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Friday, January 1. 2021

2020 Year in Review



Posted by Bill at 00:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Thursday, December 31. 2020

Anything Happens in that Five Minutes, I'm Yours No Matter What

Squeezing in one last model under the wire for 2020, not much to say beyond I'm glad it's done - both the year and the Drive Chevelle!

Posted by Bill at 23:37 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Thursday, December 24. 2020

Happy Christmas to All, and to All a Good 'Nite!

A few years back, I wrote a piece on knockoffs. Since then my feelings haven't changed but the market has - on any given day, you could acquire any of a hundred different recasts of 1/24 scale figures. There's certainly an appeal in getting cheap figures, given where I am on the skill curve, but I still can't in good conscience go that route. So imagine how happy I was to find Fortnite stampers at the local CVS pharmacy: plenty of chances to try all sorts of different skin, clothing, and makeup effects with little cost and it's all above-board.

Posted by Bill at 19:28 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Saturday, December 12. 2020

I'm Sorry, Dave, I'm Afraid I Can't Do That

I've mentioned elsewhere that I have a history in traditional visual art, and still keep a ear to the ground in that world. So I was familiar with the development of Vantablack, its exclusive artistic licensing by Anish Kapoor, and the wonderfully spiteful response by Stuart Semple with Black 2.0 and Black 3.0. As someone who fully supported this response and wanted to support the artist, I tried to figure out how best to use such a paint. My first idea was Hotblack Desiato's "funeral ship" from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, but there are a bunch of other HHGttG ships that I wanted to get to first. But the space theme stuck, and I remembered another project I've been meaning to get to for some time...the Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Posted by Bill at 16:35 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Saturday, November 14. 2020

I Was a Dead, Alabaster Badass

This summer of bingewatching has led me to pick up some recent shows that were somewhere in the Netflix queue. One of those was iZombie, a fun show that manages to combine comedy and drama without getting too silly or dour. While there's not a lot of car action, there is the regular appearance of Det. Babineaux's Charger Pursuit and Motormax's diecast was a nice easy way to add it to my TV/movie collection.

Posted by Bill at 23:20 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Sunday, November 8. 2020

Crank up Eloise!

I've been wanting to try out an ICM kit for a while now, after having seen some other builders' work on them and the general glowing reviews. Serendipity popped their Renault AG1 onto my radar, and I'm happy to find that the stories of their quality were not exaggerated.

Posted by Bill at 17:49 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Tuesday, November 3. 2020

This is the World We Live In...and These are the Hands We're Given

Ah, 2020. The year of Covid-19, murder hornets, a U.S. presidential election, Brexit, worldwide civil unrest, record breaking wildfires, record-breaking hurricanes, dust storms...and a personal theme of building models based on remakes and adaptations. "Cover songs" certainly fit that idea, and few works seemed more appropriate for 2020 than the cover of "Land of Confusion" by Disturbed.

Posted by Bill at 14:40 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Saturday, October 24. 2020

Come Find Me when You Wake Up

There have been several articles discussing the merits of Srt Rita Vrataski as a character. But few mention one of the subtler and (in my opinion) more telling bits of storytelling: her nicknames.

The more common one is "The Angel of Verdun," used for the various PR pushes throughout the movie as well as real-world articles discussing the character. The other is "Full Metal Bitch," used by fellow soldiers in the film and seldom acknowledged anywhere else thanks to the expletive. But that's the one I prefer to use.

See, the PR push isn't her - that's the dancing monkey stuff that disheartened Captain America in The First Avenger. She's a soldier, and a good one. She's smart, tough, and someone who the rest of the armed forces look up to. They get to give her a nickname, not the self-centered marketing department that had to fall ass-backwards into honor.

Posted by Bill at 23:08 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Sunday, October 18. 2020

Behind the Headlights: Stinger Missiles

Much as I enjoyed Goldeneye, I have to agree with the people that felt the Z3 was wasted. When we all went to see it on its release, we brought along a friend who had never seen a Bond movie before...and even he vocalized disappointment at having a car sold so strongly being used so little. Fortunately, the franchise more than made up for this slight with the chase sequence from Tomorrow Never Dies.

Posted by Bill at 23:02 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Sunday, October 11. 2020

Together, Session...GO!

A couple years ago, a discussion of weathering a military Jeep on the Model Cars Magazine forum included the throwaway comment "who ever heard of a clean Jeep?" The response, recognizing the humor but also noting reality, was "By God, the United States Army." I've tried to keep that in mind whenever I work on a military vehicle: if it's no longer an official vehicle, all bets are off...but if it's still in active service, it better be clean. Maybe some road dust, or a bit of wear and tear if it has seen a lot of use, but still generally clean. I applied that philosophy to Gourai and her WeGo: neither her armor nor the mech's chassis are pristine by any stretch, but both are limited to "scars received in the line of duty."

Posted by Bill at 18:29 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Saturday, September 26. 2020

Good Luck with Your Future Ride, Space Man!

I've picked up a couple of Testors' "Lincoln Mint" diecast kits, but the Sex Drive GTO is the first time I've actually completed one. Assuming it was a fair example of them, they're...OK. Not bad enough that I want to sell off the others I have, but not good enough for me to seek out more. It makes a pretty decent display item, at least.

Posted by Bill at 23:02 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Saturday, September 19. 2020

TERRA FIRMA, The Woman from PLANET EARTH

After making my Zone Rider, I wanted to give myself a little push and see if I could do more with a figure than paint and part omission. The result was Terra Firma, and while there's still a lot of room for improvement I think I finally understand the challenge of figure painting.

Posted by Bill at 14:13 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Saturday, September 12. 2020

Yee, You Got Some City Miles on You...

Men in Black remains one of my favorite comic-based movies, even if the franchise it launched hasn't retained the quality of the first. Still, #3 was pretty solid in no small part thanks to Josh Brolin, and it was nice to see that his Agent K was driving a blue oval even back in the day.

Posted by Bill at 12:47 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Friday, September 11. 2020

A Scene from Moonstruck

The World Trade Center as seen in the movie Moonstruck

New York City has always had a bit of a rough reputation. Britannica refers to it as "foreign and fearsome, a place where turmoil, arrogance, incivility, and cruelty tested the stamina of everyone who entered it;" in her column "Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young" (a.k.a. "Wear Sunscreen"), Mary Schmich gives the advice to "Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard." Movies have generally followed suit, using the city itself as shorthand for the antagonists - whether it's the negative energy manifesting in a river of liquified evil in Ghostbusters 2 or the more mundane but just as frightening power wielded in Wall Street.

But New York is also home to over eight million people, living lives on a much smaller scale than the city itself. Moonstruck was such a story, focusing on two families and their intertwined lives. Not as gang members or part of some syndicate, just as people. It was still a uniquely New York tale - the city was arguably as much a cast member as Cher or Nicolas Cage - but it was not the malevolent force so often seen in films. Among the scenes showing this softer side of New York were several shots of the full moon over Manhattan, with the Trade Center standing tall among the other buildings.
See more scenes ➡

Posted by Bill at 03:01 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Saturday, August 29. 2020

I Want a Car...Chicks Dig the Car

I've talked a fair bit about bad movies here...unappreciated brilliance, goofy but enjoyable, and true stinkers. But there is one more subset, and it's one where I feel legitimately bad for the people involved: the bad movie with spectacular production. The kind of movie that clearly had some very talented people do some amazing work on the sets, props, and general universe, only to have the finished film drop the ball. Think Ghost in the Shell or Mortal Engines. Or, in today's case, Batman & Robin. Fans still joke about the costume with its Bat-Nipples, but no one has said that they hated it because it was badly done. Clearly, the production team went all-in to create the best looking movie they could...it just couldn't stick the landing (thanks, studio interference).

Posted by Bill at 23:33 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
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