Little Man Writ Large - Napoleon, Reviewed

Sir Ridley Scott's Napoleon was a movie I had really hoped to see in IMAX, but with the whole household suffering from colds at the time it was released, it was just not to be. Today, a month later, Audrey and I finally got to see it, and since our anniversary is on Tuesday, we splurged on VIP seats.

I highly suggest VIP for this film but really all movies over two-and-a-half hours. That's not to say Napoleon feels long; Napoleon Bonaparte's life was eventful enough that you are never left dangling for an excessive amount of time before there is some more political intrigue, or another battle or another development in his relationship with Josephine.

And this relationship is really the hinge of the movie almost every time it is away from the battlefield. Now, I like history, but know very little about post-revolutionary France and everything I know about the Napoleonic wars comes from the books and shows about Richard Sharpe. Which, to be fair, has tremendous content about the period, but very little about Napoleon himself.

Joaquin Phoenix does an excellent job portraying a man at once confident of his abilities yet insecure about his place in the world. His infatuation and dedication to Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) is both understandable and inexplicable, sometimes within the same scene.

Kirby's performance is mercurial, and takes Josephine from a widowed aristocrat to the Empress of France, but the story is forced to focus on her marital indiscretions and inability to produce an heir. 

It is all handled very well, and the sets and costumes are sumptuous, but the scale of the battle scenes are what made the movie a standout for me, particularly Austerlitz and Waterloo. I am certain CGI must have been used, not once could I point out any poorly rendered bits or uncanny valleys. There are no impossible establishing shots, or cameras following cannonballs or mortar shells into the shocked faces of their targets. 

Whether watching from above as shells shatter the ice around fleeing infantry, or circling a British square with hapless French cavalry, the exquisite balance between order and chaos that Sir Ridley is known for keeps you transfixed. It is nothing short of amazing that he filmed this entire epic in 61 days, but with him using 11 cameras simultaneously for each battle, maybe more credit should be given to his lead editor, Claire Simpson.

Sadly, as much as I want Scott to win a Best Director Oscar one of these days, I don't think Napoleon is the film to give it to him. Maybe it is the lack of surprises, maybe Joaquin channeling "Old Boney's" egocentrism makes him too difficult to relate to, but there was just not enough of an emotional connection to the story to engage me the way, say, Black Hawk Down did. Maybe he will have better luck with Gladiator 2 next year?

At any rate, there is still a lot to like for history and movie buffs alike - the sets, costumes, hair, and such are amazing, and the battle sequences even more so. But at 2:38, make sure to choose a comfortable seat.

"Of Arms and the Man": Oppenheimer, Reviewed

"Armo virumque canto / I sing of arms and the man" - Virgil, The Aeneid

I will admit, I was a little apprehensive about sitting down to watch Oppenheimer tonight.

It was a foregone conclusion I was going to go - Christopher Nolan is probably my favourite filmmaker at this point in time. But I was a little afraid that the dialogue would be indecipherable at points, like it was in Tenet, or that his resistance to linear order might prompt him to tell the story of Robert Oppenheimer, the "father of the atomic bomb," from the point of view of a sub-atomic tachyon traveling backwards in time from the Trinity test explosion. Or that the three-hour runtime might prompt me to leave the theater briefly and miss some unexpected awesomeness. Or anything, really.

I needn't have worried.

Oppenheimer is an engaging, even captivating film despite its length. It deftly balances a grandiose science and engineering story about the day human history was divided into perhaps its most significant pre- and post- epochs, and the amazingly personal details and struggles of the flawed genius who brought that epoch into being. 

Based largely on Kai Bird and Michael Sherwin's Pulitzer-winning biograpohy of Oppenheimer, American Prometheus, Nolan tells one story on two parallel tracks: one, in colour, has Cillian Murphy defending his history and life decisions to a hostile board trying to strip him of power and credibility in 1954 ("1. Fission"). The other, in black and white (the first ever IMAX footage shot in b&w!) features Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, founder of the Atomic Energy Commission, being grilled about Oppenheimer during his Senate confirmation hearings in 1959 ("2. Fusion").

Both these leads bring tremendous power and subtle nuance to their performances; Murphy in particular. His inevitable Oscar nomination highlight reel might not even feature him speaking, such is the power of his facial expression, and his frequently tortured, hollowed eyes. And RDJ disappears almost completely into his role, letting his trademark sass out only on brief occasions, and always on a leash.

Oppenheimer is very likely Nolan's strongest screenplay to-date and one of only a handful not co-written with his brother.  He has been fairly criticized for the limited amount of strong female roles in his films, and while this one would still not pass the Bechdel test, both Florence Pugh (as Oppenheimer's lover Jean Tatlock, whose strong communist affiliations trail him throughout the film) and Emily Blunt (as his wife Kitty) give wonderful, human performances that go far beyond basic girlfriend/spouse representation.

Frankly, I don't think there is a character in this film who does not need to be there, and there are a lot of them, recurring on both the Fusion and Fission tracks that Nolan lays out for us. It is a panoply of great performers, both character actors and leads.

The dialogue is fast and crisp, the interactions touch on family, labour, politics, sex, and of course, physics and the war. I knew very little of Oppenheimer's life after the war and his infamous Trinity quote: "I am created Shiva; Death, the Shatterer of Worlds." So learning of his transition from theorist to project manager to policy influencer was both fascinating and tragic to witness. 

And while it is boldly directed, with both impressionistic, surrealist, and waking dream sequences woven throughout, there is very little of the flash and glamour we associate with Nolan as a brilliant visualist, and his restraint makes for a very powerful introspective film. 

But the Trinity test?

How do you build so much anticipation and drama into an event that the audience already knows the outcome to? I can't say for certain, but look for Nolan's now-trademark manipulation of time in a slowing countdown prior to detonation, as well as Ludwig Goransson's score making good use of Hans Zimmer's sonic illusion from Dunkirk, where the pitch feels like it is steadily increasing, but never peaks. Masterful stuff all around, really.

I haven't seen a whole lot of this year's grown-up films and Oscar bait, but at this point, I am ready to throw 8-10 statuettes at Oppenheimer: Picture, Screenplay, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Score, Sound, Visual Effects (with zero CGI!)...

It is also a profoundly affecting film, with a lot to say about how fear guides our best and worst decisions, humanity's questionable exercising of the power of life and death, and the potential impacts of atomic weapons on our survivability as a species. I would hesitate to characterize it as depressing, but it is certainly sobering.

My only regret at this point was not seeing it in IMAX, which I may yet end up going and doing at some point. 

Just Plane Glad For Dad

He's been gone 11 years now, but I still think of my dad every Father's Day. I loved and respected him deeply, and we got on very well despite being different in a lot of ways. We also had a number of common interests, one of which (eventually) was aviation.

Father's Day also causes me to reflect on being a father, particularly in regards to my two wonderful daughters, and soon to include a son-in-law, as Fenya and Bobby are set to tie the knot next Saturday before moving to Toronto in July.

With all the ladies away at work this afternoon, and Bobby and I cooling our heels between church and his lunch date with his parents, the topic of planes arose due to a post-service conversation with a former CF-104 pilot and aviation buff. Shared interests are a joy to be treasured, so I brought out Dad's collection of aviation ingots he started collecting while I was still in high school.

Called the Jane's Medallic Register of the World's Great Aircraft, it is a collection of 100 bronze ingots electroplated with gold that depicts significant and influential airplanes and helicopters, from the Wright Brothers Flyer to the SR-71 Blackbird. The reverse of each ingot shows the profile views of the aircraft, and each one sports a shiny proof finish. 

This was a product offered up by the Franklin Mint as a kind of subscription; another collector wrote about getting them regularly from January 1984 to April 1989. Once complete, a storage case arrived allowing the owner to nestle the entire collection into 4 velvet-lined trays. There is also a small tract describing each aircraft and an accompanying box to store them in.

I think Dad figured these as a sort of artistic investment, which turns out to have been kind of a futile hope. Based on some limited eBay searches, the $20 price per ingot doesn't appear to have even held up against inflation, let alone appreciated in value but I hope Dad took some joy from these, regardless.He was a hard-working and busy guy who didn't have any real hobbies or pastimes to speak of, and I wonder if perhaps he saw these as a shinier, classier version of the airplane cigarette cards he collected as a boy.

Despite the fact they don't display terribly well and spend the bulk of their time collecting dust (albeit in a handsome box), I can't imagine parting with them anytime soon. I am no numismatist but I definitely enjoy the ingots in the same way I enjoy beautifully minted coins, marveling at the remarkable translation of a 3-dimensional image onto a (mostly) 2-dimensional surface. The tiny ingots have a surprising heft to them which adds a tactile element to their enjoyment, the proof finish is very handsome and the artwork is wonderful to behold.

Bobby and I spent the better part of an hour looking at these beauties and our discussion covered an immense range of topics, from ramjets to warplanes, from history to our relationships with our fathers. I suppose that makes this register officially a conversation piece. 

When I told Bobby that, barring a surprise sale when we inevitably downsize, there is a better than even chance of him inheriting the collection someday, he started a bit. He looked the four trays over again, spread out across the downstairs table, and said, "I can't really see myself selling something like this either."

Which I found tremendously gratifying on a great number of levels.

Happy Father's Day!

A Life of Music and Pain

In the 1920s, a kid named Hiram was born in rural Alabama. His life was framed, if not defined, by physical setbacks and bodily pain from the start, as he was born with spina bifida occulta. It is the least serious variant of that particular defect, meaning a section of his vertebrae never fully fused around his spinal cord, but has been found to compound other injuries to the back. 

During WWI, his father had fallen from a truck, breaking his collarbone and striking his head. When Hiram was seven years old, his father experienced facial paralysis and was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm which hospitalized him for eight years, leaving Hiram's mother to raise him and his sister Irene.

The family moved to Georgia, and at ten, Hiram traded places with his cousin Opal back in Alabama, so she could attend school out of state. His aunt taught him basic guitar chords and he began playing at dances and church services.

Hiram moved to his mother's new boarding house in Alabama the next year, which she propped up during the Great Depression with a variety of side jobs, including nursing and a job in a cannery. When that house burned down, they moved to another, eventually converting it into a boarding house as well.

At some point, despite their poverty, Hiram got a guitar of his own, and a Black blues musician named Rufus "Tee-Tot" Payne, taught him to play in exchange for meals at his mother's house. Hiram blended Payne's style with country music he had heard, like that of Roy Acuff, but eventually lost touch with Payne when his family moved again.

The next boarding house was in Montgomery, Alabama, and after changing his name (more on that later), Hiram won a talent show prize of $15 for a song whose lyrics he had grafted onto another tune. Performing on the street in front of a local radio station got him on the air a handful of times, and there were so many requests for him that he was given his own 15-minute show to host twice a week - not bad for a 14-year-old. 

Hiram, aged 15

Hiram formed a band and started playing dates around Alabama, dropping out of school at 16 to do so full-time. He and his band began playing around Alabama and eventually around the South. Somewhere along the way, he got talked into bull-riding while at a rodeo in Texas, and injured his back falling from the animal. Starting out at public gatherings and at clubs, gigs at honky-tonks were a mixed bag though, as so much of his revenues went into drinking. 

When the U.S. entered WWII, Hiram's injury prevented him from serving, but all his bandmates were drafted. His drinking worsened, which led many of his replacement musicians to quit, and the radio station eventually fired him for "habitual drunkenness." He ended up working in a shipyard in Mobile for much of the war.

He met his future wife Audrey in Mobile, and after getting married in 1944 at a Texaco station, she helped Hiram get back on the radio, and he also began publishing his own songs, gaining a reputation as a skilled songwriter.

In 1946, Hiram's audition failed to get him on the Grand Ole Opry, but auditioning for a publisher in between ping-pong games got him a six-song contract. When those songs charted, he moved to a larger record company, and in 1947, got his first hit and a spot on Louisiana Hayride. Covers and original songs kept charting until he finally got on to the legendary Grand Ole Opry in 1949, getting an unprecedented six encores in his first performance.

More chart-toppers, bigger tours, and even television appearances kept Hiram's fame star on the rise, but his alcoholism worsened and he entered a sanitarium for treatment. On a hunting trip that same year, he fell and re-injured his back, and he turned to morphine as well as alcohol for the pain. 

Over the next two years, he had an affair with a dancer, became divorced, began seeing someone in Shreveport, and missed enough shows because of that and his drinking that he was fired from the Grand Ole Opry.

In 1952 Hiram married his Shreveport sweetheart but began experiencing heart problems. He came into the orbit of a quack doctor who prescribed a number of drugs, including amphetamines and morphine, which exacerbated his cardiac issues.

On December 30, 1952, he hired a college student to drive him from Knoxville, Tennessee to a show Charleston, West Virginia on New Year's Day. Hiram was out of sorts, in part due to having been beaten up and kicked in the groin during a bar fight a few days prior. His doctor injected him with a B12 shot that also included morphine - Hiram needed to be carried to the car by porters because his coughing and hiccupping left him unable to walk.

Shortly after midnight, the student, who had been driving for 20 hours, stopped in Bristol, Virginia and got a local taxi driver to spell him off. That driver took them to Oak Hill, West Virginia, where they stopped to refill and grab some coffee.

It was only when they stopped that they discovered that Hiram was dead, and had been so for long enough for rigor mortis to have set in.

The man so many people had come to know as the legendary Hank Williams, had died before seeing his 30th birthday.

Despite his poverty, his pain, his questionable judgment, and his many misadventures, in his three decades of life, Williams had 11 number-one country hits and had an astonishing 55 singles hit the top 10. Without question, he can be considered one of the most influential singer-songwriters to have ever lived. 

It can even be argued that his first hit, "Move It On Over," helped pave the way for what would eventually become rock and roll. His influence on the rockabilly movement cannot be denied, with artists like Gene Vincent, Carl Perkins, and Elvis Presley covering many of Williams' songs.

The link between blues music and rock is well documented, but knowing that such an influential figurehead in country and western music, at one of its most formative stages, learned some of his craft from a virtually unknown person of colour, is certainly food for thought.

Whitney Lakes - Beaches and History

I am always partial to camping in the mountains, but when I asked Audrey where she might want to go this year, she said due East. When I looked for provincial campgrounds with power that weren't too far, Whitney Lakes Provincial Park fit the bill. Ready access to a number of beaches, a town with a decent grocery store only half an hour away, and with fuel nearly $2 a litre, a 3-hour drive suited us just fine.

Our campsite at Ross Lake was the last one in the loop and remarkably well treed, which meant not having to make awkward eye contact with your neighbours everytime you got up from the picnic table or what have you. Tragically, I had gotten saturated with rain while loading the trailer on Monday morning and by Wednesday had symptoms consistent with bronchitis (hey, at least it wasn't covid again, right?).

It was a nice campsite that I tragically neglected to photograph, but between the trees and our 10 x 10 sun screen, it made for a very nice spot. We strung up a line for Canéla so she spent much less time getting tangled than last year, but the abundant squirrels near to drove her mad anyways.

We spent a fair amount of time doing as much nothing as possible, but still found time to take our tubes to the Whitney Lake beach on a hot day, explore Heinsburg and Alberta's last standing wooden water tower, and stumbled across Journey North Cider Company while taking a giant loop around the area and seeing Bonnyville and Kehewin Lake - beautiful country, and taking it in from an air-conditioned vehicle with Glory at the wheel was just the thing for my post-bronchial recovery.

Two historical highlights stood out for us though. The first was visiting the interpretive centre at Fort George/Buckingham House. We would not have known about this amazing site at all had it not been for the blue roadside attraction sign we saw on the highway as we drove to our campsite the first time.

I was honestly expecting a self-guided bit of signage showing the site of competing outposts from the Hudson's Bay Company and North West Company which predated Fort Edmonton by almost a decade, but we instead found a gorgeous interpretive center with tremendous displays, a good amount of artifacts and a perspective that did a great job incorporating the indigenous perspective.

It is ideally set up for young learners and school groups, but the three of us had a great time there - should you find yourself around Elk Point or Heinsburg, make a point of checking it out!

We also took a trip out to the Frog Lake National Historic site. If the same sounds familiar, the Frog Lake Massacre was a key event in the 1885 Northwest Rebellion/ Riel Resistance, and here, signs and a memorial cairn are all that stands to mark the event, but the signs do good work.

They present the facts in a context that invites an objective appraisal of western history, starting with  Rupert's Land being sold outright to the Dominion of Canada three years after Confederation.Such a sale was something the indigenous leaders had literally no concept of - land ownership was as foreign an idea to them as any science fiction idea you might come across today. By 1876, most Cree tribal leaders had signed Treaty 6, but not Chief Big Bear, who stalled and resisted, sure that the treat would be broken and warning others against signing it. He finally relented in 1882, but was reluctant to choose lands for his people's reserve. 

In the winter of 1885, the government cut off promised food rations in order to force Big Bear and his people to move into a reserve where they faced brutal conditions. In March of that year, news of the Métis victory at Duck Lake reached Big Bear, and despite his protestations, his war chief Wandering Spirit, his own son Miserable Man (AKA Little Bad Man) and six other men went to Frog Lake intent on moving the white settlers from there onto the reserve.

Tensions ran high, the Indian agent who had denied the Cree rations was killed, and when the dust settled ten settlers were dead - it is their stone cairn that stands at the site to this day.

Prime Minister John A. MacDonald breathlessly announced the Frog Lake Massacre in the House of Commons, which galvanized the government to send both militia and North West Mounted Police to apply a heavier hand to the resistance. The rebellion was put down, and the eight Cree were tried without legal counsel and hanged in Battleford, then buried in an unmarked grave.

Children from the nearby Battleford Industrial School (an Indian Residential School) were brought to watch the hangings as a "warning," but this may have backfired, as Howard Adams wrote in his book, Prisons of Grass: 

Every member of the Indian nation heard the death-rattle of the eight heroes who died at the end of the colonizer's rope and they went quietly back to their compounds, obediently submitting themselves to the oppressors. The eight men who sacrificed their lives at the end of the rope were the champions of freedom and democracy. They were incomparable heroes, as shown by their last moments.

This grave was forgotten about until 1972 when it was rediscovered by students and eventually a simple headstone naming the eight men was placed there: Wandering Spirit, (Kapapamahchakwew) a Plains Cree war chief, Little Bear (Apaschiskoos), Walking the Sky (A.K.A. Round the Sky), Bad Arrow, Miserable Man, Iron Body, Ika (A.K.A. Crooked Leg) and Man Without Blood.

Big Bear, despite the testimony of both settler and indigenous witnesses describing his efforts to prevent the killings and keep Wandering Spirit and the others on the reserve, was convicted for them anyways as chief, and spent three years in prison, dying a year after his release.

I've forgotten so much of what I learned of the Red River and North-West Rebellions - names of battles and people like Batoche, Cut-Knife, and Gabriel Dumont are still with me but diminished in significance. I was grateful for the opportunity to re-learn a bit about it.

I was surprised to learn that Glory's curriculum had included almost no mention of these events ( I swear we covered them on three different occasions over junior high and high school) and I mused as to why this might be.

"Maybe they knew how angry it would make people like me," she said earnestly. Her sense of injustice had been especially provoked by the juxtaposition of the memorial cairn for the settler victims and an unmarked grave for the Cree.

That was the day we took our long drive, quietly appreciating the beautiful country and letting the lesson we had learned soak in.

Ideally, a vacation should promote feelings of joy and relaxation, not anger at injustices from a century ago, but we were only too willing to trade a little enjoyment for a bit of enlightenment, and hopefully some wisdom too.

And the lake was still waiting for us when Fenya joined us on Friday, and the rain stopped early Sunday, so the trailer was dry this time when we packed it. All in all a great vacation!

Curiocity: The Civil War Projectiles

curiocity - an intermittent series of posts addressing one or more unusual items around our household (fr. curio (n), any unusual article, object of art, etc., valued as a curiosity.)

On a small display shelf on the mirrored hutch in our bedroom are two large lead projectiles laid on foam in a box with a transparent lid. They have been there long enough that, like so many household objects, they have become almost invisible to me most of the time. But when someone bumps the dresser and they tip over or if I need to move them so I can dust, they always produce a cloud of memories. I picked them up in a souvenir store at a civil war battlefield; an impulse purchase I have never regretted.

Most people who go to visit the National Military Park in Gettysburg Pennsylvania probably do so out of an interest in that battle, or in the American Civil War at least. My interest in the ACW began afterwards, or perhaps during. 

While living in Toronto, Audrey and I visited Gettysburg three times over a four-year period, both of us enjoying history as much as we do, and it is a remarkably well-preserved battlefield, definitely worth the trip. On our last visit, we were joined by two friends from Edmonton, Pete (the Rare Hipster) and Brent (the Hoodlum), the latter of whom I am sad to say I have only seen once in the past 12 years or so.

Brent was a real military history buff, and had come out to G'burg with Audrey and I on a previous visit, where we discovered that there would be a massive reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg the following summer to commemorate its 135th anniversary. With Audrey pregnant and expecting in November, we realized this might be our last child-free vacation in a while, and asked Pete to join us as well.

Someday I will dig up the photos from that trip and show you the massive reenactment as well as an Amish market, and Brent reenacting a famous and grisly photo from Devil's Den, and the amusement park only I knew existed in Hershey, PA, but this short post will be about bullets.

The ones in my little display box are called (incorrectly) Minnie balls, but are, in fact, Minié bullets. They are not spherical but pointy -streamlined for straighter and faster travel. They were used by both the North and the South during the Battle Between the States, and there were a lot of them fired by the thousands of troops who fought there for three days in July of 1863.

I couldn't guess how many in total, but the two points that testify to the seriously unhealthy amounts of lead in the air are first, that there are multiple instances of bullets fused together because they collided in mid-air. Not a lot mind you, but holy cow, more than one? At least two different museums have such examples on display, and they are also owned by a handful of private collectors. Think of it; despite firing only 3-4 shots per minute, there were still enough bullets fired in anger that more than one time they were intercepted in flight - astonishing!

The second point of proof is the sheer number of bullets they have dug up around the battlefield, and at the time, people were still finding them on a regular basis. So many, in fact, that most of the many gift shops in Gettysburg have small bins of them by the cash register so you can buy one or two with your change.

There were other bullets as well; I think it was Audrey who picked up a malformed one from a separate bin, flattened and with irregular indentations in it.

"What are those, miscasts or defects or something?" I asked the shopkeeper.

"No," he said, "Those ones all came from the Spangler Farm."

My expression made it clear that I did not understand the significance, but Brent spoke up: "The field hospital? Ew."

The clerk gave a wicked grin and nodded. "That's right; those ones are full of teeth marks from the poor unfortunates undergoing field surgery or amputations without anesthetic..."

I finally clued in and finished his sentence; "...and so they literally had to 'bite the bullet'."

Audrey took a closer look to verify the marks as dentition, then dropped it into the bin with only the mildest expression of disgust. And I mean, good on her - let's not forget she was well into her second trimester by this point!

I reached across the counter and grabbed the tidier display box, with blue and grey foam showing the representative sides of the conflict. "I'll take these ones instead, thanks."

A Large Undertaking of Tiny Things

I want to blame the algorithm, but I feel it would be pointless.

What earthly reason could there be for including a link to an expired Kickstarter about a fantasy/historical game set during the Hundred Years War in my Google Discover feed back in 2019? Better still, what reason could I possibly have for visiting the site?

But I did, and showed it to Audrey and she agreed it was a great-looking game, having an interest in the period as she does. So when the cunning rascals re-launched a new-and-improved version of it later that year, Audrey agreed that it might make a could hobby project we could work on together over the long term as we eventually transition to being empty-nesters.

I backed the Kickstarter for Time of Legends: Joan of Arc, a game ostensibly set during the wars between England and France in the 14th and 15th centuries, but incorporating the mythological views of common folk at the time as various fantasy elements. So in addition to the knights, archers and peasant levies you might expect, the battlefield also teems with angels, devils, griffons, witches and all manner of Apocalyptic creatures.

It certainly captured the imagination of Audrey and I, and we ended up ordering the game as well as three expansions: a Village scenery kit including a variety of quaint buildings and livestock, the Siege expansion with castle walls, trebuchets and a siege tower, and the Apocalypse set, full of creepily interpreted content from the Book of Revelations, including the Four Horsemen.

The original arrival date was scheduled to be October of 2020, but then the pandemic happened. And then production issues occurred. And then the game's designer got into loggerheads with the publishers and they ended up parting ways (and taking with them my chance to grab the Teutonic Knights expansion at some later date). And finally, a worldwide shipping crisis and supply chain issues. 

All told, I was just happy to get the stuff at all when it showed up in a pile on our doorstep in late January - and such a pile:

(Canéla for scale)

Once unpacked, it looked a little more manageable, but still pretty daunting.

(The bottom box is actually just for storing the cards and counters from all the other boxes)

Needless to say, Audrey and I can expect to be painting and playing for quite a while.

Once we got the core box unpacked so we could look at the rules and scenarios, we figured the best course of action would be to paint the pieces needed for the introductory scenario, the Siege of Rennes, including the needed scenery. Then we could play it out a few times before moving on to the next-easiest scenario, and so on.

The scenario itself doesn't need a lot of pieces, but we figured it made more sense to paint all the bowmen instead of a portion of them, and same for the knights, etc. But even this tiny subset of the core box presents a pretty daunting amount of hobby work:

The good news (mostly good, anyhow) is that the figures are 15mm scale, about half the size of the Warhammer and other figures Audrey and I have both painted before, with both less area to paint and fewer details to pick out.

The bad news is my eyes are nowhere near capable of working on such tiny things anymore, and so I ended up purchasing a magnifying visor. For years I resisted using any sort of magnification when painting, since no one would be looking at them that close when they were on the tabletop. Now, I need it just to make sure the brush is going to the right place on the model. 

But I am very happy with it! Although it makes my mistakes even more painfully visible than before, the visor has restored a lot of joy and comfort to my painting, and I am grateful for that. Good thing I don't worry about looking cool when I paint though.

We also employed a trick I used as a teen when I first started painting 25mm D&D figurines from Grenadier Models - before priming them, I attached 2-3 figures onto a popsicle stick with a tiny drop of hot glue. It took a while but I know I will gain that time back by not having to drop to my hands and knees to search for a dropped model quite as often as I might otherwise!

We are also trying a new technique to speed things up a bit - after applying basic colours to the models, we are soaking them with a type of wash called Quckshade, by Army Painter. It tints everything down a bit but adds tremendous shade and depth in very little time at all.

Magic, as near as I can tell!

Audrey will be painting the rest of the bowmen while I work on the Sergeants-at-Arms and mounted knights. The relatively small numbers of sergeants let me get through them pretty quickly actually.

Units are fielded as two (for cavalry) or three (infantry) models mounted on a circular base. Although I haven't based models wargames-style for I dunno how long, my first efforts turned out all right.

And there are even a few individual figures to break up the monotony of painting larger units, like the ten sticks (20 figures) of mounted knights I keep procrastinating on. Painting a mdeival priest, or blacksmith or merchant girl is a great way to change things up. And I know Audrey is looking forward to painting up the two houses the scenario calls for, as well as the church that will come later on.

Audrey and I are hoping to get in a few more 'paint dates' before the weather nicens up, but if we don't get to play the Siege of Rennes until the snow flies, that is absolutely fine.

Hopefully, we can get through all the scenarios of the war in less than the actual Hundred Years!