Category — Girl fighting

As someone who’s gotten in a few heated exchanges and altercations with movie theatre assholes, I can appreciate Ronda Rousey’s story about confronting an Ugg-wearing seat kicker (4:20 mark of the first video).

Rousey, who’s known just as much for her shoot-from-the-lip Chael Sonnen attitude as her four armbar wins in four minutes, will challenge Strikeforce women’s 135-pound champ Miesha Tate on March 3. I just wish she didn’t sound so much like an entitled high schooler when she talks.

She also brings up an interesting if debatable point at the 5:00 mark of the video below when she argues that Nick Diaz beating Georges St. Pierre would be good for the sport:

“It’s not the Olympics. It’s not about just coming home and bringing home a medal, and just having hardware and getting the win. It’s about pulling more fans in, and being entertaining. I think that fighters that just try to win by points and come away with a win are actually bad for the sport. If you never saw MMA before, and you walked in and you saw GSP and Koscheck, and all this jabbing out the whole time, it looks like a boring boxing match. And I don’t think you gain any fans with a fight like that. And so I really hope that Nick Diaz beats the crap out of him, because Nick Diaz is entertaining, and he’s an entertaining character in general. He might not be popular but I mean I can’t help but watch every video he puts out on YouTube. I think it’s funny as hell. And every single one of his fights is a brawl. It’s not like a pitter-pat match where afterwards he goes ‘Were friends, were all friends, buy Gatorade and let’s go home.’ I think that’s boring. GSP was good for the sport for a while. He brought in some big sponsors like Gatorade and UnderArmor. But I think he’s done everything he can in a positive way and he needs to step aside and let Nick Diaz kick his ass.”

She’s not wrong in that it would excite the welterweight division by levelling the playing field a bit. It would make match-ups in the division far more exciting because no longer would fighters be battling to be the next one to lose to the champ. But GSP does more for the sport in terms of attracting new fans and conveying a sense of civility and respectability that it would hurt the sport if he weren’t champion.

There’s an old adage in movies: if you introduce a gun, somebody’s going to get shot. Haywire inspires a related question: Why put Gina Carano in handcuffs if you’re not going to then make her fight a swarm of bad guys?

That’s just one of the more puzzling elements of the Steven Soderbergh-helmed spy thriller. Granted, I’m using the term “spy thriller” loosely.

Haywire is not the movie the trailers are trying to sell you, which is The Bourne Identity with boobs. Instead, it’s a soft-focus, low-key jazzy arthouse “fuck you” to quick-cut Michael Bayhem-style ADD action spectacles. It’s the anti-Bourne, a watered-down martini that leaves you neither shaken nor stirred.

And yet there’s something there, something in its ultra-cool ‘70s vibe that makes you forgive the by-the-numbers story, the sluggish pacing, the cheap made-for-cable quality. While the sum of Haywire’s parts adds up to a pilot for a TV series about a hot ass-kicking CIA super-agent, like Alias without all the glitz and glam and Jane Bond shine, it’s that very stripped-down pseudo-realism that provides the biggest punch.

The chases unspool with a determined this-is-what-it-would-really-be-like feel, while the fights deliver a degree of verisimilitude missing from 99 percent of on-screen fisticuffs. Nothing fancy, nothing CGI-enhanced, no wire fu. Just abrupt and brutal, punches, kicks, a couple of chokes. No actress could’ve pulled them off as well as Gina Carano. She is the first female action star you actually believe could beat up her larger, stronger male opponents. She throws a punch the way it should be thrown, and she takes one the same way. Stick Angelina Jolie in there and it would be like watching a stick figure on a string. And for the most part, Soderbergh just stands back and lets her do her thing.

On the acting side, Carano has charisma, charm and she mostly holds her own opposite heavyweight thesps like Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor and Michael Douglas. Occasionally she appears a bit out of her depth, although her acting never dips to porn-star levels, but she’s also not relied upon to deliver any great depth or emotion. And her voice, which was inexplicably digitally lowered in post-production, is only distracting in the first few moments and then only if you know what she really sounds like.

In the end, Haywire is not the explosive action debut many hoped it would be for Carano. What it is, though, is something smarter, a genre exercise that flexes some pretty big muscles. It’s more interesting than exciting, a diversion that’s both ponderous and worth pondering.

Still, it makes me wonder why the shackled Carano wasn’t called upon to battle her way out of that predicament. I guess that was one more cliché Soderbergh opted to avoid.

I have high hopes for Haywire based on the talent involved (notably director Steven Soderbergh, Michael Douglas, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender) and the generally positive reviews and buzz its been getting from respected and serious-minded film critics (i.e. not guns-and-ammo movie fanboys or MMA knuckledraggers who consider 300 or Fast Five some kind of action apotheosis), not to mention the hotness and action chops of star Gina Carano.

Everything that I’ve seen and heard about the movie tells me that the action is lean and mean and grounded in reality. Or as real as Hollywood gets these days. No gravity-defying wire fu, no CGI-assisted leaps from rooftops to runaway trains. In other words, no death-defying Angelina Jolie bullshit.

This clip, roughly the first few minutes of the movie and featuring Carano fighting Channing Tatum, definitely prove that out. The fight is short and dirty and completely convincing. I believe that Carano’s character could kick Tatum’s ass. It doesn’t hurt that Carano doesn’t save herself single-handedly (there’s nothing like a good coffee pot to the skull to turn the tide of a losing battle).

The question mark, though, has always been Carano’s acting ability, or lack thereof. And this one scene is, well, amateurish and uncomfortable. It’s not much to go on, and it’s just one brief scene taken out of context, but egads! Hopefully the script lets the rest of the cast do most of the heavy lifting while Carano spends her time busting people up.

Some of you disagreed with my assessment of Steve Mazzagatti’s officiating during the Johnny Bedford-Louis Gaudinot fight on Saturday’s Ultimate Fighter 14 Finale. But there’s no way you can say this boxing ref did a good job in the women’s match between Anne Sophie Mathis and Holly Holm (aka Jon Jones’ sparring partner). Skip ahead to the 3:25 mark and watch Holm get knocked out cold, her upper body slumped over the top rope. Then watch the referee help her to stand up  — and to regain consciousness long enough to get KO’ed a second time. I don’t think even Steve Mazzagatti would make that kind of mistake.

While Chael Sonnen is busy trading insults with ring card beauty in Arianny Celeste (insults that are funny but wrong, I might add), Ronda Rousey is busy doing her best Sonnen impression. The Strikeforce upstart is throwing out challenges to 135-pound champ Meisha Tate despite having only four pro fights under her belt. Granted, the Olympic judoka won all four of those fights by armbar in less than a minute, including snapping Julia Budd’s elbow just two weeks ago.

Both fighters appeared on The MMA Hour with Ariel Helwani this week and Rousey wasted no time throwing down the gauntlet while throwing former champ and potential contender Sarah Kaufman under the bus for good measure:

“Sarah Kaufman kind of gives boring interviews, she’s not a supermodel and the way she fights, she doesn’t finish matches in extraordinary fashion. It’s just kind of being realistic. I’m sorry that I have to say things bluntly and offend some people. I just want there to be a highly marketable, exciting women’s title fight, and I want to be part of that because I feel like I could do a really good job, and you could, too. I think the two of us could do a better job of that than you and Sarah Kaufman. I really feel 100-percent that a fight between her and me needs to happen. It’ll be great for women’s MMA. It’ll be the first highly anticipated fight in women’s MMA for a long time.”

Rousey must’ve missed Kaufman’s power-slam KO of Roxanne Modafferi, which certainly showed she knows how to finish a fight in exciting fashion. But she has a point that brash soundbites and beauty make women’s MMA more marketable. As Tate said, “If you weren’t pretty, it wouldn’t matter what you said or didn’t say. That’s why you’re getting this attention. I don’t know, I guess I personally like more of a humble approach.”

So while Tate would prefer a rematch with former champ Kaufman, and vice versa, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to give Rousey the title shot. Women’s MMA is on life support. It’s two biggest stars are nowhere to be found — Gina Carano is off making movies and Cristiane “Cyborg” Santos can’t seem to get a fight for a lack of 145-pound challengers.  Sonnen has already proven that having an abrasive personality can excite interest in a match-up. So let Rousey run with the smack talk, but maybe give her a title shot against Cyborg, not Tate, because I just don’t see her ripping the Brazilian’s arm off.

I could try to make the argument that this post is about Jon Jones working on his striking in preparation for his UFC 140 light heavyweight title defense against Lyoto Machida. But really it’s about a hot blond who can give (and take) a punch. I could watch world boxing champ and MMA fighter Holly Holm throw jabs in tight shorts all day. And those freckles are so adorable.

Never leave a free arm dangling in front of Ronda Rousey. The judo Olympic medallist and world champion has had four professional MMA fights and four victories, all by armbar. Her latest victim, Julia Budd, had her arm mangled inside of 40 seconds during Friday’s Strikeforce Challengers event. Why Budd didn’t tap sooner is beyond me. She had to have known she wasn’t going to escape.

Gina Carano has confirmed every horndog guy’s fantasy about watching two women fight: that at any moment they could start tearing each other’s clothes off and making out in the middle of the cage. Or, as she put it in Bullett Magazine:

“I think that fighting is similar to sex in that people have to let their guards down—well, some people do and some people don’t. The secret is chemistry. When two people are attacking each other, that chemistry is definitely going to come out in an interesting way. When you fight someone, you share the experience with that one person, and you’re never going to have that experience with someone else—even in another fight. I always have this weird connection with them. It really is like we had sex. I’ll always know how many people I fought.”

I kind of see where Carano is coming from. Fighting is a very intimate and raw experience. I wouldn’t say fighting someone is like fucking them, but you’re certainly closer to them for having gone through (and put each other through) a traumatic experience.

Even among jiu-jitsu players, I know some who are uncomfortable rolling with the opposite sex, partially because women are smaller and weaker and won’t be able to hold their own, partially because all that grabbing and groping and triangles and north-south position and whatnot can short circuit our lizard brains. Then again, rolling with someone you’re sleeping with can be like foreplay, where getting the submission truly is secondary to getting position.