December 2010 Recap

Happy new year! Although we started this blog back in August of 2009, I've only been doing these monthly recaps for a year, so I'll end this one with a big long-term look back at the year and how well I've been doing when it comes to cleaning out that backlog. But first, let's look back at the interesting month of December.

There was a post made right off the bat by the long silent Keith. Then there was nothing for eight full days. Then there were seventeen more posts before Christmas, four additional posts before New Year's Eve, and a furious and mostly-drunken barrage of six more posts on the final day of the month and the year. We were streaky, to say the least, but that seems to always be the case. The 28 total was better than November's, but still rather low by historic measures.

I beat two games, watched eleven movies or TV shows, and read one book, giving me 14 loggings on the month, my highest total since becoming a full-time working man in July. But when it came to the specific goals I set, I did a pretty piss-poor job. Specifically, I said I could do away with a season of Sons of Anarchy, a season of The Wire, the book Ben-Hur, and the games Rock Band 3, Ico, and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. Of those, only Sons and Rock Band 3 were finished. Oops. And let's not forget that my ultimate goal is to finish off everything I own. December was horrible in that respect, as thanks to Christmas and a bunch of post-Christmas sales, I was a dreadful -46 on the month. Wow! Months and months of logging progress undone in a few days!

Speaking of long term goals, where am I at overall? I've got 34 movies, 29 seasons of television, 37 books, and 71 video games to beat. That means over the course of 2010 I made a net progress of four video games, 18 books, and -30 DVDs (and Blu-Rays). Minus eight overall. Terrible. But there's good news, and the good news is that I'm certainly actively watching, reading, and playing. I logged 56 games this year, and at that pace I could be done logging games by 2012 if only I'd stop buying them. I logged 99 movies and TV seasons, which means I could easily have those done by the end of this year. And I read 57 books, which makes that category another theoretically easy one. The moral here is that I'm not not logging, I'm just replenishing my backlog too frequently. Still, shame on me for having negative progress in 2010. That just ain't what Back-Blogged is all about.

Anyway, let's shoot for 500 posts in 2011! I know we can do it.

Avatar

Blue people!

I liked it. Screw y'all

Sex and the City 2

Eff picturez!

This movie sucked. Sarah Jessica Parker got her mole removed. What up with that?

They go to the middle east. Spend extravagantly. Have sex on the beach. Get arrested. Kiss former lovers. Get in trouble with the law. Lose all their money. And go home. Seriously. They have butlers. And they make fun of the middle east dress. What up with that. But then the middle eastern dressed women save them!

Hoorah!

Awful movie!

Breaking Bad 2

!

So I forgot to post. Then I got dragged around on the floor. Hurumph. What a new year.

Steve says I haven't watched Back to the Future 3. Fuck that!

Anywho, GREAT SHOW!!!!!!!!!

Seriously great. Pink teddy bear freaked me out. What the hell happened with it? You'll find out. When the season ends! It's a cliffhanger. Fo' realz.

I highly recommend this show. It's a doozy.

Call of Duty: Black Ops

Thirty-nine minutes to midnight and counting...

Last post of the year and here's what I have to say. It's great. In complete contrast to what I had to say about Halo: Reach, this game strives where the other fails. Excellent gameplay. Exciting story. This game does one thing and does it well: throws you right in the middle of action movie. I'm not going to say it's anything original. That it is not just trying to capitalize on the same perks as the previous games - action and violence. It just pumps up the volume every time without changing it's attitude, claiming to be more than it is. I believe Halo could have been successful if it wasn't for that melodramatic, self-indulgent storyline that bored the shit out of me resulting in a loss of attention and a complete...

Stan! Let go of Marissa that looks like it hur... Not the "BOSTON CRAB"!!!

Wait, ok. Back to the game. C.O.D.B.P. (ha, just made it up - MY INVENTION!) just allows you to loose yourself in a testosterone-fulled, adrenaline-laced thrill ride. You spend 9 hours blowing Commi's up, what's not to love? It's just...

STAN! Put your damn pants on! Dear christ...

That's it I can't say anymore. I'll just leave you all to ponder this:

Or this...

Awesome.

Easy A

Being one of the few things she asked for for Christmas, I bought this movie so that Jill could watch it. She had hyped this movie up so thoroughly that I was forced to experience it with her due to curiosity. Also I am a sucker for bad teenage dramas.

This movie is yet another in a growing series of epic masterpieces to be remade into a modern teeny bopper movie. This movie joins the likes of Ten things I hate about you (the taming of the shrew), shes the man (twelfth night), out cold (Casablanca), yet this time the tale is based upon the Scarlet Letter. The main character in this story is relegated to Hester Prynne except in this case the harlot's reputation is based entirely upon her own lies. Emma Stone pretends to sleep with a, constantly abused and bullied, gay classmate so that he can pretend to be straight until he can manage to escape their small town. When the ruse works for him she is asked by one guy after another to do the same thing so that their reputations can be altered. This series of lies and deceptions snowballs until the inevitable collapse and the protagonists eventual "Why did this all happen" moment.

I know its a teeny bopper movie and they are by definition trite repeats of the same boring story line, but I wasn't surprised at a single moment in this movie. If it weren't for Amanda Bynes role as a Christian super freak who hounds the main character for the entire movie this film would have no redeeming qualities. Am I sad that I watched it? No. Will I probably watch it again. Most likely. Will I continue to use redundant questions in my posts? That is yet to be seen.

Cat's Cradle

Nine months ago I read my first Vonnegut novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, which most people consider to be his magnum opus. I asked for and received a number of Vonnegut's other novels this Christmas, and today I have finished one of his other most famous works in Cat's Cradle. I'll be honest; for the majority of the book, I was pretty nonplussed. There was wit and humor interspersed throughout the first 200 pages or so, but I was growing more and more frustrated every few chapters by the lack of a coherent or cohesive plot. I had a hunch about where everything was ultimately headed (and I was right), but Vonnegut really teased the finale by alluding and foreshadowing several times throughout the otherwise seemingly pointless narrative. Now, when the climax of the book did happen, predictable or not, the whole thing really came into its own and managed to make what I assume will be a lasting impact on me. So even though I saw a certain climactic event coming long before it did, I'm very pleased with Vonnegut's execution of said event. I guess I just wish there was a bit more to take away from the first 90% of the story. Fortunately, because it ended on such a high note, I still enjoyed Cat's Cradle a great deal and will be able to nod approvingly if anyone ever brings it up in conversation from here on out. And it's not as if the book was a total bore until then, either. Perhaps I just had unjustly high expectations thanks to Slaughterhouse-Five, which read like a masterpiece from beginning to end. I've got plenty more Vonnegut to read, and I still expect to enjoy all of it. But so far I'd definitely say that it seems like Slaughterhouse-Five was to Vonnegut what Catch-22 was to Heller. But yeah, still, Cat's Cradle was a pretty good book.

Party Down: Season 2

Do you know how many viewers the second season of Party Down averaged? Something like 120,000. Even for a third-tier premium cable channel like Starz, that's an absurdly small amount. That's a 0.0 in the Nielsen ratings. Quite literally, no show could possibly do worse. The season finale drew 74,000 viewers. You could have taken every single person who tuned into the finale and put them in Cowboys Stadium and still had an additional 6,000 empty seats. So this show's inevitable cancelation was hardly surprising. But it was still a shame, because Party Down is (or was, I guess) pretty damn funny. I didn't love it quite as much as many critics did; this cancellation isn't the travesty that Arrested Development's was, largely because this show isn't Arrested Development. I'd rank it somewhere just outside of the top five comedies I saw in 2010. I'm sure I gave a synopsis back when I watched Season 1 last summer, so I won't go into a lengthy explanation about it. Just know that this season was a little bit better than the first one and that Jane Lynch has been replaced by Megan Mullally, and that character exchange was neither an improvement nor a disappointment. And there you have it.

We ♥ Katamari

Nine or ten months ago I beat Katamari Damacy and enjoyed the brief and silly game a lot. Roll shit into balls, rinse, and repeat. Apparently I wasn't the only one who enjoyed it because the tongue-in-cheek plot of this sequel revolves around the whole world loving Katamari Damacy and demanding to be able to roll more shit into balls. The King (who serves as a narrator of sorts) breaks the fourth wall even further at some points and directly asks the player, "Seriously, what's so fun about this? You're just rolling things into balls over and over again." Clearly, the team behind the Katamari games was shocked that people actually liked them as much as they did. I've got one more Katamari game backlogged and my girlfriend has another, so this is far from the last time we'll see these games in the Back-Blogged archives. But this game is finished, for I have rolled up even the sun. And doing so prompted the ending credits. Awesome. Where does the series go from here? I'll find out eventually. But not yet. Not yet.

Raging Bull

Boxing Day continues! This Scorsese flick is often regarded as one of the greatest films of all time. It was a biopic about Jake LaMotta, a middleweight champion with an interesting and somewhat violent personality outside the ring. DeNiro was wonderful here as LaMotta and I'm not sure if I've ever seen a better performance from the Oscar-winning actor. In terms of content and story, this movie really wasn't all that special or unique. A young and feisty boxer rises through the ranks while battling demons at home, wins some big fights in the ring, loses some big ones at home (marital woes, estranged siblings, etc.), and ultimately ends up a broken and battered old man with plenty of regrets. But there was definitely something special about the overall production here. The performances, the score, the ebb and flow of the film itself. I'd definitely stop short of calling it one of the greatest movies of all time, but at least I can see the case for such praise. I'm finally all done with the boxing movies in my backlog after seeing this one, Million Dollar Baby, and five of the six Rocky movies in the past four months or so, but who knows how many more I'll add before all is said and done? The Fighter is supposed to be pretty damn good and FX even has a boxing TV series coming up soon. But this'll be the last boxing movie for Boxing Day, 2010. Now I'm off to my girlfriend's house where I will have to continue this annual celebration of boxing by getting into a fist fight with her dog, a boxer.