Ryan's Junk Drawer is EARLY!

Dear junk junkies,

I was confronted with two awful choices this week. (1) Forgo my junk drawer column altogether (stop your weeping sweet, sweet simpleton, you can see that I chose otherwise) or (2) bump it up a day and risk damaging my OCD and rigid commitment to keep things on a precise schedule (so, you're saying that everybody else doesn't schedule when to go to the bathroom for their doozies of a twosies). For you, who are titilated by tidbits. For you, who are satisfied by speculation. For you, who somehow find this whole schtick funny. I will once more pull out my junk...out of the metaphorical movie news drawer. As is tradition, today's item from the creepy image from "Highlights" magazine above is the glowing bright white light in the middle. It is now painfully obvious that whoever this man is, he has caged an angel and kept it in his kitchen drawer.

Now, on to the Thanksgiving week news-that-is-to-small-to-be-big-news. My drawer is (ahem) STUFFED to the gills today.

1.) Brilliance, Muppet parody be thy name - By now you all know about my Muppet lust. I find them genius, and I find that genius to be impossible to explain. Thankfully, instead of articulating why they fill my heart with more joy than a kid with a pony, I can just show you so you can feel it yourself. This circulated across the interwebs yesterday and is nothing if not true art distilled into tiny pieces of felt and rubber covering the hands of men and women making funny voices. If this doesn't make you smile, you should be arrested for being a doo-doo head (and the sentence is watching this video until you DO smile).



2.) One of the scariest movies ever just got scarier - I was on the fence over whether I wanted to read "Under the Dome," which (A) sounds like the Juggernaut's autobiography (props to all comic nerds who just giggled) and (B) sounds like a rehash of The Simpson's movie and "The Stand." Then Devin from Chud starting tweeting about how fun it was (despite being like "The Stand"), so now I'm on the fence. What I'm not on the fence about, is King's suggestion for an upcoming book...which I heard about from Slashfilm who heard it from Torontoist. Steven King is thinking about making a sequel to "The Shining" called "Doctor Sleep." Now, this was said at some sort of mass gathering, so if he actually was literally speaking from his butt, we'll have Youtube proof soon enough. But it doesn't sound like it. King explained a fair amount of detail (Danny is all grown up and now helps people who are about to pass on to the other side with his voodoo powers) and expressed a rather strong desire to do it. I think Peter from Slashfilm got it about right. Why use the character of Danny for that (shit) idea? If you want to make a new book about your characters, I'm cool with that. Totally your call. But do not sell the movie rights, because just like Peter joked, we'll end up with Brett Rattner on The Shining 2. You know it. God, even worse, it would be someone like Eli Roth because he's a horror "maestro" and knows Quentin Tarantino, who has juice in that town baby. This post is too long.

3.) In lieu of a whole "Things You Should Buy Me" column... - It would be wrong of me not to mention that Amazon.com in particular (but many places in general) are doing some amazing sales online right now. Most notably, Blu-Ray players are going for dirt cheap...including this one from LG (a good brand), which is the deal of the day at less than $100 bones (okay, so it's 99, but that's less than 100).

Okay, fine, here's two more things to get me (which would have appeared in "Things You Should Buy Me"). First, everybody knows that lasagna is (with no apologies to Sean Hannity) the greatest, best thing God ever gave man on the face of the earth. And the best part of the lasagna? If you didn't say the edges (where the noodles actually do their best to stay together) you don't know squat. So, here's a pan from Thinkgeek.com (how great are they, they even cook) that keeps your stuff together, yo.

That's straight-up, mad genius, yo. Also, you should keep your eye on Tee-Fury, who make a T-shirt available for one day only and then it's gone forever. How great is that? No legion of D-Bags walking around with your sweet, sweet T-shirt. I missed this one:

But I will keep vigilant on this site...which is also hilariously written. Check it out. Wow, I just did a column within a column...I'm so meta.

4.) A spiritual sequel to the 90s-era slacker movies? YESPLEASE - I loved Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming so very, very much that it would likely make the mythical "list of 10" that everyone wants me to make one day. Greenberg feels like a spiritual sequel to that, and a kind of bookend to the slacker films of the 90s that pretty much defined my whole generation. That's pretty impressive. More impressive still? It features what appears to be a reserved Ben Stiller performance with no monkeys or nut shots. Huzzah!



5.) Judge away, I think this looks fun - John Lasseter of Pixar fame produced this straight-to-TV CGI Christmas show, which looks to be the first one in years that will make me smile. Remember how great those Christmas shows were from our youth (from Rudolph to Charlie Brown)? Of course you do BECAUSE THEY STILL SHOW THEM BECAUSE THEY HAVEN'T MADE ANYTHING GOOD LIKE THEM IN 20 YEARS. Here's the first one that has a chance. I will love it. Judge away.



Whew, told you it was epic today. Just a quick thanks (since I'm supposed to do such things on weeks like this one). I love doing this so very much. Even when outside forces make it difficult to just enjoy the community that develops around writing about entertainment like this, it's nice to have you silent readers out there. Thanks.