Welcome to the weird portion of the year... and also to the fourth week of the Hero Forge Advent Calendar.
I also made a definite decision to lean into red this week. But it tells you something that normally I would add an extra head in order to display both the hair and the helmet in their full glory. But I hated the top of that hair so much that I was perfectly fine covering it up.
This also makes the second sword for the month, the second polearm, the second helmet, the second set of sandals and the fourth set of shoes overall. And not a single pair of pants. That is something they just never do. Not once since 2021. And thus far we've had just one jacket this year.
What I will say is that the decision to make the Christmas Day's item(s) socks was both very meta and one of the items from this year that I will absolutely use repeatedly. I mean I've already added them to about half a dozen minis when I was messing around yesterday. They're just a little detail layer piece, especially given the number of variations of both length and style, that will finish off a number of minis nicely.
Just one week left.
Anyway...
I decided on quiche for the start of this week, knowing that I only needed to fill in the first three days of the week.
This week's Mini Media Review is all movies, all the time.
I started with The Nutcracker and the Four Realms... because Christmas. Keira Knightley is doing The Most, and I was here for it, but generally speaking it was all a bit of a limp squib. They tried to turn Nutcracker into... I dunno... a Narnia movie? Honestly, they just tried to be too clever, and the whole thing just doesn't really work.
Next up... Tenet. I kind of knew what to expect, I mean at least the whole "backwards and forward in time" thing. And I'm not sure how early you're supposed to work out the main thrust of what is going on, but I feel like I worked it out fairly early on. Or noticed things early on that clicked in once those things showed up again. But I really liked it. I like it much better than, say, Inception.
It was also fascinating to me that the majority of the cast are the people that would have been the leads in any other Nolan movie...Robert Pattinson, Kenneth Branagh and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, but John David Washington does a fantastic job in the lead.
Next up... The Witches, 2020 edition. And much like Nutcracker, Anne Hathaway is doing The Most. But transporting it from the UK to the US and moving the timeline back from "present day" to the 1960's introduces a collection of issues that the movie doesn't bother wanting to address. And while I think this sticks a little closer to the book in certain ways (especially the ending), the whole thing, again, just falls flat. It definitely doesn't hold a candle to the 1990 version.
Next up... Queer, starring Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey in a story by William S Burroughs and directed by the director of Call Me By Your Name, Luca Guadagnino. And so, knowing that it was by Burroughs, it didn't really come as a surprise to me when the third act kind of descended into drug fueled insanity after two acts of incredibly 50's era queer content.
It's also just this side of too awkward for me. Because you're never really certain of Starkey's character, Eugene Allerton, and his motivations towards Craig's William Lee (the Burroughs stand-in). But Starkey is amazing throughout. And just stunningly gorgeous.
The other thing that I loved was the visual style where most of it is filmed on giant sets and a lot of the establishing shots are clearly models. Beautifully made models, but intentionally so. Which make the whole thing feel like a 1950's movie.
I'm not sure the ending really worked for me, but the movie is beautiful throughout, much like Call Me before it. But very strange.
Lastly, Christmas Eve was Red One. Which, despite it's flaws, I really enjoyed. It was the perfect Christmas Eve movie, but at the same time was trying to do entirely too much and not quite sticking the landing at any of it.
However, Chris Morgan and Hiram Garcia as the writers, and Jake Kasdan as the director really tried. Morgan and Garcia absolutely wrote this with the Wikipedia page on Christmas Mythological Figures open too one side, so they definitely thought about it. The issue is that there are a few too many threads that don't really go where they need to go.
But Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson and Chris Evans do a great job, Evans playing his general type. And the make up and costume people earned their paychecks, absolutely.
Some highs, some lows, but they kept me mostly entertained.
This week was also the week of Christmas goodies... Monday was Christmas Crack ala B Dylan Hollis. And then Tuesday I made two trays of my Rocky Road.
We already covered Thursday...
Friday, all of the standing up the day before really caught up with me. And the general flatness descended.
But Friday Night DnD was good. We did the present thing, had a table full of Christmas goodies, fought a magical drilling machine and found a bunch of magic items. So not a bad session overall.
Anyway...
Today was good. Simple, but good. The usual supermarket stuff. And then I wanted to swing by the Burnside Library again to drop the things I'd watched off and grab a couple of other things to watch this week. And Ma ended up getting more stuff than me.
I did also make a note of a few other things to grab later, so a trip well spent.
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