Protecting the Finisher: Storytelling Devices in Professional Wrestling

What is a Finisher? 

A finisher is the move that a professional wrestler uses to end a match in victory. After a hard fought contest of trying to incapacitate an opponent with a series of blows and maneuvers, a wrestler will begin to look for an opening where they can hit a maneuver that will end the match. This move is typically devastating and when struck, it means that the match is going end with the referee slapping the mat three times to signify the victory of one competitor over another. 

Perhaps the most mainstream famous finisher or finishing maneuver is the RKO, the finisher of one Randy Orton of the WWE. For a time, Orton's finisher became a popular meme as it could be hit, outta nowhere. Kids playing around swimming pools would run and grab a friend around the neck and pull them into pools outta nowhere. Memes of Orton grabbing his opponent around the neck and slamming them to the mat as their chin rested upon his shoulder began to pop up in animated GIF form in the mid to late 2010's in ubiquitous fashion.

In the parlance of professional wrestling, the RKO is a well protected finishing maneuver. What does that mean? Well, as a storytelling device, the RKO was the end of a story for whatever opponent stood across the ring from Randy Orton. For a time, no one, not even the biggest stars in the company were allowed to 'kick out' of the RKO. Once the blow was struck, the match was over. Kicking out is another kind of wrestling storytelling device, one key to some of the best drama in professional wrestling. Kicking out when it appears that you are about to lose a match is a big moment, it's a storytelling crescendo, a moment of breathless wonder for fans rooting for a hero to overcome the odds and come back to win or for fans hoping that a hated foe had finally been vanquished. 

Thus, the fact that no one ever kicked out of the RKO, built the importance of the move. In terms of long term storytelling, if a finishing maneuver like the RKO is never kicked out of, it means that if someone ever did kick out of it, that person would gain a particular level of prestige. Only the most valiant and resilient of babyface heroes or the most dastardly of hated foes could ever come close to kicking out once Randy Orton hit the RKO Outta Nowhere. It's a storytelling device so well established in WWE lore that when Randy goes to the biggest shows of the year and competes in the biggest matches of his career, whether or not he can hit the RKO is a major part of the story of the show and the match he's competing in. 

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Movie Review Caught

Caught (1949) 

Directed by Max Opuls 

Written by Arthur Laurents, Libbie Block 

Starring James Mason, Barbara Bel Geddes, Robert Ryan

Release Date February 17th, 1949 

Published March 13th, 2023

Caught tells the story of Leonora (Barbara Bel Geddes), a woman who dreams of being a model. To achieve her dream, she attends a Charm School. This takes her to a job working at a department store as a living model for Mink Coats. While doing this, she's approached by a man to attend a private party aboard a yacht. She's dubious about the idea but is convinced by a friend that she should attend. It's a fateful choice as before she can even reach the party, she meets the man for whom the party is being thrown, multi-millionaire named Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan). 

Ohlrig is handsome and he decides to sweep young Leonor off her feet using his vast resources. After doing so however, he's immediately resentful of her. He's long assumed that any woman who would want to be with him is only there to take his money. Leonor insists that her feelings are genuine, despite them having a very, very limited courtship. She asks for his time, and he refuses, leaving her home alone. In a particularly telling and cruel moment, he tells her to simply spend his money as that is the only reason she's there anyway. 

Nothing about the Leonora that we've met to this point indicates she is a gold digger but that's the label he's given her. It's clear that this marriage is a mistake and one that is headed to a tragic ending. That is until Leonora makes an unexpected choice. Having tired of Ohlrig's absence and cruelty, Leonora leaves the comfort and security of being a rich man's wife for the life of a lower middle class working girl. Leaving Smith's compound in Long Island for a small tenament in the City, Leonora takes a job working for $25.00 a week in the office of Dr. Larry Quinada (James Mason). Eventually, a romance begins between Dr. Quinada and Leonora but a complication looms over the romance, one that may force Leonora to return to Ohlrig. 

Caught demonstrates the elegance of the direction of Max Ophuls. The German director's camera sweeps and flows from scene to scene beautifully, seamlessly marrying rooms in single locations, rarely breaking shots without the absolute need to do so. The style of Max Ophuls is rarely distracting or flashy, it's distinctive only if you are truly looking for directorial style. A trained eye may take note of Ophuls' work while a more casual audience may simply find his style appealing for its crisp beauty and how rarely jarring his edits are. This could be said about a number of directors but Ophuls has a particular skill that stands out when you know what you are looking for. 

Take for instance Ophuls simple yet skillful framing of characters. When one character has an advantage of information over another, that character is foreground, looming larger in the frame. When this character then give their advantage away, the framing subtly changes to equalize the characters in the scene. It's a remarkably subtle visual cue that an important piece of information has been shared, information that may shift the narrative. Ophuls is visually equalizing his characters to draw you closer to the disadvantaged character. If you weren't looking for that, you might not notice it and that is the hallmark of a terrific piece of direction. 

Movie Review 65

65 (2023) 

Directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods 

Written by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods 

Starring Adam Driver, Arian Greenblatt, Nika King, Chloe Coleman 

Release Date March 10th, 2023 

Published March 12th, 2023 

65 does little to justify its own existence. The sci-fi action movie starring Adam Driver is an incredibly basic and repetitive action movie that happens to include space travel and people from a planet other than Earth. The core story is about a man trying to protect a small girl from a perilous and uncaring world, a story reflected in his personal life where he has a daughter who is sick and dying from an unspecified disease. Saving this small girl in the context of a mission on a foreign planet is intended as commentary on protecting the man's daughter from an illness that may kill her. 

That sounds like it has potential and perhaps it does but nothing really comes from that potential. Adam Driver plays Captain Mills. Mills has been offered three times his salary to take a group of people in cryo-pods from one side of the universe to another. It's a trip that will take two years to complete. This means spending two years away from his wife, (Nika King), and their sick daughter (Chloe Coleman). Why do this? Because the family needs the money to give their daughter a chance to survive. 

The plot of 65 kicks in when an unexpected meteor shower shatters the calm of an otherwise mundane space trip. This field of meteors seemingly came out of nowhere, Mills was asleep when it happened, demonstrating just how unexpected this was. The ship crashes on a nearby, seemingly uninhabited planet. Uninhabited by intelligent life forms anyway. Instead, the planet is populated by giant monsters that we recognize as dinosaurs, though Mills doesn't seem to know what they are. 

Mills must then find an escape pod which is about 12 kilometers from where his part of the ship crashed. His journey is complicated when he learns that one of his cryo-pod passengers is still alive. Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), is foreign to Mills. She doesn't speak the same language and this communication barrier will provide further complication as they attempt to navigate the 12 kilometers of lush jungle, low and dangerous open space, and a mountain range. 

Read my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review The Boston Strangler

The Boston Strangler (2023) 

Directed by Mark Ruskin 

Written by Mark Ruskin 

Starring Keira Knightley, Carrie Coon, Chris Cooper 

Release Date March 17th, 2023

Published March 16th, 2023 

The Boston Strangler takes the perspective of the two real life reporters who put together the story of the killers behind The Boston Strangler. Keira Knightley stars as Loretta McLaughlin, an experienced reporter tied to the Lifestyle section of her paper. When her mother mentions the murder of an elderly woman in her neighborhood, Loretta's instincts take over and she begins to investigate, even before she's managed to get herself assigned to this story. In order to keep the story once it starts to get bigger and more complicated, Loretta is teamed with Jean Cole (Carrie Coon), a more experienced and connected Crime Reporter. 

Together, the duo of reporters follow disparate leads to multiple suspects all the while watching as the Boston Police Department fumbles the investigation. How bad are the cops on this case? The lead detective, Detective Conley (Alessandro Nivola) begins telling Loretta how poorly his bosses are handling the case. The film avoids making it appear that the reporters are better at investigating the case than the cops by simply being honest about the challenges that the cops were facing and the politics behind the awful decisions they were making. 

One cliche the movie cannot avoid is the spouse who gets upset when their successful wife/husband is spending too much time at work. Loretta's husband begins as an incredibly supportive and forward thinking, for the 1960's, guy. Then, when the movie needs to force some drama and deal with the fact that Loretta's marriage did end in real life, the script resorts to scenes that feel deeply forced and perfunctory about Loretta not being home for dinner a few times or missing a bedtime or two for their kids and blows these things up into world ending dramas. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media. 

Movie Review Shazam Fury of the Gods

Shazam Fury of the Gods (2023) 

Directed by David Sandberg

Written by Harry Gayden, Chris Morgan 

Starring Zachary Levi, Helen Mirren, Lucy Liu, Adan Brody, D.J Cotrona, Meagan Good, Rachel Zegler 

Release Date March 17th, 2023 

Published March 20th, 2023 

Just as James Gunn is about to explode the D.C Universe, Shazam Fury of the Gods arrives to recall the Snyder-verse heyday as seems to be coming to an end. Yes, we still have an Aquaman sequel and a Flash movie in our future, but the path being cut in the D.C film universe still appears to have reached an end. Whether that is a good or bad thing is entirely subjective to your feelings about D.C's scattershot personification of superheroes in the movies. Sometimes the D.C Universe is dour and bleak and sometimes the D.C Universe is broad and goofy and nothing D.C has done has married these disparate tones despite the a clear sharing of characters across movies definitively linking the movies together. 

Zach Snyder's vision of D.C's future as a wasteland ruled over by a bitter, out of control Superman still clashes violently with the vibrant, colorful and childlike wonder of Wonder Woman 84 and especially Shazam which leans further into the candy color of childhood with Shazam Fury of the Gods. Where Snyder eagerly drained the world of color, going as far as to make black and white versions of his films, Shazam and its sequel, clearly exist in a coloring book universe of childlike imagination and bright, bright colors. Fury of the Gods even has unicorns, albeit, scary snorting, warrior unicorns, they're still unicorns and that flies desperately in the face of Snyder's self-serious to the point of parody vision. 

Perhaps that is why Shazam was never glimpsed in any of Batman/The Flash's visions of the future. There is no place in that universe for an angst-riddled, slacker, dreamer like Billy Batson. Shazam is the guy who would get too confident and get himself absolutely killed by an angry Superman. That actually tracks with the bleakness of the Snyder-verse, now that I am thinking of it. Evil of the future would totally demolish the young heroes of Shazam Fury of the Gods, a group who still marvels over their own powers and obsess about their superhero names. Well, now that I have talked myself into how the D.C Film Universe actually makes sense, via the likely horrific future death of Billy Batson and his family, let's talk about Shazam Fury of the Gods. 

As we join the story, a pair of women dressed as ancient warriors have entered a museum to retrieve a staff. This staff had been used by the big bad of the last Shazam movie. In that film, spoiler alert, Billy Batson busted the staff on the assumption that breaking it would destroy its world destroying magic. What Billy could not know was that the magic in the staff was all that was keeping sisters and ex-Gods, Hespera (Helen Mirren) and Kalypso (Lucy Liu), from entering the human realm. With the staff broken, the sisters come to Earth, reassemble the staff and proceed to murder a museum full of people. These deaths are never referenced again. 

Read my full length review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review American Cherry

 American Cherry (2023) 

Directed by Marcella Cytrynowicz 

Written by Marcella Cytrynowicz 

Starring Leonora Varela, Matty Cardarople, Hart Denton

Release Date March 17th, 2023 

Published March 16th, 2023 

Is this dull or am I just tired? Probably should not have to wonder about that during a movie. But I did wonder that as I sat through the frankly miserable new teen drama, American Cherry. The film starring Hart Denton and Sara May Sommers as a doomed young couple is an incredibly sad bit of small-town misery porn about incredibly sad teens and negligent small down adults. American Cherry presses buttons hard, doubling down on portraying how dull to the point of agony small town life is and the lengths one troubled teen specifically will go just to break the monotony. 

Hart Denton, from TV's Riverdale, stars in American Cherry as Finn Elliott, a deeply depressed young man. Finn is so bored in his small corner of the Midwest that he is pondering suicide. In fact, the plot of the movie kicks in when Finn, with his constant companion, an old school video camera, is lying in the street hoping one of the few cars that pass his house, runs him over. Finn is rescued at the last moment by one of his High School classmates, Eliza (Sarah May Sommers), who manages to stop an oncoming car just in time. 

Intrigued that someone may not want to see him splattered all over the road, Finn begins to see more of Eliza and the two form a tentative romance. That burgeoning romance is tempered by Eliza's own personal drama involving her mother, Louise (Leonor Varela), a struggling alcoholic. Louise and Eliza are estranged not only from Eliza's completely absent bio-dad, but also from her step-dad and step-sister, though Eliza still sees the sister everyday. The separation of their parents have led to Eliza resenting her sister while lamenting her mother's decisions. 

This is all portrayed against a beautifully bucolic setting. The lovely backdrops of a beautiful small town provide a counterpoint to the ugly personal stories that drive the plot of American Cherry. That's a solid approach, juxtaposition is a classic dramatic tool. What doesn't work for me about American Cherry is how the film leans in on being so ugly. Instead of merely being disaffected and sad, Finn is a psychopath. This is a deeply unwell character and the broad, brooding, weirdness of Finn is not a great fit for the drama of Eliza's story which is honestly more compelling in the conflicts it presents. 

At times, Finn's deeply troubled mutterings and obnoxious use of Kurt Vonnegut quotes as a signifier of his superiority over others, make the character appear as if he's visiting the wrong movie. He's the star of the film so, obviously, that's a problem. Sarah May Sommers is delivering a lovely performance filled with the heartbreaking angst of being a teenage girl desperate for a normal life, while Denton is playing a loose adaptation of John Hinckley or Mark David Chapman, loner-killers with delusions of self-importance. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media 

 

Movie Review A Little White Lie

A Little White Lie (2023) 

Directed by Michael Maren 

Written by Michael Maren 

Starring Kate Hudson, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson 

Release Date March 3rd, 2023 

Published March 1st, 2023 

Michael Shannon has made his name as an actor by being wildly unique and unpredictable. Those qualities are on incredible display in the new comedy, A Little White Lie. Here, Michael Shannon stars as a man named Shriver, a janitor living a life of desperation and boredom in New York City. Schriver's life is upended when he receives a letter from a college professor, Professor Simone Cleary (Kate Hudson), inviting him to speak at a prestigious but struggling literary conference in Utah. 

This is a little odd as Schriver doesn't remember having written a famous bestseller before pulling a J.D Salinger and disappearing from the literary world. Nevertheless, with prodding from his best friend Lenny (Mark Boone Junior), Schriver accepts the invitation and plans to pretend that he is this mysterious missing author. It's helpful to his scheme that no one has ever seen the famous Schriver, aside from a dark and broody photograph on the back cover of his novel. 

Arriving for the conference we meet the rest of the cast of this unusual comedy. Joining Kate Hudson is Don Johnson as a degenerate fellow professor with a deep admiration for Schriver and his writing. Aja Naomi King, known for role on TV's How to Get Away With Murder, plays a fellow author named Blythe Brown who is suspicious of Shriver from the moment she meets him. And rounding out the main cast are Da'Vine Joy Randolph as a Schriver super-fan and Romy Byrne as Teresa, Professor Cleary's assistant who appears to be in charge of exposition in several scenes. 

There are elements of A Little White Lie that don't work like a highly reductive cameo by beloved character actress Wendie Malick. Malick plays a patron of the college literary department who has a legendary habit of sleeping with famous authors. That's the joke, she sleeps with authors. She's an older woman who likes to have sex and for reasons unexplained, t

his is supposed to be funny. Neither Michael Shannon as the object of her desire or Malick herself are given any time to flesh out what might be funny about this beyond the idea of it. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media