Warrior, Gavin O’Connor’s MMA version of Rocky, is much better than it has any right to be. As a MMA fan, I expected two things out of this movie. I expected it to disrespect the sport of MMA. And I expected it to be completely unbelievable. And while there are some parts of the movie where things are unrealistic, O’Connor balanced the film with great action and heartfelt emotion.

The film’s major storyline is about a broken family. Brothers Brendan and Tommy are estranged because their father, played by Nick Nolte, was an alcoholic and drove their mother away. The brothers were split up as well as Tommy went with his mother, even though that wasn’t the original plan. They went their separate ways as early adults, but they’re back in the same place for the first time since they were teenagers, at a MMA tournament called Sparta, which pits all of the top non-UFC middleweight fighters in a two-day tournament with a winner-take-home purse of 5 million dollars.

This part of the film is pretty unrealistic if you understand how the sport of MMA works. Fighters wouldn’t join a tournament if only the winner was paid, and no MMA tournament would get the necessary publicity to make any sort of sense, unless there was UFC involvement, and even then, the UFC doesn’t run tournaments anymore. However, most people watching this movie won’t even understand how Hollywood-ized that portion of the film is, so it won’t really matter.

The brothers are played by Joel Edgarton (Brendan) and Tom Hardy (Tommy). Neither guy is easily recognizable for their work, but their characters are easily recognizable if you look for the inspiration for their characters. Brendan is a school teacher whose house is about to be foreclosed on because he and his wife had to take out a second mortage to pay for expensive treatments for his youngest daughter’s illness. And they’re short on money again. He also looks dead on like UFC welterweight legend Matt Hughes. Tommy is an ex-Marine (much like UFC star Brian Stann) who goes by his mother’s maiden name and has a sketchy past. He has tattoos, is angry, fights like Bill Goldberg used to wrestle and snarls like Brock Lesnar.
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When WWE decided to get into the movie business, the idea was that their wrestlers would star in their films and that with the crossover promotion from wrestling and some buzz, they could make a little bit of money in the theaters and then profit from the video release. Their first few movies starred John Cena, Stone Cold Steve Austin, and Kane. While Vince McMahon has had Hollywood dollar signs dancing in his eyes ever since he put Hulk Hogan on the big screen in No Holds Barred, I think their recent foray into the movie business was a reactive move based on Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson leaving WWE for Hollywood.

Their strategy hasn’t necessarily worked quite yet. The film branch of their business is continually one of the only money losers, yet they don’t seem to be quitting. Very recently, WWE’s strategy has been to do a limited edition theater release and then go straight to DVD. I don’t really know why they bother with the theatrical release, other than to simply say that they did it.

What separates That’s What I Am from their other movies is that it’s the first movie they’ve done where their star wrestler, in this case Randy Orton, only had a bit part, and real actors carried the movie. Ed Harris is the only adult actor on the poster and Orton’s in the movie for maybe five minutes. I think their goal here was to get publicity on the quality of the film rather than on their big bumbling wrestler who was in it.

That’s What I Am has heart and the idea is a fine one. But it’s message is very heavy-handed and has an after school special feel to it at times. The movie preaches tolerance and anti-bullying, which is kind of funny coming from a company that endorses huge wrestlers who bully each other.
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In the mid 80s, the WWE utilized the help of MTV to make their product cool. It’s not like wrestling hadn’t been popular before, and I’m sure to many, going to wrestling matches was the thing to do in certain cities across America. But with the expansion of cable TV, WWE was able to latch onto certain pop culture phenoms like Cyndi Lauper and Mr. T to expand their fanbase. They called that generation, Rock & Wrestling.

But other than the help of MTV and a couple of actual wrestling records produced with actual wrestlers on the mic, there wasn’t much rock about it. Hulk Hogan could strum the guitar a little bit, but Roddy Piper’s actual skill in playing the bagpipes wasn’t necessarily rock & roll. Some twenty five years later, an actual wrestler defined the rock & wrestling connection. That man is Chris Jericho.

Jericho’s second book, Undisputed: How To Become The World Champion In 1,372 Easy Steps isn’t the same type of wrestling book that his first autobiography was. A Lion’s Tale: Around The World In Spandex was his journey in the crazy world of professional wrestling, from growing up as a huge fan of wrestling to becoming one of the most entertaining and underrated wrestlers of the mid-to-late 90s. Undisputed picks up right where that book left off, with his arrival into WWE as Y2J, aka The Millennium Man.

While the wrestling fan in me absorbed every nook and cranny of the inside world of Jericho’s WWE career, I did feel a little disconnected from the rock & roll part of his career. Jericho is the lead vocalist for his band Fozzy, which started out as the cover band Fozzy Ozbourne. Jericho pretended to be Mongoose McQueen and while the band was a real band, it was more of a fun hobby and artistic expression than second career. I’m not a fan of Fozzy or really a fan of Fozzy’s style of music, and that’s probably why I felt a bit disconnected. It might’ve also been because I wanted to read more about his WWE career. However, the Fozzy portions of the book are very entertaining because Jericho has a true passion for his music career. In fact, while Jericho obviously loves entertaining wrestling fans, you kind of get the idea that he has just as much fun, or maybe even more fun entertaining Fozzy fans.
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WWE did many things right for WrestleMania 26 that they incorrectly at WrestleMania 25. The show was built around the same match – Shawn Michaels vs. The Undertaker. But for WrestleMania 26, rather than try to sell the title matches as the main event like they did at 25, they decided to put Shawn Micheals vs. The Undertaker on last and let them close it out.

They booked two strong title matches before the main event and overall, this was a very strong show. But there was one thing missing that is very apparent from the second you turn on the show. And it didn’t hurt my live viewing so I didn’t even know about it until I watched it back. What’s missing is Jim Ross.

The announcing was so subdued on this show that I barely noticed it. Sometimes that isn’t a bad thing. You can let the wrestling speak for itself. But at WrestleMania, nothing can be subdued. Everything has to be up another level. And without Jim Ross, the announcing took this show down a level. Live, I thought it was much better than it came across on the DVD. The announcing crew of Michael Cole, Jerry Lawler, and Matt Striker were off their game. Striker was stepping over Lawler’s punchlines and Cole was just pushing everything as positive which came off fake. If JR was there announcing, it might’ve made it one of the classic WrestleManias of all time.

For the most part, all the matches made complete and perfect sense. Like what happens at most WrestleManias, many matches were cut short on time. If some of the matches had more time, they could’ve been all-time classics. But, in a four hour show, you can’t have all classics. All the matches have to give the viewer and the audience something a little bit different. And WrestleMania 26 did this very well.

For your die-hard in-ring wrestling fans, Edge and Chris Jericho had a near 4 star quality match. Live, it was definitely 4 stars, but back on DVD it wasn’t as hot. I’m not exactly sure why. The finish, where Jericho won clean with the code-breaker was fine live, but seemed a bit anticlimactic on DVD. Also, after the match, when Edge speared Jericho off the announcer’s table and through the barricade, it was awesome live, and on the DVD, was just a fun stunt.
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Right before WrestleMania 25, I started writing reports of the build-up to the show based on the television shows, Raw and Smackdown starting with the Raw after Royal Rumble. Thus, I remember many things about the planning of this show, such as one of the original goals of the Chris Jericho vs. The Legends match was supposed to feature Mickey Rourke in an in-ring role. I remember the Matt Hardy vs. Jeff Hardy storytelling that left a bitter taste in my mouth when they started to bring real life into the angle, but push it in a tasteless way. I also remember that the main event between Triple H and Randy Orton had a chance to be great, but the build was so up and down, it wasn’t on fire like it should’ve been.

In ten years, people will remember this show for two things. The first thing is the Undertaker and Shawn Michaels match that had the entire building rocking. I’ve been to very few live events where the building was rumbling as loudly as it was, which is a credit to both guys because in large stadiums, the sound goes upward and can be muted a bit. And if they remember a second thing (and they may not), it will be that Stone Cold Steve Austin was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame that same weekend.

Actually, when Austin was announced with the other Hall of Famers and then drove his four wheeler towards the ring and drank beer, it was the second loudest pop in the building. Both of those moments dwarfed the main event. By the time Triple H walked out for his match with Randy Orton, the fans were sitting on their hands. That’s not exactly the way you want your main event to be presented.

The Money In The Bank match was really good live, but it doesn’t come across as well on DVD. It was awe-inspiring to see guys gracefully fly in the air in person, but the actual up-close camera work hurts the visual. There was uncertainty as to who was going to win the actual match and receive a future title shot, but the crowd was clearly behind Christian. Instead, CM Punk won the match and all of a sudden, the wonder was if he’d cash in his title shot if Edge won his title match.
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If anyone asked me my worries about the new WWE WrestleMania DVD before I had actually watched it, I would’ve said that since it was produced by them and they get to tell their own story, it would be filled with errors and lies that became WWE truths over the years. And I would’ve been right. But I would’ve been incorrect about what parts of the DVD were good, and which parts of the DVD that simply came across as unimportant.

The story starts from before the original WrestleMania, when Vince McMahon decided to go national with his dad’s once territorial product. It’s very similar to the story they’ve told of going national on other DVDs, with very little insight, other than Vince saying that his father wouldn’t have liked him going national.

Guys like Jerry Lawler, Vince himself, Howard Finkel, and Mean Gene Okerlund are there to talk about some of the earlier WrestleManias, but the story loses all credibility immediately when Okerlund tells that old myth that before Vince McMahon took wrestling national, shows were in old armories and not in arenas. Also, Jerry Lawler talks glowingly about the early days of WrestleMania, when it was well known that he was anti-WWF in those days and tried to keep his Memphis region going for as long as possible. Lawler, specifically, just looks like he’s picking up a pay check because you don’t believe a word he’s saying. Finkel, McMahon, and Okerlund were there, so at the very least, what they say has some validity. Jerry Brisco, who you’d expect to lie, did say that closed circuit TV was a new thing when Vince was doing it, even though boxing had been doing it for years.

The story starts to go in order from the first WrestleMania. But somewhere along the way, they just decided to not really tell the story in the order of the shows. I’m not sure if they didn’t have the time or if it wasn’t all that exciting, but some of the biggest WrestleManias ever, including X7 were barely more than an afterthought, while some bad WrestleManias like XI were given more time because of the celebrity involved. The Hulk Hogan WrestleManias were shown as much bigger than the Steve Austin and Rock lead Manias and some of it made sense. If not for Hogan and Vince, WrestleMania and WWF would’ve never taken off. But it’s sort of alarming at how Austin and Rock are made to look like lesser stars than Hogan. Maybe Vince just remembers some of those shows more memorably.

They show WrestleMania 2, which was live in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York as a failure, but WrestleMania III is shown in a bright light. There’s a lot of time invested on that show, which is still remembered as one of the biggest shows they’ve ever done. The Hulk Hogan/Andre The Giant main event story was told well, with Andre looking like the biggest attraction and most respected wrestler ever. Vince McMahon and Hulk Hogan both said that Hogan was so nervous before the match because they didn’t know how well Andre would cooperate. Surprising to me, they also gave a lot of time to Ricky Steamboat vs. Randy Savage, which was the actual match that stole the show.
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