movie on this list. With Billy Blanks!

Bloodsport: Jean-Claude Van Damme in the role that he never bettered, in his first and best movie. The clear favorite in the tournament.

Bronson Lee, Champion: What do you get if you cross Charles Bronson and Bruce Lee? A motherfucking champion, that’s what.

DOA: Dead or Alive: Like Enter the Dragon, but with volleyball.

Enter the Dragon: The original. But is it the best?

The Karate Kid: One of the truly classic tournament movies, even if it’s not as intense as the more adult fare of Bloodsport or Enter the Dragon. But can 1984’s favorite plucky New Jerseyite win a whole tournament tournament in 2010?

The Karate Kid, part III: The oft-overlooked final chapter of the original Karate Kid trilogy. Most people think it went right from KK II to The Next Karate Kid, but first the Karate Kid and Mr. Miyagi had to take on some seriously menacing Vietnam veterans.

Mortal Kombat: The entirely watchable first foray into franchising the iconic video game into a filmic empire. One of the many Enter the Dragon homages in the tournament. With Christopher Lambert!

Never Back Down: Karate Kid, reinvented for douchebags in the 21st century.

Over the Top: Sylvester Stallone never speaks above a whisper (he must have been really tired when they filmed this) in this B-movie, truck-driving, arm-wrestling, father-son-bonding classic.

The Quest: Jean-Claude Van Damme is a street fighting stilt mime scamp (possibly some sort of weird child labor offender… or fetishist), forced to escape New York City and stow away on a cargo boat, where he proceeds to get caught, get saved, and get sold into martial arts slavery in Thailand. Also directed by JCVD.

The Quick and the Dead: Sam Raimi’s dolly zoom wild west classic. Gene Hackman, Sharon Stone, a young Leonardo DiCaprio, and guns! What more could a tournament movie need?

Redbelt: David Mamet loves MMA. Who would’ve guessed? Clearly the artsy-fartsiest of the movies in the tournament.

Sidekicks: A very special vanity project for Chuck Norris, but is he really in this movie, or just a figment of our overactive imaginations?

That’s the list! So now go, download the ROUND ONE bracket, and play along to see if your picks move onto ROUND TWO next Friday!

Given that, as I was suspecting last week, Brubaker/Philip’s Criminal is definitely worth bothering with. A full notch better than Sleeper, mostly because they both seem more at home writing a straighter noir piece, rather than having to bother with sci-fi elements. The first arc, Coward, just hits on all cylinders (and the second issue’s cover is one of my favorite covers ever (and I don’t normally even notice covers all that much; so maybe my immediate enjoyment of this cover demonstrates some aspect of my taste in general (I think it probably does), and thereby further clarifies why I think Criminal is better than Sleeper.

Criminal also further brings up the issue of back-matter in comics, an area of content which, to me, reached it s height with Casanova, where I can’t really imagine reading the book without the back-matter; it’d still be good, but not nearly as good as I feel like it was. Criminal has some of the usual letter-responses and shout-out type material, but then also features (and I guess, again, that most of you know this, since the book isn’t, like, new at all) short essays by guest writers about aspects of noir that they like, or specific movies or books that seem worth talking about. So not as personal/interwoven as the Casanova material, but definitely substantial and an aspect of reading the book in general (since the quasi-scholarly material certainly heightens the sense of genre exercise from the book).

It’s a conversation that Nick and I have begun to have, as we approach the printing date of our 10-years-in-the-making masterpiece, Time Log. The story itself is enough pages that we can just print it and use the inside covers for any publishing info & thank-yous that we may need, but there’s also this sense that maybe we should add another 4 pages of content, in order to have some supplementary materials. But how necessary is this? If we did so, would we just be copping an aspect of smarty-pants comics that I like and some of which appeal to Nick? Or is this what readers want in the first place? To know about all the trials and tribulations that we’ve been through in the last ten years in order to finally get this book in print?

I don’t think that either Nick or I are particularly confessional about our craft (if you can call it craft), and I’m not sure if Shawn is or not. Plus, it would cost just that much more to print an additional four pages. But is that what we need to do to get this comic read? Or should we just run some advertisements instead…

But now that I’m done for the moment reading novels (okay, that’s not really true (I’m still in the middle of reading a (less contemporary) novel); you can take the nerd out of the library, but you can’t take the library out of the nerd), I can get back to the other things that I like to read, namely, shampoo bottles comics that most people that read comics have already read. For instance, I finally just read Casanova, just in time for internet rumors that Fraction is finally working on the next arc. But, damn, that’s a brilliant comic. I never really read comics as a kid, or even as a college student (got into it a little bit in college, reading stuff like Akira and other sundry technical university required readings), aside from a single issue at the barber shop where I used to get my haircut, in which Superman raced The Flash. The race was refereed by some kind of floating leprechaun guy. I forget who won, but I think it made the floating leprechaun guy unhappy. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to the barber (though, full disclosure, I went to a Supercuts in December). So I’ve had a lot of catching up to do, since now that I like and read comics, I have decades and decades of catching up to do. Luckily, part of being in graduate school is having just about as much time as you’d like to have to dedicate to reading. Without getting into too much of a discussion about Casanova (because, again, I imagine that most of these conversations in the real world took place, like, a couple of years ago), I think what most impressed me about it was how it managed to feel both very unique and personal but also have a kind of broad appeal at the same time, which is a real queue (especially to a person like me, who has spent a fair amount of time here in Culturology talking about audience)). And, it probably goes without saying, but many thanks for Nick for plugging me in to just about every comic book that I’ve read.

Also just read Brubaker/Philips’ Sleeper, which, coming after Casanova, seemed much more rooted in genre, and really kind of lacking on the sci-fi side of things. Liked the atmosphere and main character, and the global black ops kind of plot, but the superpowers seemed really pretty dull. But given the genre-related sense, I’m pretty stoked to start reading Criminal, the first five issues of which are now waiting on my table as the next thing I start reading, ’cause it seems like it pretty much has to be better than Sleeper was.

And speaking of Fraction and Brubaker, I also just read the first arc of the Last Iron Fist thingy that they co-wrote, which is pretty rad. And I’m looking forward to the next sequence, since it’s apparently going to take place at a tournament, and I’ve just finished watching just about every tournament movie made in the last 40 years (look forward to some Tournament Movie March Madness here at Audioshocker, courtesy of Nick and myself).

And speaking of shit that’s out of date, John Byrne is, like, a total asshole, right? Or am I incorrectly picking up that vibe from is early ’90s Next Men effort?

Other comcis that I’m about to start reading, finally: Umbrella Academy, and Promethea.

I’ve also had the opportunity to read most of this stuff in single issues, rather than in their trade collections, which I think is also a massive bonus (especially with Casanova, since the book really works so well because of its back-matter). And maybe I’m just old fashioned, but I think it’s really important that comics don’t get sucked in to be entirely digital. Mostly because even the flimsy paper of physical comics will last longer than most digital storage mediums. And I want to be able to read comics in the case of a massive solar storm wiping out North America’s power grid!

So what can I culturologize today? How about the fact that Avatar sucked? I guess that’s not really that interesting, and a moot point, and just kind of blandly hater-ish. But such terrible writing, gah, that any time I actually managed to be sucked into it’s Imax 3-D world, I was pulled right back out by the utter crap of its writing. But my favorable opinions of the continued recession-era 3-D craze continues. The future is now, people. Now now now now now (or, hmm… despite being “back with a vengeance” here at Culturology, I seem to still be half-assing it… though I feel bad about this…)

One thing I don’t feel bad about is Conan O’Brien losing his job. I think I stopped really caring about late night TV just in time for that whole hullabaloo (despite my one hemi-post trying to speak of the issues there-involved). Really, now that football is over (football ended when the Steelers didn’t make the play-offs and once I had already one my fantasy football league’s championship game (that’s right people, not only am I a hot-shit cultural critic, but I also kick ass at fantasy football)), I don’t watch hardly any TV at all, except for some occasional snippets of international news on my local PBS station (German TV news on Wednesday nights!). And find myself, remarkable, having better things to do from 11:30-1:30 than watch desk-based interview television.

So let’s see… what else happened… oh! I finally read (finished reading) Richard Powers’s Generosity: An Enhancement, which readers might recall as my choice for the not-suck-y book of the year. It was really pretty good, definitely worthy of the prize (though I’m now reading another nominee, Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply, and it’s really pretty good too). Not Powers’s best book, but a good book.

Alright, well, here at least, we see that Culturology is alive, if not kickin’, and re-dedicating itself to getting its shit back together and having, like, real fine vintage-quality posts again soon enough.

I feel some sense of obligation to really knock things out of the park with this post, since I asked off of Mondays and Nick & Neal accommodated within a week, but we all know that that’s not necessarily going to happen.  I think, though, that by February I should really be rolling again. You’ve got to give me a break, Culturology is now an entire entry-year old, and a little bit prone to a wee sophomore slump here. But we soldier on.

Since Nick, I believe, has finished his massive Jean-Claude Van Damme movie watching marathon–though we may still sneak in one more JCVD Roundtable to cover the Oughts (and we also have some other awesome JCVD offshoots coming up soon)–I do still want to mention that nothing that JCVD ever did is nearly as entertaining to watch as Jackie Chan when Chan was at his peak (I’m thinking Drunken Master and Police Stories I & II here). Especially the Police Story comparison needs to be made (or even Rumble in the Bronx, for that matter) because it’s the exact genre that Van Damme never managed to do as well as Jackie Chan (and Chan’s amazingly-willing-to-be-injured stunt team). This ties in, more or less, with my sense that the most important part about Van Damme is that he was 1) white and 2) not American (Nick and I already discussed this to some extent in the first roundtable), since it’s my sense that the boost of martial arts stars in the States, as much as it had to do with the rise of Hong Kong film-making and Bruce Lee’s lasting impact, was really about the fact that the US had waged three consecutive wars against various Asian countries.

You can more or less map Edward Said’s “Orientalist” readings of Victorian literature as it pertained to British imperialism (say, especially, for this case, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda) onto Kickboxer as it relates to post-Vietnam War blowback. Where JCVD, in way that Chuck Norris never could, becomes Thai (learns the “ancient ways”), but still, despite his apparent willingness to adapt to a new culture remains the “White Warrior”.

As opposed to Jackie Chan, who just did awesome stunts all over the place.

+++

Also, I feel like, since I wrote about it back in the summer, I should weigh in on this whole Tonight Show situation. Of course, back in my previous post, I basically said that, excepting a few rare occasions where guests like Norm MacDonald (who should have his own talk show) or William Shatner are hilarious, Conan O’Brien had gotten incredibly boring and bland (and that, really, as Nick pointed out, Conan hadn’t been really funny for a decade already). The platform probably is outmoded. So I’m not really on O’Brien’s side. I watched the show last night, just to see what it was like now, what with the controversy, and Conan’s interview w/ Rob Lowe was really pretty hilarious, old form for Conan. Too little, too late, I suppose.

I’m sure Bob Odenkirk wishes he was doing more, but I almost think Conan would be good in a position with some new show similar to Odenkirk’s with Tim & Eric Awesome Show Good Job, where he’d be the guiding light to some comics that were doing more interesting things, obviously inspired by their mentor’s glory days. (It’s a suitable comparison as well because, apparently, back in the day at SNL, O’Brien, Odenkirk, and Robert Smeigel shared what was the funniest office in Manhattan at the time.) Or Conan doing weird comedy for the internet, at least, instead of bland corporate shilling for NBC (or for Fox, or where ever he ends up).

Though my guess would really be that Conan just grew up at some point and doesn’t really want to work very hard any more (I’m sure he works hard to maintain his new bland self, I realize that). So I guess i still don’t really care, but I’m pro-funny. Bring the funny.

And I had a great, what I would consider to be a classic-style culturological formulation ready and everything. I’ll get it out here, and maybe add to this if/when I get the chance, should conversation not bubble off as rapidly as I think it will.

Over the weekend, I third wheeled with a friend of mine and his girlfriend to go see the new George Clooney vehicle, Up in the Air, which is a great kind of movie to third wheel on, since it’s the usual brand of “indie” rom-com that uses an episodic structure and general plotlessness to come off as quirky and indie as it’s been perceived as by the general-ish viewing public. A general waste of a time of a movie, except for an awesome cameo by Sam Elliot (though I missed all his dialogue because I was too busy whispering Big Lebowski quotes to my friend’s girlfriend (in typical third wheel fashion)).

But here’s the point I want to make, about George Clooney:

George Clooney will always be disappointing as an actor because he’s constantly trying to be Jimmy Stewart when he’s really–and hopelessly–James Cagney.

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I really don’t know, myself, but it’s been bothering the hell out of me. There’s got to be something, right?