The Iceman Cometh (and goeth)

UFC 115 has come and gone in Vancouver. My thoughts:

1) Chuck Liddell looked great. He didn't have a beer gut for the first time in recent memory. And he was fairing very well. Until he got hit. Once. And dropped. He's head can't take a good punch to the noggin anymore. Which is too bad. Not that I'm a huge Liddell fan, because I ain't, but I like Rich Franklin even less, so I was really hoping he would loose. Oh well.

2) Cro Cop won! Yeah! To a Sanshou fighter with no ground skills! To a guy who knocked him on his ass not once, but twice, and just stood there and let him get up. I do like Cro Cop, I love a good head kick, but if Pat Barry actually knew MMA and not just Sanshou, he would have plowed right through Cro Cop in the first round. It was a feeder fight, and fed Cro Cop Dana White did.

3) It was obvious during the pre-lim fights they show live on Spike for free, that they are cutting the fights to show as little contact and violence as they can. I know its a business, and Dana White is trying to make it more legitamized, but there were times when the camera had a perfect view of the action, and then it would cut to angle that made it more difficult to discern what was going on. I didn't dig it.

Blood and Bone - Black Dynamite converted me into a Michael Jai White fan. Sure I'd seen him in a Universal Soldier: The Return, The Dark Knight, Spawn, and the deleted scene from Kill Bill 2, but I was never fully convinced of his martial arts skills nor his on screen prescence and charisma. Until Black Dynamite. Now I can't get enough. Blood and Bone is a low budget film, but the guy who wrote the Big Hit (which I LOVE) and Love and a Bullet, which he directed, starring Treach (BAD!!!), and without MJW, it would probably have been a terrible film. Sure its got Kimbo Slice, Gina Carrano and Bob Sapp, but MJW kicks some serious ass in this film. They change camera formats throughout (you can see this pretty clearly in the making of), and it shows. Some of it looks like shit. Sometimes, when there's lots of horizontal movement in the frame, the image strobes. Some of the acting is awful. But fuck, Michael Jai White is incredible. I will buy this film solely for the guys martial arts mayhem. The end fight is pretty amazing.