Kobe Bryant is el basketball persono 2009

Nobody is going to freak out aboot it because it’s not LeBron, but now Kobe says he’d go to Italy for $40-50M a year.

He’s also much less vague with the reasoning/intentions, essentially saying one would have to be nuts to turn down the money.

An always wise voice by the name of Mark Cuban has chimed in, and he thinks this is great for business. He doesn’t exactly explain why – he’s just suggesting it’s an inevitable situation, and should be analyzed and eventually embraced as an opportunity to make positive changes to the business model.

That’s much more reasonable than the, “BASKETBALL IN CLEVELAND IS DEAD FOREVER OMG,” reaction.

The world’s changing, and it’s a good thing.

Frankly, if the airline industry would go ahead and join the 21st century, none of this would be an issue:

1) Invent plane that isn’t same plane from 1975.
2) Said plane flys into lower atmosphere.
3) Earth turns beneath plane.
4) Land in Europe an hour later.

Here’s the next problem – someone finally called us out on our ranking of Rocky Balboa so low on the movie list(s), which means we need to explain that (not a problem) and also rank the rest of the Rocky movies (problem).

Here’s our Rocky Balboa review – it was terrible; nothing but a trip down memory lane for Stallone and the audience. Now, we could probably deal with that, except that the fight was by far the worst of the entire series.

We have no idea what they were thinking doing it as if it were the HBO broadcast itself. Very jarring and poorly done, as well. All the internal monologues by Rocky during it – it was just a mess.

The biggest problem, though? The champ guy breaks his hand, and Rocky wants to use it as an advantage. Stupid. The Rocky we know and love beats insurmountable odds in ridiculous fashion, he doesn’t take advantage of broken hand guy, and ask the audience to be excited about it.

This segues nicely into the other films, because we’ve always, always flopped around on which is our favorite. We’re also, to our knowledge, the only person on the entire planet who actively LIKES Rocky V. Not tolerates it. No – we LIKE it.

When we saw Rocky Balboa in the theater it cemented something about Rocky for us – we like “superhero Rocky” (which is the guy in III, IV, and V) more than “regular joe Rocky” (I, II, and Balboa).

Not that we don’t love Rocky and Rocky II – we absolutely do, and they’re better films than the later ones. But III, IV, and V are way more fun and far more re-watchable, especially IV, which is really just a series of montages, plus a couple scenes with the robot.

If you read that all over again, you’ll note that we weren’t even capable of making any sort of definitive point aboot which ones we like better and why, which is the reason we haven’t ranked them…until today.

Here are today’s additions:

Dazed and Confused, Armageddon, Reindeer Games, Bounce, Changing Lanes, Daredevil, Paycheck, Hollywoodland, The Rock, The Island, Sling Blade, The Apostle, Primary Colors, A Simple Plan, Bandits, Monster’s Ball, Bad Santa, Friday Night Lights, 10 Things I Hate About You, The Patriot, A Knight’s Tale, Brokeback Mountain, Rocky, Rocky II, Rocky III, Rocky IV, Rocky V

Funniest one on there is The Island. We rented that movie three separate times when it came out on DVD, and probably tried to watch it 6 times. We fell asleep every single time, no matter what time of day or how we sat. Very odd – what we saw wasn’t even that bad – that movie just didn’t want us to watch it.