The first Best of the Best was shat out by God and hit his chosen people like a brown stinky stone tablet. It foretold a future of action cinema where we wouldn’t need the riot-generator main man who could kick a country in half, but instead could field a team of bureaucratically obedient warrior-nerds who would deliver our sense of revenge for us. For as ragingly homoerotic and thick-skulled as it was, it marked the end of 80s (or “Butch) action film, and heralded the dawn of the 90s (or “Bitch”) action film. Think it through; by the time 1993 rolled around, how many necks were snapped without some expansive personal exploration montage? Even Steven “He Who Seeks The Killer of Bobby Lupo” Seagal went from drugs-n-cake masterpiece Under Siege to a lecture on electric fucking cars in On Deadly Ground. Let us also forget for a moment the inexorable adventures of Best of the Best 3 and the surprisingly titled Best of the Best 4; Tommy Lee, one of the only truly Asian-American characters who was actually allowed to be a non-queer adult male speaking at normal volume, simply became so much of a badass that he was able to Turkish-crescent-kick racism right out of people. What matters is that at the turning point between Butch and Bitch, 1993, a torch was passed. A long, veiny torch.

What I’m saying is, Best of the Best 2 is the first awkward teenage grope of action cinema. That is to say, brilliant and thrilling, awkward and wordy, sweaty, thrusting, mad, and basically preoccupied with Wayne Newton’s ageing testicular cameltoe. Our heroes Alex Grady (Eric Roberts), Tommy Lee (Phillip Rhee) and Travis Brickley (Chris Penn) return from South Korea having heroically lost the tournament but gained a brother. HE WAS… A .. GOOD.. FIGHTER. Well, he wasn’t good enough to stay alive during a fucking padded sparring session, so Dae Han, you’re in. What do you do when your team returns for a moral victory? You set up shop with a bizarre and vaguely defined fight school in Las Vegas, of course.

Luckily for us, Las Vegas is home to a brutal and fanciful underground fight club, the Coliseum, hosted by a post-Danke Schoen Wayne Newton and owned by a pre-The Viking Sagas (has it really been 13 years?) Ralph Moeller. Newton needs no introduction and he acts here exactly as we know him: the tireless overseer of human depravity, jaded, listless and cruel. Playing the baby-oil producing region and tremendously heterosexual vilian Brakus, Moeller has always had the distant sorrow of a man who knows he is too physically big to be properly famous. Frankly, he owns this film from frame to frame. I could pretend to some high-larious irony where I laugh at the German beefcake at the centre of the Coliseum’s absurd hierarchical fighting system, but there is plenty to laugh at here without taking anything away from the courageous and dreamy Ralph Moeller (starring in the upcoming summer smash, CarPirates!).

The relationship between Newton’s Weldon and Moeller’s Brakus is, to me, the pinnacle of action cinema’s inability to talk about the male body. Brakus is beyond maleness the way a Turducken is beyond a chicken burrito. Weldon manages him and the business of the Coliseum sort of a leashed maniac, despite us seeing Brakus’s depth and intelligence in just about every shot or scene setting up the first third of the film. He is made into a monster not by being different, but just by being a Butch in a Bitch world. That is his tragedy. Weldon is a massive, terrible Bitch. Their business is managing the braying elite of the audience; row after row of hooting trophy wives, impotent men who were a decade out from their first Viagra prescription, and mini Patrick Batemans.

I dare readers to scour film history for a more perfect and vile audience than the blood-stained suits in Best of the Best 2; shot after shot in every fight fills us with dread, hatred and class contempt. Not the gum-chewing yahoos surrounding the pool in AWOL/Lionheart/Wrong Bet who watched Jean Claude elbow someone in the face once, but had it cut together seven times. Not even the fearful gi-clad drones on the island of Mr. Han (“-man, you come straight out of a comic book.”) Not even the wonderfully inappropriately bewildered cronies of Shang Tsung (“YOU ARE NECKS!”) watching Liu Kang’s first fight in the (first and only) Mortal Kombat movie. No. In the town that best represents the salty excesses of American wealth, right at the turning point between the peaks of then and the troughs of now, these people are the best chalk circle in which glistening tweakers have ever fake-fought. These people are always in underlit shadow, always up to no good, and always being prompted by Weldon to remember that “There is one one rule; there are no rules.” They are referenced explicitly as bankers and investors – not just rich, but Finance sector rich. People whose entire existence is ephemeral. What pisses me off about Fight Club, was that it ended up being the Republican right of reply to an entire era of balls-out action cinema like this that got away with making a real political point, dumb as it was, without then holding your hand – literally – to tell you it would all be okay. No conservative impulse here; the poor extract revenge, sweet and juicy. Revenge for what?

Well, for these people, Brakus kills Travis Brickley. Chris Penn, as many of our readers will know, followed the essential rule laid out in Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, that if you’re going to go in a cosmically sad and tragic way, be sure to leave about a decade of morbid foreshadowing of that death in your films. So it is with no surprise that I point out that two sentences on Penn’s Wikipedia page contain the following phrases about his film roles; “heavy-set, drug dealing” and “heavy-set, couch potato drug dealing high school janitor.” You may want to laugh at Chris Penn’s death, but before you do, be aware of two things. One, he managed to pretend he knew karate, in two separate films. Two, he had to live everyday knowing that his brother was Sean Penn. Travis Brickley’s forlorn face as he realizes he is so crap at karate that Brakus is snapping his neck as a form of aesthetic critique can now be seen as the most sage precursor to Penn’s fat, tragic death. We won’t include an image of the deceased here, because like many indigenous peoples we understand that mechanical reproductions of the dead can disturb their spirits, but for those of you planning a “heavy-set, drug dealing” marathon will want to pay close attention to the epic and grim poetry happening in Ralph Moeller’s armpit. Who should be watching from the rafters at this point, but Alex Grady’s drama school Walter. Walter is precisely the kind of child that a constantly crying divorcee with a ponytail would bring up, so we can’t blame him. That name again: Walter.

At this point, the film is pretty much perfect. We have two Bitch heroes, who, having lost the only Butch of the original US National Karate TEEEEAMMMM, must now defeat the last of the wild Butch, managed by a real Bitch, to protect one of the Bitches’ progeny Bitch.

The ordering of the first confrontation scene is brilliant: The boys, finding Brickle’s body in the river, get hooped up on goofballs and head up to interrupt Brakus’s improbably massive dinner in a what appears to be the Vegas version of a mead hall. Grady, already crying before he’s been punched, asks if Brakus killed Travis, and gets the response “Easily!” before getting tossed aside and probably putting out his dud shoulder in the process. Brakus turns to Tommy and punctuates with “Care to join him?.” Then, in what I consider to be the definitive breaking point between two distinct action cinema traditions, Tommy (No!) Lee snaps Brakus in the face, sending him flying into a mirror straight out of Snow White, cutting his face, his beautiful face. Ever the narcissist, he wakes from his slumber, and goes from kicked head to kicked head from here on in. The heroes leave with menacing swerves and winks, Weldon’s thugs vow to hunt them down and kill them, setting up the requisite montage-tragedy-montage-triumph. But from this point, not a single frame is wasted.

The sheer greatness of what follows, and the way it overshadows the rest of the film has required of me to give you no foreshadowing. It simply must be said as it happens. The boys escape to very Asian Tommy’s adoptive Very Native Indian family in a desert shack, where the drunk and sweaty Sonny Landham, playing Tommy’s politically-correct Butch half-brother, bears of the scars of a headfirst collision with Brakus. The film, already loaded with tragic figures, gives us at this crucial moment in his life, Sonny “we need a genocide against the ragheads” Landham. Even as a teenager watching Best of the Best 2 in the cinema, knowing the Predator connection, prior to any real gossip website culture, you knew that Sonny was a man who has swallowed a bomb and given a detonator to, according to his very own personal website, a “mentally ill wife and a liberal guided federal government”. Before he would face off against “the fascist women’s abuse groups of Kentucky”, he would have to deal with the scars of fighting the Aryan juggernaut. His character James is part Sagat from Street Fighter, part the ‘gots any change’ guy from Weird Al’s Vidiot from UHF. Landham really is one of America’s enduring images of male paranoia. Just how unstable does a person have to be to become known as ‘the crazy one’ on the set of Predator?

Somehow, this lump of bullshit and bitterness has to train up two hairless jockeys to make a triumphant return to the Coliseum and see off the big fellah. All of Landham comes out in James, the way all of Newton comes out in Weldon. The tragedies which were implicitly fictional in 1993 – Penn (by being dead), Newton (by being the same), Eric Roberts (by being Eric Roberts), and finally Landham (by being Republican/crazy) – are by now complete, real, and beautiful. The experience of watching action cinema punch itself in the balls is nowhere more pronounced, nowhere more farcical.

There’s a whole twenty minutes of greatness that follows the James introductory vomit that requires little explanation. A bunch of sun-baked training montage occurs, some family tenderness, we grow a little, we laugh a little, we fight with sticks. I think Meg Foster is there at this point, but I can never remember where she is in films because her dead, dead eyes are a portal to the land of wind and ghosts. Weldon’s armed thugs rock up before the training is complete (of course), and shoot up the place, killing James by shooting a wig apparently representing the back of his head, but not before he slow-motion stabs a dude in the chest. There’s been a lot of action so far, but really, the last fifteen minutes is a ramp of stupidity. Dae Han is called in to help out Grady mix it up while Tommy has to kick some people around in the Coliseum before he can get to fight Brakus himself, who is basically nursing his scar 24/7. Pretty much everybody cops it in the face and neck for a good while, the audience demands more and more blood, Tommy’s kicks are getting more elaborate and edited together more ferociously. As the floor breaks into chaos, Brakus and Tommy go at it with iron poles.

We don’t want to spoil the ending too much, but I’ll just hint at the fact that Tommy kills Brakus in an eerie echo of Travis, and then shuts down the Coliseum. Okay, we did want to spoil the ending, but that’s to make a point:

Best of the Best 2 is the Citizen Kane of cinema. The narrative spokes open up to reveal a portrait of American self-obsession that goes considerably further than something like Fear and Loathing ever managed to risk. If you think that’s a throwaway sentiment, watch it again with the benefit of hindsight. Maleness dies in the arms of another man, time and again, in the sweaty underbelly of Vegas. Showmen live forever, queer Euro juggernauts preen for our amusement, and the new figures rising out of the ashes are basically dressed up community-minded primary school teachers. Race is forgotten, but failure to acclimatize to it is punishable by death. This film, in attempting to map a shift away from greed and muscle culture to make a quick buck on the new emerging aesthetic, ended up also serving historical critique of the Clinton era’s systemic corruption and family court paranoia. WACO would go down between the close of principal photography and release. On the one hand, what use would America have for the charismatic leader? But then, who wants some dudes in wigs to come and kill your Sonny Landham half-brother?

At the real centre of it all is the lynch mob, with their betting stubs and shit champagne. The sneering, screaming crowd of white West Coast powerdressers had learned nothing from the LA riots, happy to unite in the half-light of the fighting ring and place their bets on other’s flesh. If you don’t remember them being the focus of the film, then you probably think the film is about middle-aged men dealing with getting older. No, even the Romans knew that the ring of battle criticized the audience. Thank God those blood-thirsty vampire caricatures on the edge of the drama never actually ended up running our financial system.

Okay, that’s a lie. At the centre of it all is Ralph Moeller. Acting so perfect, they had to replace his head with a jelly mold for the last shot of the last fight, in an autocritique that precurses Hot Shots: Part Deux (geniflect here, folks) by a couple of months. We love you, RM, you insane man-mountain.

Congratulations, Mrs. Palin. You have become the first female contender for either end of the Presidential ticket since Dukakis. We especially want to congratulate you on your success considering your youth, and the usually debilitating affliction of being as dumb as a stump. We here at the Ruthless offices are especially glad to see you rise to the national stage; a lovely all-American woman with impeccable social and moral credentials that can bring our country out of the moral quagmire and back into God’s light.  There will be no Jaimie Lynn Spears on your watch, right, Governor?

We also want to wish you the best of luck today as you take the stage at the RNC. With so much bad governance staining the Republican name, its good to see a true reformer ready to split open the old power structures and replace them with her own set of demented cronies. You’re not so much a reformer as a former-from-within. You remake political systems in your own image, leveraging their corruption to turn butterflies into slugs. Your amazing tenure up there in Winterfrost Valley seems to indicate that you managed to make absolutely every decision with motives that were either explicitly thieving and venal, or potent and bracing in their moralising.

Originally, we very much wanted to believe you were not the mother of the infant, Trig. (Great name, by the way!) We originally believed that this magical child was no more yours than it was Larry Craig’s. Yet, in a way, we’re happier now that this issue has been resolved. There is… just..one.… more thing, Sarah.

You’re not anti-abortion. You’re addicted to children.

We’re more than a little creeped out by the way you decided to wait three days to tell the world that oh yes, shit, forgot to say that you’re going to be grandmother really soon. Your lovely daughter Bristol, suffering what must be the world’s most wild case of mono, ‘took seven months out of vital high school learning to recuperate from a medieval disease.’  We know things are bad up in Alaska, but we’re pretty sure you have ‘a’ doctor, or access to WebMD when the sun appears to power the light sails above the governor’s manor. While I’m sure seven months of Alaskan high school can probably be covered by catching up on a week’s worth of Passions, your poor daughter probably suffered one of those rare cases of mono, the Levi Johnston stain, where a screaming human thing emerges from the lower body at the culmination of a long period of eating and moodiness.

How about you just admit to us how obscenely medieval your family is? How would that be?

For us here in the real world, its so much more likely that lovely Bristol wants to get rid of the baby. Hammer it out with a rusty forcep, singular. Fling it from the free throw line. We’re guessing that you want to force your daughter and the lovely Mr. Johnston into a marriage. Myspace doesn’t lie, Ms. Palin. Levi said he didn’t want children. Does your Jesus condone forced marriage? I forget which Jesus we’re talking about – is it the Prince of Peace with the “war mode” that demands that every single pregnancy produce a squealing human nugget?

We’re guessing that champ here isn’t thinking long-term about child-rearing.

We’re guessing this hero is thinking about the sweetness of getting into the White House bowling alley and inviting his pink-popped-collar buddies in for a kegger for his 21st.

But none of the scandals, not even the yet-developing religious insanity you believe in, the Jews for Jesus, the anti-flag sermons – none of that really tells us quite how much your brain is a diseased circus. No, your super weird decision to fly from Texas to Alaska to give birth to Trig is really the perfect image of your type, the Medieval American.

You broke water in Texas, which nobody noticed, got on a plane and didn’t seem to be in any form of distress, or in fact, pregnant at all:

“Governor Palin was extremely pleasant to flight attendants and her stage of pregnancy was not apparent by observation as she didn’t show any signs of distress,” an Alaska Airlines spokesperson said.

Hey, maybe you’re superwoman. Maybe you can just shit them out now that the way has been prepared. However, smart money says that you don’t take on a multi-hour flight when labor contractions are coming on without first letting the airline know.  As one right-wing blog commenter said on September 1:

I seriously question the governor’s judgement for making the bizarre decision to fly back to Alaska after her membranes ruptured. She was asking for trouble, but fortunately made the trip safely. I hope she runs the statehouse better than she handles her own pregnancies.

It could well be that the Republicans are better at birth due to their patriotism. Its entirely likely, given that it also gives them the power to ignore things like common sense ethics rules and fundamental supply-side economics. What the fuck were you thinking, you insane… insane..woman? It absolutely, positively had to be in the secluded frozen compound with your own personal rifle-totin’ Jesus nearby. It couldn’t be just anywhere. You’re so addicted to the easy drug of power that you can suppress anything – life itself – to bring something under your domain. It speaks to the controlling puritan madness that has metastasized your personality into a living poison.

Well, at least we know you’re the mother now; only someone stupid enough to name a child ‘Track’ would name another child ‘Trig’, after a Norse rune, no less. We are tempted to think, however, that your rather intelligent-looking family members are probably sick to death of that bullshit, evidenced in at least by none of them being registered Republicans, your husband being a member of a union, and your daughter getting into the more dynamic social activities before the age of Republican consent.

You haven’t given us much. Of all the scandals out there, they merely tell us you’re a Republican. But we’re compelled by how additionally Republican you are – how horrifyingly self-obsessed, controlling, and just shit at your job. These things make you the perfect punctuation to the Bush years. Only in his shadow do such freaky mushrooms bloom. Our only conclusions about you thus far must make us see you lied to the world to avoid the shame of Alaskan teenage sex in your house. Its Alaska, what else is there to do? Hunt moose? C’mon, nobody is that crazy.

 We have our sherry. We’ll be keen to watch your speech tonight, and we’ll be back to check up on your after the next wave of deranged scandals. God willing, by the time we finish writing this sentence, you may even be replaced – but we’ll never let you go now, Mrs. Palin. You’re special to us. You’re the symbolic endpoint of American life. If it can get as bad as you, then the Republic might be lost. May God speed you to the highest office.

-The Ruthless Team

Most pieces written about this diminutive Lestat are swarmed upon by throngs of the shit-witted; every single word dismantled, rearranged, and cannibalized in a tragic parody of debate. It’s as if SkyNet became self-aware then suffered a major stroke. Just as it’s true that you can judge any book by its cover, you can judge a person by the type of monsters who vouch for them. Ron Paul’s libertarians have taken it upon themselves to cast the majority of Government actions as wasteful and have promised themselves a wonderland where people are untaxed, welfare is at a bare minimum if at all, and the King of England stays out of your face. As it follows, every presidential candidate needs a theme song, one that telegraphs a plagiarized set of emotions that seeks to capture the rapturous feelings of the uninformed masses that follow them. For Paul and his supporters, that song would be “Dancing With Myself.”

Ron Paul fandom (and oh yes, it is fandom) is a collection of mental illnesses poorly diagnosed, not unlike Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, depression, or being Jewish. There are no Ron Paul devotees who do not consider themselves libertarians – which poses a problem for this discussion, because not all libertarians are mentally ill. They are merely wrong. Even worse, these modern day Hare Krishna’s could no more explain to you the basic tenets of libertarianism beyond the standard mantra of “gaht damn federal government” than GW Bush could pronounce “encephalitis” correctly on his first try.

The rub is here, and the rub is queer, and we better get used to it: All stripes of weirdo death-cult, wannabe Heavens Gate and Branch Davidian, square-headed Danny Bonaduce-led racist outfits have strapped themselves to the patina of constitutional freedom because they know it’s the only way to avoid having ATF tanks roll over their necks. Under the wizard’s robe, a whole variety of little cockmonglers have thrived: UFO conspiracy handmaidens, survivalists, moon-landing nuts – the type of people who aren’t against big government, but the grown-up world in general.

At the same time, Paul has found a foothold across the political divide with young impressionable folk who have the clarity to see that something is critically wrong with the project of capitalistic democracy, but not the wit to realize that he’s the problem, not the cure. These devotees have a fantasy that Paul is about ending corruption, reorganizing power and doing away with interference. This fantasy is allowed to grow because so many people want these things, at such a high pitch, that they are willing to take any old cunt to get it. Ron Paul is any old cunt and common sense needs to win out.

Mr. Paul, pull up a seat, we need to talk.

The situation is this; the economy is fucked, poor people are three weeks away from resorting to mass cannibalism, your country has taken a giant Sunday morning shit on the dinner service of every country below, oh lets see, all the fucking meridians. Race, no matter how you think it’s played out until now, is going to play a major role in each of these things.

The problem isn’t issue 13 of the 1985 Ron Paul “Hang Dem Niggers High” Gazette – that’s actually fine. That just makes you dangerously thick and irresponsible to the point of clinical lunacy. The problem is not to be found in some obscure quote on which you so often claim to be misrepresented; the real problem is your dull-witted friends. Somewhere over the last year, ‘liberty’ has become a synonym for all sorts of freshman-level dick-sizing about the worst possible ideas for governance the human mind can produce. Worse yet, they’ve taken on the mantel of victim status and paranoia so completely that any slight is met with an orgasmic avalanche of New World Order, Trilateral Commission, second gunman on the grassy knoll finger pointing.

This brings us to his patois with the media. He is ‘pushed out of debates’ and ‘not taken seriously’ by a colluding fourth estate apparatus, according to the RLOVELUTION. In reality, Ron Paul is ignored by the media because he doesn’t offer them a product they can sell. What does Paul offer the media, a sub par professional wrestler once known as Isaac Yankem and a bit of bitching about Roe vs. Wade?

By making his exclusion part of his grand narrative of government control, his presence poisons the debate. Ron, you were excluded because you offer nothing. Now you sell yourself to college kids on the back that they were witness to your exclusion, to something dodgy happening. If they could film it with their cellphones and upload it to Youtube, they would.

So it’s that at every step he has shrouded a discussion of the real issue underneath the arcane conspiratorial rubric he specializes in to hide the fact that when push comes to shove, he’s just another conservative. He’s like George Costanza blaming his impotency on the fact that Elaine faked her orgasms with Jerry.

So, just to review, let’s see how the Shroud of Paul works:

Life Under the Ron Paul RLOVEUTION
————————————————–

Paul Policy: Pulls troops out of Korea, Japan and Europe, pulls US out of NATO, UN, WTO, NAFTA.
What People See: America is great.
Reality: China is great.

Paul Policy: Pulls out of International Criminal Court completely.
What People See: Don’t let my son be tried for war crimes.
Reality: War crimes.

Paul Policy: Pulling out of Iraq completely and immediately.
What People See: Less Iraq, More Britney!
Reality: Good idea, but war crimes and a destroyed Iraq ripe for the mullahs.

Paul Policy: Let Iran have the bomb.
What People See: No interference in international affairs.
Reality: Iran does the Kid-n-Play dance.

Paul Policy: Sending nothing but a ‘moral statement’ to Darfur instead of money and troops.
What People See: More money for Bush bonuses.
Reality: Darfur officially renamed ‘The Badlands’.

Paul Policy: End to Free Trade Agreements.
What People See: They’re taking our jobs!
Reality: They are taking your jobs anyway.

Paul Policy: Tighter border security.
What People See: A way to be racist without, ya know, being racist.
Reality: A shitty benefit concert with Gloria Estefan.

Paul Policy: Lower taxes / small government.
What People See: Little House on the Prairie.
Reality: Salute of the Jugger.

Paul Policy: No Department of Education.
What People See: A way to stop liberals from killing Christ in schools.
Reality: Salute of the Jugger, Blu-Ray Collector’s Edition.

Paul Policy: No Federal Emergency Management of any kind.
What People See: Freedom to drive around on quad-bikes.
Reality: To r.paul@ronpaul.org, attachment: Katrina.jpg

Paul Policy: Return to the gold standard.
What People See: Confused by the word ‘gold’, believe it to be good.
Reality: Switzerland begins minting dubloons again.

Paul Policy: Freedom of religion (but not to be free from religion)
What People See: Christ is coming.
Reality: Cheap real estate in Utah.

Paul Policy: Bearing arms largely unregulated.
What People See: Red Dawn trailer.
Reality: Red Dawn.

Paul Policy: ‘Unshakable foe of abortion’; would let states decide (read: wants it banned but doesn’t have the balls)
What People See: Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
Reality: “the falcon cannot hear the falconer”, etc.

Paul Policy: Unworkable Constitution returned to its Articles of Confederation heyday.
What People See: A chance to start over?
Reality: Instead of large-scale corruption, all-encompassing corruption.