Category — Lights, camera... action!

Here’s Georges St. Pierre wearing perhaps the least offensive Affliction shirt in the history of the brand, with douche bag magician Criss Angel, who I admit does some pretty freaky tricks, like that time he levitated over a parking lot.

Have to admit I’m very psyched for The Expendables, Sylvester Stallone’s R-rated ’80s-style men-on-a-mission movie that only sees Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme missing in action. It opens August 13.

While Cristiane “Cyborg” Santos gets set to face Jan Finney at June 26’s Strikeforce: Fedor vs. Werdum, the woman she beat to earn the women’s featherweight belt, Gina Carano, has been conspicuously absent from the cage.

Well, her Hollywood dalliance, the Steve Soderberg-directed action thriller Haywire (formerly the too-on-the-nose Knockout), has begun preview screenings. And the advance word is good. Very good:

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Todd Brown, the wizard behind the awesome offbeat movie site Twitch, passed along a message about a film he’s involved with called Breaking Point, which will star Cung Le in his first significant starring role. Here’s the official plot description:

In this action-packed thriller, former DEA agent and recent ex-con Vu Ton (Cung Le) travels to Vietnam to bury his father. Once there, Vu meets business mogul Daniel Park and learns that Daniel is married to Vu’s ex-wife, Lily. Daniel offers Vu a position as bodyguard to Lily and her daughter, Nina, but Vu refuses until Lily tells him that he is Nina’s father. When a business rival with criminal ties firebombs Daniel’s house and kidnaps Lily and Nina, Vu is forced into action.

Sound pretty generic in a straight-to-DVD kind of way, the kind of thing that Wesley Snipes would be involved with (except he’s not Asian), and I’d dismiss it entirely except for a couple of things.

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I really dig the shot of Quinton “Rampage” Jackson’s BA Baracus hanging off the side of a skyscraper and whistling the A-Team theme before firing a rocket into another building. It comes at the 1:55 mark and makes the 12-year-old me that was a huge fan of the original series kind of giddy. I also have to say that Rampage’s Baracus/Mr. T impression not only isn’t bad, it’s the best thing in this latest trailer. Except for Jessica Biel. The movie hits theatres June 11.

This trailer is just too much ’80s action awesomeness not to post. All that’s missing is Norris, Van Damme, Seagal, Dudikoff and a little Sho Kosugi.

This new trailer contains all kinds of Ironman bad-assery, but what’s it doing here? Well, at the 0:25 mark Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark is working out in a ring while wearing MMA gloves. And yes, I noticed that before I noticed the slinky Miss Scarlett Johansson in the same scene. Make of that what you will.

Downey is heavily into the martial arts – he studies wing chun kung fu, which you can see a lot of in his Sherlock Holmes. Not sure if he’s into MMA, though. And for you Scar-Jo fans, she pulls off a cool jiu-jitsuish move around the 2:00 mark.

Just saw the ad for OxyMorons, a new film starring Tim Sylvia (and, strangely, sponsored by Affliction; watch the end of the trailer) about OxyContin addiction. A powerful – and powerfully addictive – opiate, Oxy is also known as hillbilly heroin.

Someone must think that the same people who watch MMA are the same people who like to get high. Which is maybe why Sylvia, whom Barrett wrote about earlier today, is scheduled to fight against five-time World’s Strongest Man Mariusz Pudzianowski this April 23 in Worchester, Mass. The event is being promoted by Butterbean.

Laugh all you want, but half of you reading this are probably high right now…

I’ve never been much of a Jens Pulver fan (unless he was fighting BJ Penn). I admire his feral tenacity, but that’s about as far as it goes. But I have to give him a lot of credit for making something of himself considering where he’s come from. It’s no secret Little Evil had an abusive white trash upbringing. When he was seven, his father stuck a gun in his mouth and then deciding he wasn’t worth the bullets. And his whole fight career seems to have been built around literally battling those demons. Every time he steps in the cage, he imagines his opponent is his father.

Well, this trailer for a film about Pulver called Jens Pulver: Driven has me intrigued. If the final film pays off what the trailer promises – in-depth, honest, emotional, raw, and most-importantly insightful and self-reflective – then I’m there. It’s also got a Friday Night Lights quality about it – I suspect it’s the choice of music – and that’s a good thing.

I’ve been in touch with the filmmaker, Gregory Bayne, so expect an interview with him in the next couple of weeks.

As for Pulver, who dropped his last four fights to Urijah Faber (twice), Leonard Garcia and Joseph Grispi, he plans to unretire on March 6 at WEC 47. The former UFC lightweight champ (as well as PRIDE and WEC veteran) will face Javier Vazquez on a card that also features WEC bantamweight champ Brian Bowles vs. Dominick Cruz, Leonard Garcia vs. Diego Nunes and Miguel Torres vs. Joseph Benavidez.