My Massive Blockbuster Haul (Part Deux)

Considering that the Blockbuster down the road from me is still open for a few weeks and seeing that the movies were dropped down by another couple bucks to $5.99, I decided to pick up a few more last night.  Despite the fact that their inventory is shrinking, they still have a lot to choose from but this time my haul isn't as massive as it was before.  Maybe I showed a bit more restraint but I think either next week or the week after, hopefully they'll be even cheaper and I'll just go nuts on the leftovers.  But this is what I got last night, along with a few thoughts of what I've been watching.

My Massive Blockbuster Haul

As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, the Blockbuster Video down the road from my apartment is closing down, so they're selling off their inventory.  Last week, ended up not buying any movies due to buying an Inglourious Basterds wall print instead but this week I more than made up for it when I went back yesterday (especially since the Fight Club painting I wanted was gone).  So, what did I end up getting?

Movie-Mania! (Including Yet Another Horror Movie Marathon!)

I've been watching my fair share of movies lately.  Seriously, between movies and watching videos online (The Spoony Experiment and The Cinema Snob being my current fixations), I've put off finishing the video games I've been playing as I've given up on New Super Mario Bros. Wii for the time being (damn ice world) and haven't even touched Yakuza 2 on the PS2 for about a month now.  Anyways, to help get 2010 off to a good start, I spent New Year's Day trying to stay awake by going to Best Buy and spending whatever else I had left on my gift cards on movies.  I ended up walking out with Inglourious Basterds (the 2-disc edition), Sukiyaki Western Django, Let The Right One In and Martyrs.  Of course, you should know by now how much I loved Basterds seeing as I ranked it the best movie of 2009 and, even though I finally got around to watching it again last weekend, my high opinion of it hasn't changed.  Sukiyaki Western Django was a movie I've been wanting to see for the past couple years now, especially considering its a Takashi Miike film and I'll watch pretty much everything he makes.  Basically, it's a Japanese twist on a Western, which has the actors speaking in slightly-broken English throughout the movie (the only non-Japanese member of the cast being Quentin Tarantino himself), so it's pretty off-kilter meaning it's a typical Miike film.  But what I was most impressed with is the fact that it's basically a remake of Django, which in turn was a "ripoff" (for lack of a better word) of A Fistful of Dollars, which in turn was a remake of Yojimbo.  So, in a way Sukiyaki Western Django kinda took all those films and combined them, yet made the whole thing go full circle.  Oddly enough, I was really wanting to seek out those movies after watching Sukiyaki, which is quite a feat because I don't consider myself a fan of Westerns at all.

Anyway, I'm not here to talk about Inglourious Basterds or Sukiyaki Western Django but the other two films I bought, Let The Right One In and Martyrs, which ended up becoming a little sequel to my Christmas Day Horror Movie Marathon as I played the two back-to-back in a doubleheader a few weeks back.

I Totally Wish I Had Photoshop Skillz (Part Three)

Inspired by my previous entry (The 2009 WTF? Awards), I have seen a vision of what the future may hold for the world...especially if Heidi Montag continues to be addicted to plastic surgery and runs out of body parts to augment:

The 2009 WTF? Awards

Yeah, I realize that we're now about halfway through January 2010 and the time for nostalgia over the past year and/or decade has already passed us by.  But I don't care, I'm cranking out a few more worthless awards anyway.  My tastes tend to stray outside of the mainstream but that affords me the luxury to objectively look at what the general public thinks is fun and entertaining and question (sometimes quite loudly) "WTF?!?" 

2010: The Year I Make Contact...With Your Face!

I just want to take this opportunity to thank anyone that has read this blog thus far.  That's right, all four of you.  I know I've only been doing this about a month or so but I like to believe that big things are coming, if I may be a bit presumptuous.  Of course, I'll need a bit of your help if those big things are going to happen.  It's like they say (who they are, I'll never know): "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"  In a word: Ummm...yeah.  But to extrapolate that a bit, if I write a blog and no one is around to read it, does it really matter?  Not really. 

I Totally Wish I Had Photoshop Skillz (Part Two)

The saga continues!

WWE vs TNA: The Monday Night Wars Redux? (Part 2)

It took me a few days but I finally was able to watch this Monday's edition of Raw.  I tried to do the recap in the same format that I did Impact's as a more reactionary-type thing instead of a play-by-play.  But forgive me if it feels a bit anti-climactic considering I had already read the results and knew what happened before I saw the whole thing.

WWE vs TNA: The Monday Night Wars Redux? (Part 1)

Anyone that knows me well knows that I'm a huge fan of professional wrestling and have been since the day I was born.  But truth be told, I haven't watched wrestling with any regularity in some time.  You see, in my teenage years, the wrestling business had reached a high not seen since the days of Hulkamania in the '80s due to the Monday Night Wars.  WCW went head-to-head with the WWF every Monday (at least when the WWF wasn't pre-empted with stuff like the US Open) and for a good couple years, wrestling fans were in heaven.  On the WCW side, you had the nWo taking over but also some great matches including guys like Chris Jericho and Eddie Guerrero who would go on to become huge.  On the WWF side, there was Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock, D-Generation X and the newfound "Attitude".  After a few years, WCW fell due to bad business decisions and ended up being bought out by Vince McMahon and absorbed into the WWF, which would later become the WWE that we know of today.  But soon enough, wrestling got boring to me with the WWE being the only show on the air and I stopped watching.  Other than a few years ago when ECW (another competing brand that was bought out by McMahon) was making a comeback, I haven't watched any shows regularly.  Now, I'll turn it on every once in a while if I'm with friends and we need something to laugh at but I can't really watch it on my own.  In that time, a new company dubbed TNA Wrestling had risen through the ranks but despite grabbing plenty of top stars in the wrestling business, they've failed to gain a foothold to go toe-to-toe with the McMahon empire.  But with the recent decision to not only hire Hulk Hogan to help run the company but to run a show head-to-head with the WWE's flagship show Monday Night Raw, I couldn't not watch.  Of course, the WWE wasn't going to be outdone as they had brought in Bret Hart, a wrestler who hasn't been in a WWE ring in 12 years and who many thought they would never see him appear in one ever again.  Yeah, maybe I'm a bit more cynical now than I was then but I can't deny that history is being made, whether TNA shows that they're a contender or falls by the wayside when it's all said and done.  So, I decided to do a bit of a recap.  Due to the fact that TNA was running a 3-hour show, starting an hour earlier than Raw, and that the USA Network comes in a bit fuzzy for me, I decided to watch TNA Impact first and I'll watch Raw online at a later date, probably tomorrow.  Forgive me if this review seems a bit scatterbrained as I typed it up while watching.  I'm pretty much copy-and-pasting this a half-hour after the show had ended so I'm not going to edit it.  If you're unsure as to what something or who someone is, let me know in the comments and I'll clarify.  This one's for my fellow wrestling fans and I hope they're not disappointed.

Ryan's Top Music of 2009 Part 3: #5-1

So here we are.  It's been a long road, cowboy...wait a minute, no it hasn't!  Without further ado, here's my Top 5 Favorite Albums of 2009.  Enjoy...or don't.  Your call.  (PS - This newish format with the pics happened totally by accident, but I liked it so I'm keeping it.)

Ryan's Top Music of 2009 Part 2: #10-6

So here we are with the actual Top 10 countdown for my favorite albums of the year.  Just in case you forgot, my criteria for this list includes all the albums that I bought and own.  And forgive me if it sounds like I'm trashing some of them at times as, honestly, I only bought about 12 or 13 CDs this year so this list is really more like "Stuff I Bought This Year" instead of "The Best Music of 2009".  But it's not like I go out and buy crap on purpose.  No, that's what I do for movies.  And some of them aren't even music albums!  Anyway, here we go with the first half of the countdown: