Category — Lights, camera... action!

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.

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.