Category — Lights, camera... action!

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.

There seems to be an awful lot of dramatic build-up implied in the back of Quinton “Rampage” Jackson’s mohawked head. Liam Neeson delivers every line with the leaden sobriety of the Gettysburg Address. And the action feels like leftovers from the GI Joe movie. Where’s the sense of fun that the original series had? I doubt we’ll see Neeson in a Godzilla suit even once. And while the ‘83 GMC van is a nice homage, if I was a kick-ass special forces team blowing shit up while on the run from the law I’d maybe drive a Hummer. Just sayin’.

I’m getting a little tired of all the post-Matrix/post-Crouching Tiger chop-socky wire fu in films. It’s getting stale. But I’ll cut Bodyguards & Assassins some slack because it stars the super bad-ass Donnie Yen. Here’s an extended clip from the film, a fight scene with Strikeforce middleweight Cung Le, who is my excuse for posting this video.

I’m a huge fan of behind-the-scenes MMA videos/vlogs. I like seeing the training, of course, but more than that I like seeing the fighters outside of the cage and away from the carefully composed interviews typically used to promote events. I also like documentaries, like the Rickson Gracie one called Choke and the Renzo Gracie one called Legacy. Entertaining and enlightening stuff.

Well, I had a chance last week to sit down with Toronto filmmaker Steven Wong and his producer, James Hergott, who are making a 3-D documentary called The Striking Truth about friends and training partners Georges St. Pierre and David Loiseau. How cool could that be – GSP in 3-D? Wong also got Loiseau on the phone for me because it was actually his idea to make a movie about them. The full story is over here at the National Post.

No words. There are just no words. What do I say about this? It’s a clip from Death Warrior, which plays like a relic from Cannon Films circa 1983. Oh, and the guy that Rampage is fighting is also the screenwriter, so he should take some of the blame as well.

The cast of the A-Team movie in all their photoshopped glory looks like a bunch of guys dressing as the A-Team for Hallowe’en: Bradley Cooper as Templeton “Faceman” Peck, Quinton “Rampage” Jackson as BA Barracus, Sharlto Copley as “Howling Mad” Murdock and Liam Neeson as John “Hannibal” Smith.

I post this clip from the set of the A-Team movie so that I’ll have one more reason to make fun of Quinton “Rampage” Jackson. Although it is nice to see he’s got the full Mr. T mohawk glued to his head.

I’m not sure if this is a web series, a proposed TV series or what, but I’d be a regular viewer. A couple of young talented Gracie black belts living it up in Miami? What’s not to like? The Valente Brothers, Pedro and Gui, seem charismatic enough, and if they focus as much on the jiu-jitsu as they do on the nightclubs, I’m sold.

A couple of things, though: having Royce Gracie stop by might make a promotable selling point and lend the brothers some BJJ credibility, but the guy’s got all the charm of a mannequin. And I feel sorry for the poor sap in the jail sell who thinks he doesn’t have to worry about dropping the soap because he studied BJJ for two weeks. I hope the show is around long enough to do a followup with him a few months into his incarceration.

Former UFC light heavyweight champ Chuck Liddell was voted off of Dancing With The Stars on Tuesday night. Maybe his guilty feet ain’t got no rhythm. Kudos to the Iceman for taking the risk. It takes guts to dress like it’s cowboy night at Woody’s gay bar. We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.

I thought I posted this last week but it slipped through the cracks. I hate to judge a movie by its trailer but this feels exactly like the kind of B-grade action movies that were released in theatres in the ’80s but now go directly to DVD. The bad one-liners, bodies leaping ahead of explosions, cheesy bad guys with bad accents (which they even make fun of in the trailer). Even the sight of Dolph Lundgren going toe-to-toe with Jet Li isn’t enough to make me overlook the goofy raspberry berets (make your own Prince joke). I was really hoping this would be a hard-R, blood-and-guts, over-the-top (pun intended) Sly Stallone actioner like the deliriously entertaining Rambo. Oh yeah, and if you haven’t figured out why I’m posting this on FW, Randy Couture’s one of Stallone’s bad-asses.

Umm, one of these things does not belong here: among the cast for the reboot of the Predator movie franchise you’ll find Adrien Brody, Topher Grace and Oleg Taktarov. Now, I’m not saying Brody and Grace won’t make great alien killers but UFC and PRIDE FC vet Taktarov seems better-suited to the job of shooting up the jungle, not having time to bleed and getting to the choppah. Anyway, the film is shooting in Hawaii and the Russian dreadnought is hanging out with BJ Penn.