Movies reviewed this week: A Room in Town, Love and Anarchy, and Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers.
Author: Bryant
I was chatting the other day about how I’d book an AEW round-robin tournament and I thought I’d expand on the subject somewhat here.
Background: most US pro wrestling tournaments are single elimination. There’s a bracket, and if you lose you’re out. In contrast, the big Japanese promotions tend to run round robin tournaments, where you earn points for wins, and the wrestlers with the most points face off in the finals.
Round robin tournaments chew up way more time. Typically, while something like NJPW’s G1 is going on, the majority of each show is dedicated to tournament matches. This would be hard for an American promotion.
The G1 has 20 wrestlers in two blocks. In each block, each wrestler fights every other wrestler in the block, so everyone has nine matches. That means you’re running 18 shows with four tournament matches apiece on them, and there’s no way AEW could devote over two months of TV time to something like that.
But the value of a round robin tournament is that you can book a lot of matches that might be awkward otherwise — faction members against each other, and so on. You can also do a few stunning upsets because nobody can be expected to win all their matches. So how would you make it work in the US?
I think you cut it down to eight wrestlers in two blocks of four. Now each wrestler only has three matches. Each week, you put two tournament matches on Dynamite and one on Rampage. One match is always the main event each night to maintain significance. Each block gets Dynamite one week and Rampage the second week, so over the course of the two week cycle each block completes one set of matches.
That means the whole tournament except the finals takes six weeks to run and only occupies a third of the available TV time. That’s not bad at all, even after you double it to fit in the women’s tournament.
Okay, how do you book it?
You run this at the end of the year. AEW resets win-loss records at the end of the year for the purpose of rankings. The first consequence of the tournament is that the wrestlers are seeded in the new year’s rankings based on their records. Come in third, and you’re third in the top five. Second, and more important, you give the winner the traditional shot at any title they want. Include tag team titles in that.
Finally, you determine the entrants by a mixture of skill and luck. First off, the top four wrestlers in the rankings as of the start of the tournament get in. That ensures you have stars. Second, you “randomly” pick four other wrestlers to fill out the field. That means you can give a newcomer a boost, you can set up inter-faction matches, all that good stuff.
And to maintain the gambling theme, you call it Hard Eight. You also get a bonus gambling note by using a roulette wheel or something to do the random selection.
Movies reviewed this week: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Purple Noon, Petite Maman, and La Haine.
Movies reviewed this week: The Decameron, Hopscotch, It’s Always Fair Weather, The Sweet Hereafter, The American Soldier, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
It is not very useful to argue this shit on Twitter but that’s what blogs are for, right?
Anyone who says that Clinton lost because of Russia is wrong. Anyone who says that Clinton lost because she ran a bad campaign is wrong. Anyone who says that Clinton lost because of Bernie is wrong. You’re all wrong. A lot of things happened and I don’t think any of them shift the tide on their own.
Here’s stuff that happened in no particular order of importance!
My code is basically working, including spoiler protection and some other fun stuff. It’s more complex than it needs to be since I’m also saving entries to a database, plus it includes a lot of Letterboxd specific processing. Oh, and I’m using basic auth because I’m lazy. Possibly I’ll clean it up and release it soon; I’d just want to make it more of a generic RSS feed to WordPress engine.
Movies reviewed this week: The Gleaners and I, The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later, Shadow in the Cloud, and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.
I’m experimenting with posting my Letterboxd reviews here, since eventually you have to learn your lesson about hosting your own content. We’ll see how it goes. I’d prefer to filter out the ratings without reviews.
Saskia Reeves is awfully good in Slow Horses. As with more or less everything in both the original novels and the TV show, it’s a slow reveal. They show us the failures that the Slough House denizens have become, and you have to be patient to see the talents — however rusty — that balance out the failings.
So up front, Catherine Standish is an aging grey haired alcoholic. I’ve just finished episode 5 of the first season, which is where she lifts her head and sees a chance and takes it. The really good bit is when Reeves makes it clear that her character is incredibly pleased to have gotten this one right, with the slightest shy smile.
I won’t spoil the books but I did say that the talents “balance out” the failings, didn’t I? Not “overcome.” Such a good series. I’ve read them and can promise that reading them won’t mar your enjoyment of the TV show.
Episode 5 shows that transition for a few characters, actually, protagonists and antagonists alike. People get serious. It’s a nice inflection point before the season finale, in which much of that seriousness will be at cross purposes.
Movies reviewed this week: Take Me Somewhere Nice, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Closely Watched Trains, The Batman, Election, …And God Created Woman, and The Northman.