#1st and marshall st

[catherinetheprincessofwales]

The Irish Princess and her dynastic marriage to a Norman that helped shape Europe. Aoife, Princess of Leinster -> Catherine, The Princess of Wales. The Princess of Wales is Aoife, Princess of Leinster and Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke 26th Great-Granddaughter  via her paternal grandfather’s line.

** Aoife or Eva, Princess of Leinster, played a pivotal role in the history of Ireland and the Norman expansion. She was the daughter of Diarmaid MacMurrough, King of Leinster, who sought the help of the Normans to secure his throne and defeat his enemies. As part of this alliance, Aoife married the Norman leader Richard de Clare, known as ‘Strongbow,’ on 25 August 1170. This marriage marked the arrival of the Normans in Ireland, just 104 years after their conquest of England by William the Conqueror.

Through their daughter, Isabelle de Clare, The 4th Countess of Pembroke, the union of Aoife and Strongbow forged a lineage that would shape the future of European nobility. Isabelle became an ancestor of nearly every reigning monarch across Europe. Within a few generations, her descendants included much of the European aristocracy, including all the Kings of Scotland since Robert the Bruce (1274–1329) and every monarch of England, Great Britain, and the United Kingdom since Henry IV (1367–1413). 

Family Line

Aoife MacMurrough, Princess of Leinster and Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke. Painting of their wedding, depicting the political and cultural consequences. 

Isabelle de Clare 4th Countess of Pembroke m. William Marshall 1st Earl of Pembroke. 

Eve Marshall m William de Briouze, born  Pembroke Castle.

Eve de Briouze m. William de Cauntelo, Coat of Arms

Millicent de Cauntelo m. Eon la Zouche, Coat of Arms

Eva la Zouche m. Maurice de Berkeley, 2nd Lord Berkeley, buried St Mary's Church, Portbury. 

Thomas de Berkeley, 3rd Lord Berkeley m. Catherine Clivedon

Sir John Berkeley m. Elizabeth Betteshorne, burial location.

Eleanor Berkeley m. Sir Richard Poynings, burial tomb.

Eleanor de Poynings m. Henry Percy, 3rd Earl of Northumberland

Lady Margaret Percy m. Sir William Gascoigne 

Anne Gascoigne m. Sir Thomas Fairfax - Gawthorpe Hall, family seat.

William Fairfax m. Anne Baker - Gilling Castle, family seat. 

John Fairfax m. Mary Birch - Master of the Great Hospital at Norwich, Norfolk

Rev. Benjamin Fairfax m. Sarah Galliard - Preacher at Rumburgh, Suffolk.

Benjamin Fairfax m. Bridget Stringer - died in Halesworth, Suffolk.

Sarah Fairfax m. Rev. John Meadows - died in Ousedon, Suffolk.

Philip Meadows m. Margaret Hall

Sarah Meadows m. Dr. David Martineau

Thomas Martineau m. Elizabeth Rankin - buried at Rosary Cemetery, Norwich.

Elizabeth Martineau m. Dr. Thomas Michael Greenhow - died in Newcastle upon Tyne, Northumberland.

Frances Elizabeth Greenhow m. Francis Lupton

Francis Martineau Lupton m. Harriet Davis

Olive Lupton m. Richard Middleton

Peter Middleton m. Valerie Glassborow

Michael Middleton m. Carole Goldsmith 

Catherine Middleton m. Prince William of Wales

*Catherine is also a descendant of Aoife via her mother Caroles maternal line.

[napoleonic-sexyman-tournament]

The updated list of nominees so far:

France:

Jean Lannes

Josephine de Beauharnais

Thérésa Tallien

Jean-Andoche Junot

Joseph Fouché

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand

Joachim Murat

Michel Ney

Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (Charles XIV of Sweden)

Louis-Francois Lejeune

Pierre Jacques Étienne Cambrinne

Napoleon I

Marshal Louis-Gabriel Suchet

Jacques de Trobriand

Jean de dieu soult.

François-Étienne-Christophe Kellermann

Louis Davout

Pauline Bonaparte, Duchess of Guastalla

Eugène de Beauharnais

Jean-Baptiste Bessières

Antoine-Jean Gros

Jérôme Bonaparte

Andre Masséna

England:

Richard Sharpe (The Sharpe Series)

Tom Pullings (Master and Commander)

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington

Jonathan Strange (Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell)

Captain Jack Aubrey (Aubrey/Maturin books)

Horatio Hornblower (the Hornblower Books)

William Laurence (The Temeraire Series)

Austria:

Klemens von Metternich

Friedrich Bianchi, Duke of Casalanza

Franz I/II

Archduke Karl

Marie Louise

Poland:

Wincenty Krasiński

Józef Antoni Poniatowski

Józef Zajączek

Maria Walewska

Russia:

Alexander I Pavlovich

Alexander Andreevich Durov

Prince Andrei (War and Peace)

Pyotr Bagration

Mikhail Miloradovich

Levin August von Bennigsen

Prussia:

Louise von Mecklenburg-Strelitz

Gebard von Blücher

Carl von Clausewitz

Frederick William III

Gerhard von Scharnhorst

Louis Ferdinand of Prussia

Friederike of Mecklenburg-Strelitz

The Netherlands:

Ida St Elme

Wiliam, Prince of Orange

The Papal States:

Pius VII

[todaysdocument]

Special Order No. 5

Record Group 393: Records of U.S. Army Continental CommandsSeries: Letters Received

[3 fold - 1st fold]

M625. PM Gen/64

Troy Lincoln Co.

May 4" 1864

March AC Major and

Assistant Provost Marshal

Special Order No. 5

In regard to an insult 

offered the American flag

at Harmony Mo.

APMGnel May 6/64

[2nd fold]

Approved in Substance

James F. Wright [?]

Major & Acting Dist PM

Dist North Mo

May 10, 1864

[bottom endorsement illegible]

[handwritten] 

Head Quarters [4th?] Sub. District North Mo

Troy Lincoln County Mo May 4th 1864

Special Orders

No 5 

     Evidence Having been obtained

at this Office that on Sunday May 1st 1864

the National Flag was publicly disgraced

by being forcibly taken from over the Pulpit of 

the church in or near New Harmony Pike Co. 

Mo. and thrown out of doors. It is hereby ordered

I  That the Trustees of said Church within 

two days from this date shall raise or cause

to be raised the National Flag over the 

Pulpit in said Church and allow it to remain 

untill further orders. In default of which 

said Church will not be used after that date

as a place for Public worship. 

II   Any person or persons found guilty of 

insulting our National Flag will be arrested

and tried by the Military authorities.

A. G. Marsh Major + 

Asst Pro. Mar. 4th Sub. Dist [illegible]

[in red ink] 

To 

Call. J. P. Sanderson

Provost Marshal General

St. Louis Mo      [/in red ink]

[is-the-battlemech-cool-or-not]

MESSAGE FOR: Ward, A., ILKHAN / FIRST LORD

FROM: M. Hazen, COMGEN

My IlKhan, as requested, here is a breakdown of the forces being sent to Helios as part of the third wave of Operation TOUCHDOWN.

------------------------------------

* National:

-- SLDF Royal:

1st Royal BattleMech Regiment "Turkina"

2nd Royal BattleMech Regiment "Werewolves"

3rd Royal BattleMech Regiment "Gunslingers" (ex-Stone's Lament/KotRS)

331st Royal BattleMech Regiment "The North American Regiment"

410th Royal BattleMech Regiment "The United Member States Regiment"

1st Royal Swiss Cavalry Regiment

13th Royal French Demi-Regiment

59th Royal Jump Infantry Regiment "The King's Own Jump Troops"

82nd Royal Jump Infantry Regiment "The All Americans"

101st Royal Jump Infantry Regiment "Screaming Eagles"

175th Royal Mechanized Infantry Regiment "The Desert Rats"

181st Royal Mechanized Infantry Regiment "The King's Own Scots Rifles"

206th Royal Mechanized Infantry Regiment "The Democrats of Brazil"

8th Royal CAAN Regiment "The Black Sea Regiment"

20th Royal CAAN Regiment "The Saipan Regiment"

124th Royal Heavy Assault Regiment "Dai Maxbuster"

1st Royal Separate Special Purpose Regiment "The Fidelis"

Elements of Clan Iron Orca - Command Star

-- SLDF Regular:

46th BattleMech Regiment "The Chrome Hounds Regiment"

171st BattleMech Regiment "The Zhukov Regiment"

332nd BattleMech Regiment "The Antarctica Regiment"

335th BattleMech Regiment "The Joan of Arc Regiment"

398th BattleMech Regiment "The European Regiment"

9th Mechanized Infantry Regiment "The Pride of Puget Sound"

59th Mechanized Infantry Regiment "New Kyoto Samurai"

80th Mechanized Infantry Regiment "The Texas Rangers"

138th Mechanized Infantry Regiment "The Chicago Regiment"

233rd Mechanized Infantry Regiment "The King of Denmark Regiment"

245th Mechanized Infantry Regiment "The Latvian Rifles"

256th Mechanized Infantry Regiment "The Dutch and Belgian Fusiliers"

1st French Regiment

1st German Regiment

1st Ukrainian Regiment

1st Infantry Regiment "The Big Red One"

4th Infantry Regiment "The Gurkha Rifles"

10th Infantry Regiment "The Welsh Foot Regiment"

61st Infantry Regiment "The Michigan Sixty-First"

77th Special Operations Group "Blackhearts"

-- Non-Star League:

>> FWL:

1st Nova Cat Provisionals

Kara's Scorchers

>> Capellan Confederation:

Death Commandos

1st McCarron's Armored Cavalry

1st St. Ives Lancers

Marshals of Tikonov

>> Federated Suns:

1st Avalon Hussars

Davion Assault Guards RCT

3rd Davion Guards

McKinnon's Company

>> Lyran Commonwealth:

2nd Donegal Guards (AWOL)

>> Draconis Combine:

Hikage

Ryuken-San

1st Genyosha

4th Arkab Legion

5th Sword of Light

>> Rasalhague Dominion:

Rasalhague Galaxy

1st Drakøns

>> Magistracy of Canopus:

1st Canopian Night Stalkers

2nd Canopian Fusiliers

>> Aurigan Coalition:

1st Aurigan Guards

>> Taurian Concordat:

Taurian Guards Regiment

>> United Hindu Collective:

Messengers of Shiva

>> Raven Alliance:

First Raven Phalanx

Alliance Grenadiers

>> Scorpion Empire:

Seeker Keshik

* Mercenaries:

Neon Knights

Lone Wolves (inc. Fox Patrol)

Lindon's Company

Steve's Stevedores

Tiamat's Terrors

Raging Horde

------------------------------------

As we discussed, this does represent a significant deployment of SLDF personnel, but the experience these units will gain will far outweigh any risks. Standing up units with the names and recruitment profiles of old SLDF regiments is a powerful tool to establish continuity with the old Star League, and provide the people of Terra incentives to join up. I am hoping similar programs can be carried out as the Star League expands.

Deployment of these forces will begin on D+6, following destruction of remaining Blakist assets in the Coen Regional Area of Operations (CRAO), currently scheduled for tomorrow, D+5. Most of the forces listed here will deploy to pre-selected AOs across Helios, with several SLDF Regular units detailed to continue occupation operations in the CRAO following the first and second wave units departure to a new AO.

Mercenary and non-Star League forces will be assigned as deemed fit. Currently I plan on attaching the following units to my own operational sector command - in addition to those already attached in prior waves:

2nd Royal BattleMech Regiment

59th Royal Jump Infantry Regiment

124th Royal Heavy Assault Regiment

1st Royal Separate Special Purpose Regiment

46th BattleMech Regiment

1st Ukrainian Regiment

1st Infantry Regiment

Taurian Guards Regiment

1st Canopian Night Stalkers

2nd Canopian Fusiliers

Hikage

Ryuken-San

3rd Davion Guards

Neon Knights

Yours,

M. Hazen

Commanding General, SLDF

MESSAGE ENDS

STOP STOP STOP

[goalhofer]

2023-24 1st NHL Games

October 10, 2023

Waltteri Merelä (Tampa Bay) vs. Nashville.

Connor Bedard (Chicago) at Pittsburgh.

Kevin Korchinski (Chicago) at Pittsburgh.

October 11, 2023

Fraser Minten (Toronto) vs. Montreal.

Matt Poitras (Boston) vs. Chicago.

Johnny Beecher (Boston) vs. Chicago.

Alex Laferriere (Los Angeles) vs. Colorado.

October 12, 2023

Adam Fantilli (Columbus) vs. Philadelphia.

Zach Benson (Buffalo) vs. New York Rangers.

Uvis Balinskis (Florida) at Minnesota.

Matthew Samoskevich (Florida) at Minnesota.

October 13, 2023

Logan Cooley (Arizona) at New Jersey.

October 14, 2023

Emil Andrae (Philadelphia) at Ottawa.

Pavel Mintyukov (Anaheim) at Vegas.

October 15, 2023

Matt Tomkins (Tampa Bay) at Ottawa.

October 16, 2023

Justin Sourdif (Florida) at New Jersey.

October 19, 2023

Leo Carlsson (Anaheim) vs. Dallas.

Tristan Luneau (Anaheim) vs. Dallas.

October 21, 2023

Hardy Häman-Aktell (Washington) at Montreal.

Ryan Shea (Pittsburgh) at St. Louis.

Ty Emberson (San José) at Nashville.

October 24, 2023

John Ludvig (Pittsburgh) vs. Dallas.

October 25, 2023

Hunter Shepard (Washington) at New Jersey.

October 26, 2023

Dmitri Voronkov (Columbus) at Montreal.

Ilya Salauyou (Calgary) vs. St. Louis.

October 27, 2023

Daemon Hunt (Minnesota) at Washington.

October 28, 2023

Nikolas Matinpalo (Ottawa) at Pittsburgh.

November 1, 2023

Connor Zary (Calgary) vs. Dallas.

November 2, 2023

Mason Lohrei (Boston) vs. Toronto.

November 4, 2023

Marc Del Gaizo (Nashville) at Edmonton.

Ryan Johnson (Buffalo) at Toronto.

Roby Järventie (Ottawa) vs. Tampa Bay.

Magnus Chrona (San José) vs. Pittsburgh.

Raphaël Lavoie (Edmonton) vs. Nashville.

Martin Pospíšil (Calgary) at Seattle.

November 7, 2023

Ondřej Pavel (Colorado) vs. New Jersey.

November 9, 2023

Ryan Winterton (Seattle) at Colorado.

November 13, 2023

Sam Malinski (Colorado) at Seattle.

November 16, 2023

Linus Karlsson (Vancouver) at Calgary.

November 22, 2023

Jayden Struble (Montreal) at Anaheim.

November 25, 2023

Jiří Kulich (Buffalo) at New Jersey.

Isak Rosén (Buffalo) at New Jersey.

November 30, 2023

Sam Laberge (New Jersey) at Philadelphia.

December 1, 2023

Šimon Nemec (New Jersey) vs. San José.

December 3, 2023

Louis Crevier (Chicago) at Minnesota.

December 7, 2023

Ryker Evans (Seattle) vs. New Jersey.

December 8, 2023

Marc Johnstone (Pittsburgh) at Florida.

December 9, 2023

Jiří Smejkal (Ottawa) at Detroit.

December 15, 2023

Adam Edström (New York Rangers) vs. Anaheim.

December 17, 2023

Angus Crookshank (Ottawa) at Vegas.

December 20, 2023

Ivan Miroshnichenko (Washington) vs. New York Islanders.

December 21, 2023

Emil Heineman (Montreal) at Minnesota.

December 30, 2023

Georgii Merkulov (Boston) vs. New Jersey.

January 4, 2024

Brennan Othmann (New York Rangers) vs. Chicago.

Declan Carlile (Tampa Bay) at Minnesota.

January 5, 2024

Vasili Ponomaryov (Carolina) at Washington.

January 6, 2024

Emil Martinsen-Lilleberg (Tampa Bay) at Boston.

Jack Thompson (Tampa Bay) at Boston.

Graeme Clarke (New Jersey) vs. Vancouver.

Lukas Cormier (Vegas) vs. New York Islanders.

January 8, 2024

Jason Polin (Colorado) vs. Boston.

January 9, 2024

Yan Kuznetsov (Calgary) vs. Ottawa.

January 10, 2024

Jesper Wallstedt (Minnesota) at Dallas.

January 11, 2024

Gage Goncalves (Tampa Bay) vs. New Jersey.

January 13, 2024

Phil Kemp (Edmonton) at Montreal.

Joshua Roy (Montreal) vs. Edmonton.

Max Crozier (Tampa Bay) vs. Anaheim.

January 15, 2024

Brendan Brisson (Vegas) vs. Nashville.

January 19, 2024

Kyle MacLean (New York Islanders) at Chicago.

January 20, 2024

Adam Klapka (Calgary) vs. Edmonton.

January 23, 2024

Olen Zellweger (Anaheim) vs. Buffalo.

January 27, 2024

Shakir Mukhamadullin (San José) vs. Buffalo.

February 16, 2024

Matt Villalta (Arizona) vs. Carolina.

February 18, 2024

Matt Rempe (New York Rangers) at New York Islanders.

February 19, 2024

Marshall Rifai (Toronto) at St. Louis.

Justin Brazeau (Boston) vs. Dallas.

Mason Morelli (Vegas) at San José.

February 20, 2024

Arshdeep Bains (Vancouver) at Colorado.

February 22, 2024

Zachary Bolduc (St. Louis) vs. New York Islanders.

February 24, 2024

Pierrick Dubé (Washington) at Florida.

Logan Stankoven (Dallas) at Carolina.

February 25, 2024

Brian Halonen (New Jersey) vs. Tampa Bay.

March 7, 2024

Patrik Koch (Arizona) vs. Minnesota.

March 12, 2024

Zack Ostapchuk (Ottawa) vs. Pittsburgh.

March 14, 2024

Marat Khusnutdinov (Minnesota) vs. Anaheim.

March 15, 2024

Landon Slaggert (Chicago) vs. Los Angeles.

March 17, 2024

Devin Cooley (San José) at Chicago.

March 21, 2024

Zach Dean (St. Louis) at Ottawa.

March 22, 2024

Jack St. Ivany (Pittsburgh) at Dallas.

March 24, 2024

Cam Crotty (Arizona) vs. Dallas.

March 26, 2024

Brandon Scanlin (New York Rangers) vs. Philadelphia.

James Malatesta (Columbus) at Arizona.

Josh Doan (Arizona) vs. Columbus.

Logan Morrison (Seattle) vs. Anaheim.

March 30, 2024

Cameron Butler (Columbus) vs. Pittsburgh.

April 1, 2024

Ivan Fedotov (Philadelphia) vs. New York Islanders.

Akil Thomas (Los Angeles) at Winnipeg.

April 6, 2024

Collin Graf (San José) vs. St. Louis.

April 9, 2024

Maksymilian Szuber (Arizona) at Seattle.

April 12, 2024

Ethan Del Mastro (Chicago) vs. Nashville.

Scott Morrow (Carolina) at St. Louis.

Sam Colangelo (Anaheim) vs. Calgary.

Liam Öhgren (Minnesota) at Vegas.

April 14, 2024

Frank Nazar III (Chicago) vs. Carolina.

April 15, 2024

Lane Hutson (Montreal) at Detroit.

Georgi Romanov (San José) at Edmonton.

April 16, 2024

Logan Mailloux (Montreal) vs. Detroit.

Jackson Blake (Carolina) at Columbus.

Bradly Nadeau (Carolina) at Columbus.

Luca Del Bel Belluz (Columbus) vs. Carolina.

Gavin Brindley (Columbus) vs. Carolina.

April 17, 2024

Ruslan Iskhakov (New York Islanders) vs. Pittsburgh.

Aku Räty (Arizona) vs. Edmonton.

April 18, 2024

Nikita Chibrikov (Winnipeg) vs. Vancouver.

Brad Lambert (Winnipeg) vs. Vancouver.

William Gauthier (Anaheim) at Vegas.

[maximumwobblerbanditdonut]

Duncan Lacroix stands in front of a statue with the Beatles' song playing in the background, seemingly unaware of what type of statue it is. 🙄

This is the statue behind Duncan, Statue of Earl Roberts by Harry Bates, which is in Glasgow`s Kelvingrove Park, commemorates one of the most distinguished commanders of the British Empire, Field Marshal Lord Frederick Sleigh Roberts of Kandahar 1st Earl Roberts (1832 – 1914) and is an exact replica of the original which was unveiled in 1898 in Calcutta, India, to acknowledge his actions during the “Indian Rebellion,” 1857-1858 also known as the “Sepoy Mutiny”.

Field Marshal Frederick Sleigh Roberts (30 September 1832 – 14 November 1914) VC KG KP GCB OM GCSI GCIE KStJ PC was one of Britain’s most successful military commanders of the 19th century. British Victorian-era general born in Kanpur (Cawnpore) India served much of his military career there. Kanpur became one of the most important commercial and military stations of British India.

He won important victories during the Second Afghan War and revitalised the British campaign in the Boer War. He rose to Major-General during the Afghan war, 1878-80, and Commander-in-Chief in India, 1885-93.

A Field Marshal is the highest rank in the British Army. The rank of Field Marshal is never awarded except to a General who has commanded an army in war.

These are words from a recruiting speech given by Lord Roberts:

"I seem to see the gleam in the near distance of the weapons and accoutrements of this Army of the future, this Citizen Army, the wonder of these islands, and the pledge of the peace and of the continued greatness of this Empire" Extract from Lord Robert's speech in Glasgow on 6th May 1913.

Lord Roberts was the protagonist of a national military service and he visited Glasgow on the 5th of May 1913 as part of his duties to the National Service League and aimed to ‘rouse public interest to the necessity of a more adequate home defence.

The University of Glasgow decided confer his honorary degree upon him at a special ceremony, to coincide with Lord Roberts visit at this time. Professor James Moir, Dean of the Faculty of Law, presented Earl Roberts for the degree of Doctor of Laws at the Bute hall.

Lord Roberts died at the Front of pneumonia at St Omer, France while visiting Indian troops fighting the First World War. He was given a state funeral after lying in state at Westminster Hall (only one of two non-royal family members to do so in the 20th century, the other being Sir Winston Churchill) and was buried in St Paul's Cathedral.

Indian troops preceding the coffin of Field Marshal Roberts, November 1914. From W. R. DEIGHTON, 4, GRAND HOTEL BUILDINGS, STRAND, LONDON, W.C.

#StatueofEarlRoberts #KelvingrovePark #Victorianera #LordFrederickSleighRoberts #RobertsofKandahar #1stEarlRoberts #replica #Calcutta #India #IndianRebellion #SepoyMutiny #commandersoftheBritishEmpire #Glasgow #FieldMarshal #General #Kanpur #Cawnpore #HarryBates #sculptor #StOmer #France #FirstWorldWar #Indiantroops #statefuneral #WestminsterHall #StPaul's Cathedral #lyinginstate

Posted 16th March 2024

[cleverhottubmiracle]

Ask someone to name the best New Year’s Eve movies, and more than likely they’ll come back with either a great movie with a single extremely memorable New Year’s Eve scene, or a terrible one centered around the holiday itself. That’s all well and good, but if you’re in the mood for a post-Christmas movie that maintains the holiday spirit without necessarily reminding you of the other holidays that just ended, you don’t need to throw on Boogie Nights, Phantom Thread, When Harry Met Sally, or Diner (or anyway, you don’t need to use New Year’s as an excuse to watch or rewatch any of those). And rest assured: You never need to throw on New Year’s Eve or 200 Cigarettes, ever. There may not be a wealth of great New Year’s Eve movies, but there is a solid group of good New Year's Eve movies from the past century or so. Rather than subjecting yourself to cacophonous musical performances (or a Garry Marshall ensemble comedy), consider ringing in the new year by time-traveling through this mix of classics and curiosities in which the holiday plays a central role. If you want to stay home on New Year’s Eve (or need something to watch from the couch the next day), one of these should do the trick.After the Thin Man (1936)The Thin Man, the first mystery-comedy featuring married semi-sleuths Nick and Norah Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy), is set during the Christmas season, and one of the most delightful aspects of the sequel (the first of five featuring Powell and Loy) is that it heads straight into New Years; would that more Christmas-set entertainments saw fit to follow this trajectory. Now, is After the Thin Man as good as the original? No, it is not. This is one of those series where the first one is the one everyone loves most, for good reason. But it’s also one of those series where the opportunity to simply spend more time with its lead characters as they banter, bicker, and solve additional mysteries is still a welcome one, and seasonally celebratory; Nick and Norah are essentially hosting a New Year's mystery party you’re not desperate to leave. Sadly, the series drops its holiday progression after this installment; maybe the further sequels would be better-regarded if they headed straight into Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s, and so on.Holiday (1938)Though the title refers to the plans Johnny Case (Cary Grant) has to take a much-deserved holiday after years of hard work, much of the pivotal action in this classic George Cukor-directed romantic dramedy takes place on New Year’s Eve. Over the course of the evening, Johnny finds himself increasingly drawn to the free-spirited Linda (Katharine Hepburn), the older sister of his fiancée – and during the lavish engagement party thrown by his business-minded future father-in-law, no less. Imbued with Cukor’s graceful touch along with Grant and Hepburn’s undeniable chemistry, Holiday is essentially a New Year’s resolution movie, with the heartening twist that Johnny is attempting to keep a promise of passion, freedom, and leisure, rather than hold himself to an exacting standard of capitalistic self-improvement.Repeat Performance (1947)As a recent Criterion Channel series illustrated, there are plenty of noirs and noir-adjacent thrillers set around Christmas. There are fewer that revolve around New Year’s Eve—and fewer still that use the holiday as an excuse for a thematically resonant fantastical do-over. Sheila Page (Joan Leslie) literally jumps the gun on the new year, as the movie opens with her standing over her slain husband with a smoking pistol in her hand. (Regrets, she has a few.) But on the morning of January 1st, she wakes up a full year earlier—husband alive, mistakes unmade, second chance magically granted. The movie follows her attempts to steer her life away from murder, raising questions about fate, the universe, and whether we’re doomed to repeat our worst impulses. For extra metatexual zing, Leslie’s character is an actress – but when dealing with what feels like fate, aren’t we all?Ocean’s 11 (1960)Look, let’s be real: the Soderbergh-Clooney version of Ocean’s 11 is better. A lot better; one of the best of its kind. But the Rat Pack version with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. (among others) is the one that actually places its heist on New Year’s Eve, which is admittedly an inspired idea. Even better, the arc of this earlier crack at this material is undoubtedly New Year’s-coded: You start off excited to see a bunch of familiar faces, start to get bored and wonder if you’ve arrived too early as the party meanders through its early stages, get more excited and engaged once the clock inches closer to midnight and everything starts to feel livelier, and feel a bit of a letdown in the aftermath as the evening amounts to a long set-up with a modestly amusing punchline.More American Graffiti (1979)Did you know there was a sequel to George Lucas’s seminal 1973 film American Graffiti, and that it shares a title with a second volume of the original film’s soundtrack? Though it’s not nearly as great as the original (which is mainly to say it’s not one of the best movies of the 1970s), More American Graffiti does come up with an ingeniously overelaborate solution to following up an ensemble one-eventful-night narrative. Rather than reuniting all the characters who, as the previous movie’s final moments indicated, were unlikely to all see each other in the same place at the same time again, the sequel has four different storylines, each taking place on a successive New Year’s Eve in 1964, 1965, 1966, and 1967, intercut but easily legible thanks to the different characters and styles for each time period. The way the story splits off into dark war farce, semi-miserable domestic drama, and youth-culture chronicle perfectly captures the divergent (and, yes, sometimes disappointing) paths the characters find themselves on. Of course the movie must turn to New Year’s; as adults, the characters can no longer rely on school years and those attendant rituals to mark the passage of time. More diffuse by design, American Graffiti can’t be as powerful as its predecessor, but as a holiday-themed follow-up, it’s a fascinating experiment.New Year’s Evil (1980)The post-Halloween slasher boom provided two New Year’s-themed horror movies in 1980. Terror Train is the more traditional entry: Masked killer, young people getting offed at a prodigious rate, Jamie Lee Curtis, with the bonus of a Agatha Christie-ish gimmick: most of the action takes place on a moving train. But there was a better train-themed New Year’s movie coming down the track. 1980’s quickie oddity New Year’s Evil—which started shooting in mid-October and came out in time for the titular holiday two months later!—wins the token holiday-themed slasher spot. Though the killer eventually, halfheartedly dons a creepy mask (a caricature of Stan Laurel, no less!), much of the movie is an unusual hybrid of ridiculous-gimmick slasher (a killer picks off victims one by one, timed to New Year’s celebrations across time zones), and serial-killer thriller, where we see the guy’s face from the jump. The de facto final girl is a glamorous DJ (Roz Kelly) hosting a live countdown show all evening, ringing in the year from coast to coast as bands described by the movie as “punk” and “new wave” play. (The two real-life bands on display, Shadow and Made in Japan, are more pop-metal and power-pop, respectively.) The live footage and accompanying neon lighting gives this 86-minute movie an extra jolt of novelty; it’s not exactly terrifying, but it’s entertaining perverse and has genuine holiday atmosphere, giving a Dick Clark-style TV broadcast a menacing, purgatorial feel that now doubles as a time capsule. Also and relatedly, the theme song by Shadow rips.Ghostbusters II (1989)It’s nowhere near as good as the first Ghostbusters; the cast feels like they’re cheerfully going along, rather than enthusiastically inspired, the story engages in some lazy resetting before getting the group together, and the tone feels more oriented toward the surprising number of young fans the first movie picked up. Yet that last bit also makes this sequel a strong New Year’s choice for families, especially considering that the plot revolves around a river of pink slime underneath New York City that feeds off of bad vibes and negativity. Is it a little corny that the Ghostbusters rally the dyspeptic citizenry to their cause by animating the Statue of Liberty with “positively charged” slime and using it as a vehicle for engendering feelings of togetherness? No—it’s extremely corny. But it’s also a zany, amusing alternative to the pure hell people must experience watching the ball drop in Times Square.Metropolitan (1990)What lesser New Year’s Eve movies like New Year’s Eve and 200 Cigarettes get wrong is their understandable insistence on packing as much one-crazy-night action as possible into 24 hours or so; what Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan gets right is how the whole last week of the year, when schools are often out and offices often closed, can feel like a melancholy culmination of something, even if we’re not exactly sure what. That’s especially true for young people on some kind of in-between break, and Stillman’s film is one of the great young-people-on-break movies (an admittedly niche subgenre), wherein a group of mostly upper-class college-aged friends attend deb balls and after-parties during (but not necessarily of) the holiday season. They pontificate and posture as befits their social status, while possibly starting to realize an inkling of the world outside that youthful bubble, and the myriad opportunities for failure and disappointment that await there. Like Stillman’s terrific Last Days of Disco, it’s about existing in a season of parties and starting to see the end of it on the horizon.Peter’s Friends (1992)Peter’s Friends is essentially a British Big Chill where the reunion takes place on a New Year’s weekend rather than forced by tragedy – though there is a dash of the tragic in this dramedy co-written by comedian Rita Rudner (who also has a supporting role as a famous spouse on the outside of the semi-estranged friend group). It’s easy to see why it feels less zeitgeisty than Big Chill did in its day; the latter’s 15-year gap between college in 1968 and reuniting in 1983 feels a lot more eventful than Peter’s trip from 1982, when the friends are working together in some kind of insufferable performance troupe, to their 1992 adulthood (though the super-familiar soundtrack cuts are at least less musty today than some of those Big Chill needle drops). What makes the movie memorable, and a worthwhile evocation of the holiday, is how director Kenneth Branagh (who also plays one of the friends) captures the simultaneous chumminess and rancor of longtime friends, particularly those with a flair for the dramatic. At the center is a lovely, understated performance from Stephen Fry as Peter, a privileged young man who has reached a crossroads seemingly by accident, for reasons that become more clear as the movie goes on. If you’re missing your old school chums on New Year’s, Peter’s Friends can offer some surrogates, or maybe remind you of what a headache those group dynamics can be.Strange Days (1995)One of director Kathryn Bigelow’s best – and, in its initial release, most slept-on – features, Strange Days takes place during the last few days of 1999, generating a turn-of-millennium tension that became more subtextual during actual movies from 1999; maybe Y2K rattled enough real-life nerves to cause filmmakers to back off. Strange Days, co-scripted by James Cameron, certainly doesn’t back off, at least for most of its running time: It folds in police brutality and digitally augmented living in a way that felt like slamming a bunch of hot buttons back in ’95, and has circled back around to feeling contemporary again decades later. Lenny (Ralph Fiennes), a slickster dirtbag, peddles illegal memory recordings designed to let people live through other people’s experiences, with all of the sleaze, thrills, violence, and sadness that entails; it’s like a chilling solution to Instagram FOMO that someone at Facebook is probably working to recreate at this very instant. When one of Lenny’s memory discs turns out to contain evidence of a murder, he and his longtime gal pal Mace (Angela Bassett) are drawn into a dangerous conspiracy. If you tend to experience the passage of another year as if you’re on the precipice of disaster, Strange Days is jittery and paranoid enough to give you a fix, but not so dark (maybe even, in the end, a little too squishy) to fry your brain.Four Rooms (1995)Once regarded as a massive disappointment in the way that only “Quentin Tarantino’s directorial follow-up to Pulp Fiction” could, the fullness of time has revealed Four Rooms as an uneven novelty—also known as an anthology film, a format that gets a bad rap for its inability to produce flawless gems. But flawless is clearly not what the eclectic Four Rooms is going for as it offers a quartet of entertaining stories taking place at the same hotel on New Year’s Eve, all involving the green and overtaxed bellman Ted (Tim Roth). Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, and Tarantino each take a go at torturing poor Ted, and though the results are uneven, the segments are brisk and amusing enough to make the whole thing worthwhile as a tour through other people’s leisure time. The slapsticky Rodriguez segment “The Misbehavers” clearly prefigured his Spy Kids series, and Tarantino’s “The Man from Hollywood,” a riff on an old Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes, is the perfect seedy post-fame hangover/hangout for the pre-dawn hours.Highball (1998)Noah Baumbach would not put this movie on this list. Noah Baumbach would, by all indications, prefer that this movie did not exist; it was made with leftover time and money from his second film Mr. Jealousy, and according to the filmmaker, it wasn’t really properly finished—a failed experiment that was released to the home-video market with Baumbach’s name pseudonymously removed from the writing and directing credits (though amusingly, he remains properly credited as an actor; yes, like Tarantino, he appears in his own film here, and he’s very funny.) But you should not listen to Noah Baumbach on this particular matter, because Highball is up there with Mistress America and Kicking and Screaming as one of his flat-out funniest movies, a more purely comic gloss on his typically sharp explorations of social niceties and relationship dynamics. The whole thing doesn’t actually unfold on New Year’s; that’s the final segment in a triptych of party sequences with the same loose friend group (including Metropolitan’s Chris Eigeman!) gathering at the same Brooklyn apartment: a birthday party, a Halloween bash, and the New Year’s event, with a variety of relationships ebbing and flowing both at the parties and offscreen in between them. The birthday party is the most grounded in elegantly wrought cringe comedy, based around the presence of Felix (Carlos Jacott), an asshole who Travis (Christopher Reed) considers his best friend in a way that is both inexplicable and familiar. The Halloween party is the funniest, with a lot of costume-based shenanigans (including Baumbach accidentally dressing like Hitler). But the weird, uncomfortable soul of the movie is the New Year’s segment, where the characters’ regret and confusion really takes shape.Snowpiercer (2013)Aren’t holidays like New Year’s just social constructions, anyway? If you want to take a deconstructionist approach to the holiday, consider Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi thriller Snowpiercer, which (like New Year’s non-classic Terror Train) takes place mostly on a moving train. In the aftermath of a new ice-age apocalypse, remaining humans are packed (or, if you’re wealthy, comfortably spaced out) onto a massive 10-mile train, which circumnavigates the iced-over globe in an endless loop. To celebrate their trip around the planet, train denizens perform a New Year’s countdown every time it passes a landmark bridge – which is more often than the typical 365-day calendar, but when the whole planet is covered in ice and snow, what’s the difference? If you want to chase your pessimism with just the faintest glimmer of hope about the dawning of a new year, while acknowledging how arbitrary that specific marker may be, just hop aboard the Snowpiercer train. Source link

[norajworld]

Ask someone to name the best New Year’s Eve movies, and more than likely they’ll come back with either a great movie with a single extremely memorable New Year’s Eve scene, or a terrible one centered around the holiday itself. That’s all well and good, but if you’re in the mood for a post-Christmas movie that maintains the holiday spirit without necessarily reminding you of the other holidays that just ended, you don’t need to throw on Boogie Nights, Phantom Thread, When Harry Met Sally, or Diner (or anyway, you don’t need to use New Year’s as an excuse to watch or rewatch any of those). And rest assured: You never need to throw on New Year’s Eve or 200 Cigarettes, ever. There may not be a wealth of great New Year’s Eve movies, but there is a solid group of good New Year's Eve movies from the past century or so. Rather than subjecting yourself to cacophonous musical performances (or a Garry Marshall ensemble comedy), consider ringing in the new year by time-traveling through this mix of classics and curiosities in which the holiday plays a central role. If you want to stay home on New Year’s Eve (or need something to watch from the couch the next day), one of these should do the trick.After the Thin Man (1936)The Thin Man, the first mystery-comedy featuring married semi-sleuths Nick and Norah Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy), is set during the Christmas season, and one of the most delightful aspects of the sequel (the first of five featuring Powell and Loy) is that it heads straight into New Years; would that more Christmas-set entertainments saw fit to follow this trajectory. Now, is After the Thin Man as good as the original? No, it is not. This is one of those series where the first one is the one everyone loves most, for good reason. But it’s also one of those series where the opportunity to simply spend more time with its lead characters as they banter, bicker, and solve additional mysteries is still a welcome one, and seasonally celebratory; Nick and Norah are essentially hosting a New Year's mystery party you’re not desperate to leave. Sadly, the series drops its holiday progression after this installment; maybe the further sequels would be better-regarded if they headed straight into Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s, and so on.Holiday (1938)Though the title refers to the plans Johnny Case (Cary Grant) has to take a much-deserved holiday after years of hard work, much of the pivotal action in this classic George Cukor-directed romantic dramedy takes place on New Year’s Eve. Over the course of the evening, Johnny finds himself increasingly drawn to the free-spirited Linda (Katharine Hepburn), the older sister of his fiancée – and during the lavish engagement party thrown by his business-minded future father-in-law, no less. Imbued with Cukor’s graceful touch along with Grant and Hepburn’s undeniable chemistry, Holiday is essentially a New Year’s resolution movie, with the heartening twist that Johnny is attempting to keep a promise of passion, freedom, and leisure, rather than hold himself to an exacting standard of capitalistic self-improvement.Repeat Performance (1947)As a recent Criterion Channel series illustrated, there are plenty of noirs and noir-adjacent thrillers set around Christmas. There are fewer that revolve around New Year’s Eve—and fewer still that use the holiday as an excuse for a thematically resonant fantastical do-over. Sheila Page (Joan Leslie) literally jumps the gun on the new year, as the movie opens with her standing over her slain husband with a smoking pistol in her hand. (Regrets, she has a few.) But on the morning of January 1st, she wakes up a full year earlier—husband alive, mistakes unmade, second chance magically granted. The movie follows her attempts to steer her life away from murder, raising questions about fate, the universe, and whether we’re doomed to repeat our worst impulses. For extra metatexual zing, Leslie’s character is an actress – but when dealing with what feels like fate, aren’t we all?Ocean’s 11 (1960)Look, let’s be real: the Soderbergh-Clooney version of Ocean’s 11 is better. A lot better; one of the best of its kind. But the Rat Pack version with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. (among others) is the one that actually places its heist on New Year’s Eve, which is admittedly an inspired idea. Even better, the arc of this earlier crack at this material is undoubtedly New Year’s-coded: You start off excited to see a bunch of familiar faces, start to get bored and wonder if you’ve arrived too early as the party meanders through its early stages, get more excited and engaged once the clock inches closer to midnight and everything starts to feel livelier, and feel a bit of a letdown in the aftermath as the evening amounts to a long set-up with a modestly amusing punchline.More American Graffiti (1979)Did you know there was a sequel to George Lucas’s seminal 1973 film American Graffiti, and that it shares a title with a second volume of the original film’s soundtrack? Though it’s not nearly as great as the original (which is mainly to say it’s not one of the best movies of the 1970s), More American Graffiti does come up with an ingeniously overelaborate solution to following up an ensemble one-eventful-night narrative. Rather than reuniting all the characters who, as the previous movie’s final moments indicated, were unlikely to all see each other in the same place at the same time again, the sequel has four different storylines, each taking place on a successive New Year’s Eve in 1964, 1965, 1966, and 1967, intercut but easily legible thanks to the different characters and styles for each time period. The way the story splits off into dark war farce, semi-miserable domestic drama, and youth-culture chronicle perfectly captures the divergent (and, yes, sometimes disappointing) paths the characters find themselves on. Of course the movie must turn to New Year’s; as adults, the characters can no longer rely on school years and those attendant rituals to mark the passage of time. More diffuse by design, American Graffiti can’t be as powerful as its predecessor, but as a holiday-themed follow-up, it’s a fascinating experiment.New Year’s Evil (1980)The post-Halloween slasher boom provided two New Year’s-themed horror movies in 1980. Terror Train is the more traditional entry: Masked killer, young people getting offed at a prodigious rate, Jamie Lee Curtis, with the bonus of a Agatha Christie-ish gimmick: most of the action takes place on a moving train. But there was a better train-themed New Year’s movie coming down the track. 1980’s quickie oddity New Year’s Evil—which started shooting in mid-October and came out in time for the titular holiday two months later!—wins the token holiday-themed slasher spot. Though the killer eventually, halfheartedly dons a creepy mask (a caricature of Stan Laurel, no less!), much of the movie is an unusual hybrid of ridiculous-gimmick slasher (a killer picks off victims one by one, timed to New Year’s celebrations across time zones), and serial-killer thriller, where we see the guy’s face from the jump. The de facto final girl is a glamorous DJ (Roz Kelly) hosting a live countdown show all evening, ringing in the year from coast to coast as bands described by the movie as “punk” and “new wave” play. (The two real-life bands on display, Shadow and Made in Japan, are more pop-metal and power-pop, respectively.) The live footage and accompanying neon lighting gives this 86-minute movie an extra jolt of novelty; it’s not exactly terrifying, but it’s entertaining perverse and has genuine holiday atmosphere, giving a Dick Clark-style TV broadcast a menacing, purgatorial feel that now doubles as a time capsule. Also and relatedly, the theme song by Shadow rips.Ghostbusters II (1989)It’s nowhere near as good as the first Ghostbusters; the cast feels like they’re cheerfully going along, rather than enthusiastically inspired, the story engages in some lazy resetting before getting the group together, and the tone feels more oriented toward the surprising number of young fans the first movie picked up. Yet that last bit also makes this sequel a strong New Year’s choice for families, especially considering that the plot revolves around a river of pink slime underneath New York City that feeds off of bad vibes and negativity. Is it a little corny that the Ghostbusters rally the dyspeptic citizenry to their cause by animating the Statue of Liberty with “positively charged” slime and using it as a vehicle for engendering feelings of togetherness? No—it’s extremely corny. But it’s also a zany, amusing alternative to the pure hell people must experience watching the ball drop in Times Square.Metropolitan (1990)What lesser New Year’s Eve movies like New Year’s Eve and 200 Cigarettes get wrong is their understandable insistence on packing as much one-crazy-night action as possible into 24 hours or so; what Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan gets right is how the whole last week of the year, when schools are often out and offices often closed, can feel like a melancholy culmination of something, even if we’re not exactly sure what. That’s especially true for young people on some kind of in-between break, and Stillman’s film is one of the great young-people-on-break movies (an admittedly niche subgenre), wherein a group of mostly upper-class college-aged friends attend deb balls and after-parties during (but not necessarily of) the holiday season. They pontificate and posture as befits their social status, while possibly starting to realize an inkling of the world outside that youthful bubble, and the myriad opportunities for failure and disappointment that await there. Like Stillman’s terrific Last Days of Disco, it’s about existing in a season of parties and starting to see the end of it on the horizon.Peter’s Friends (1992)Peter’s Friends is essentially a British Big Chill where the reunion takes place on a New Year’s weekend rather than forced by tragedy – though there is a dash of the tragic in this dramedy co-written by comedian Rita Rudner (who also has a supporting role as a famous spouse on the outside of the semi-estranged friend group). It’s easy to see why it feels less zeitgeisty than Big Chill did in its day; the latter’s 15-year gap between college in 1968 and reuniting in 1983 feels a lot more eventful than Peter’s trip from 1982, when the friends are working together in some kind of insufferable performance troupe, to their 1992 adulthood (though the super-familiar soundtrack cuts are at least less musty today than some of those Big Chill needle drops). What makes the movie memorable, and a worthwhile evocation of the holiday, is how director Kenneth Branagh (who also plays one of the friends) captures the simultaneous chumminess and rancor of longtime friends, particularly those with a flair for the dramatic. At the center is a lovely, understated performance from Stephen Fry as Peter, a privileged young man who has reached a crossroads seemingly by accident, for reasons that become more clear as the movie goes on. If you’re missing your old school chums on New Year’s, Peter’s Friends can offer some surrogates, or maybe remind you of what a headache those group dynamics can be.Strange Days (1995)One of director Kathryn Bigelow’s best – and, in its initial release, most slept-on – features, Strange Days takes place during the last few days of 1999, generating a turn-of-millennium tension that became more subtextual during actual movies from 1999; maybe Y2K rattled enough real-life nerves to cause filmmakers to back off. Strange Days, co-scripted by James Cameron, certainly doesn’t back off, at least for most of its running time: It folds in police brutality and digitally augmented living in a way that felt like slamming a bunch of hot buttons back in ’95, and has circled back around to feeling contemporary again decades later. Lenny (Ralph Fiennes), a slickster dirtbag, peddles illegal memory recordings designed to let people live through other people’s experiences, with all of the sleaze, thrills, violence, and sadness that entails; it’s like a chilling solution to Instagram FOMO that someone at Facebook is probably working to recreate at this very instant. When one of Lenny’s memory discs turns out to contain evidence of a murder, he and his longtime gal pal Mace (Angela Bassett) are drawn into a dangerous conspiracy. If you tend to experience the passage of another year as if you’re on the precipice of disaster, Strange Days is jittery and paranoid enough to give you a fix, but not so dark (maybe even, in the end, a little too squishy) to fry your brain.Four Rooms (1995)Once regarded as a massive disappointment in the way that only “Quentin Tarantino’s directorial follow-up to Pulp Fiction” could, the fullness of time has revealed Four Rooms as an uneven novelty—also known as an anthology film, a format that gets a bad rap for its inability to produce flawless gems. But flawless is clearly not what the eclectic Four Rooms is going for as it offers a quartet of entertaining stories taking place at the same hotel on New Year’s Eve, all involving the green and overtaxed bellman Ted (Tim Roth). Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, and Tarantino each take a go at torturing poor Ted, and though the results are uneven, the segments are brisk and amusing enough to make the whole thing worthwhile as a tour through other people’s leisure time. The slapsticky Rodriguez segment “The Misbehavers” clearly prefigured his Spy Kids series, and Tarantino’s “The Man from Hollywood,” a riff on an old Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes, is the perfect seedy post-fame hangover/hangout for the pre-dawn hours.Highball (1998)Noah Baumbach would not put this movie on this list. Noah Baumbach would, by all indications, prefer that this movie did not exist; it was made with leftover time and money from his second film Mr. Jealousy, and according to the filmmaker, it wasn’t really properly finished—a failed experiment that was released to the home-video market with Baumbach’s name pseudonymously removed from the writing and directing credits (though amusingly, he remains properly credited as an actor; yes, like Tarantino, he appears in his own film here, and he’s very funny.) But you should not listen to Noah Baumbach on this particular matter, because Highball is up there with Mistress America and Kicking and Screaming as one of his flat-out funniest movies, a more purely comic gloss on his typically sharp explorations of social niceties and relationship dynamics. The whole thing doesn’t actually unfold on New Year’s; that’s the final segment in a triptych of party sequences with the same loose friend group (including Metropolitan’s Chris Eigeman!) gathering at the same Brooklyn apartment: a birthday party, a Halloween bash, and the New Year’s event, with a variety of relationships ebbing and flowing both at the parties and offscreen in between them. The birthday party is the most grounded in elegantly wrought cringe comedy, based around the presence of Felix (Carlos Jacott), an asshole who Travis (Christopher Reed) considers his best friend in a way that is both inexplicable and familiar. The Halloween party is the funniest, with a lot of costume-based shenanigans (including Baumbach accidentally dressing like Hitler). But the weird, uncomfortable soul of the movie is the New Year’s segment, where the characters’ regret and confusion really takes shape.Snowpiercer (2013)Aren’t holidays like New Year’s just social constructions, anyway? If you want to take a deconstructionist approach to the holiday, consider Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi thriller Snowpiercer, which (like New Year’s non-classic Terror Train) takes place mostly on a moving train. In the aftermath of a new ice-age apocalypse, remaining humans are packed (or, if you’re wealthy, comfortably spaced out) onto a massive 10-mile train, which circumnavigates the iced-over globe in an endless loop. To celebrate their trip around the planet, train denizens perform a New Year’s countdown every time it passes a landmark bridge – which is more often than the typical 365-day calendar, but when the whole planet is covered in ice and snow, what’s the difference? If you want to chase your pessimism with just the faintest glimmer of hope about the dawning of a new year, while acknowledging how arbitrary that specific marker may be, just hop aboard the Snowpiercer train. Source link

[ellajme0]

Ask someone to name the best New Year’s Eve movies, and more than likely they’ll come back with either a great movie with a single extremely memorable New Year’s Eve scene, or a terrible one centered around the holiday itself. That’s all well and good, but if you’re in the mood for a post-Christmas movie that maintains the holiday spirit without necessarily reminding you of the other holidays that just ended, you don’t need to throw on Boogie Nights, Phantom Thread, When Harry Met Sally, or Diner (or anyway, you don’t need to use New Year’s as an excuse to watch or rewatch any of those). And rest assured: You never need to throw on New Year’s Eve or 200 Cigarettes, ever. There may not be a wealth of great New Year’s Eve movies, but there is a solid group of good New Year's Eve movies from the past century or so. Rather than subjecting yourself to cacophonous musical performances (or a Garry Marshall ensemble comedy), consider ringing in the new year by time-traveling through this mix of classics and curiosities in which the holiday plays a central role. If you want to stay home on New Year’s Eve (or need something to watch from the couch the next day), one of these should do the trick.After the Thin Man (1936)The Thin Man, the first mystery-comedy featuring married semi-sleuths Nick and Norah Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy), is set during the Christmas season, and one of the most delightful aspects of the sequel (the first of five featuring Powell and Loy) is that it heads straight into New Years; would that more Christmas-set entertainments saw fit to follow this trajectory. Now, is After the Thin Man as good as the original? No, it is not. This is one of those series where the first one is the one everyone loves most, for good reason. But it’s also one of those series where the opportunity to simply spend more time with its lead characters as they banter, bicker, and solve additional mysteries is still a welcome one, and seasonally celebratory; Nick and Norah are essentially hosting a New Year's mystery party you’re not desperate to leave. Sadly, the series drops its holiday progression after this installment; maybe the further sequels would be better-regarded if they headed straight into Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s, and so on.Holiday (1938)Though the title refers to the plans Johnny Case (Cary Grant) has to take a much-deserved holiday after years of hard work, much of the pivotal action in this classic George Cukor-directed romantic dramedy takes place on New Year’s Eve. Over the course of the evening, Johnny finds himself increasingly drawn to the free-spirited Linda (Katharine Hepburn), the older sister of his fiancée – and during the lavish engagement party thrown by his business-minded future father-in-law, no less. Imbued with Cukor’s graceful touch along with Grant and Hepburn’s undeniable chemistry, Holiday is essentially a New Year’s resolution movie, with the heartening twist that Johnny is attempting to keep a promise of passion, freedom, and leisure, rather than hold himself to an exacting standard of capitalistic self-improvement.Repeat Performance (1947)As a recent Criterion Channel series illustrated, there are plenty of noirs and noir-adjacent thrillers set around Christmas. There are fewer that revolve around New Year’s Eve—and fewer still that use the holiday as an excuse for a thematically resonant fantastical do-over. Sheila Page (Joan Leslie) literally jumps the gun on the new year, as the movie opens with her standing over her slain husband with a smoking pistol in her hand. (Regrets, she has a few.) But on the morning of January 1st, she wakes up a full year earlier—husband alive, mistakes unmade, second chance magically granted. The movie follows her attempts to steer her life away from murder, raising questions about fate, the universe, and whether we’re doomed to repeat our worst impulses. For extra metatexual zing, Leslie’s character is an actress – but when dealing with what feels like fate, aren’t we all?Ocean’s 11 (1960)Look, let’s be real: the Soderbergh-Clooney version of Ocean’s 11 is better. A lot better; one of the best of its kind. But the Rat Pack version with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. (among others) is the one that actually places its heist on New Year’s Eve, which is admittedly an inspired idea. Even better, the arc of this earlier crack at this material is undoubtedly New Year’s-coded: You start off excited to see a bunch of familiar faces, start to get bored and wonder if you’ve arrived too early as the party meanders through its early stages, get more excited and engaged once the clock inches closer to midnight and everything starts to feel livelier, and feel a bit of a letdown in the aftermath as the evening amounts to a long set-up with a modestly amusing punchline.More American Graffiti (1979)Did you know there was a sequel to George Lucas’s seminal 1973 film American Graffiti, and that it shares a title with a second volume of the original film’s soundtrack? Though it’s not nearly as great as the original (which is mainly to say it’s not one of the best movies of the 1970s), More American Graffiti does come up with an ingeniously overelaborate solution to following up an ensemble one-eventful-night narrative. Rather than reuniting all the characters who, as the previous movie’s final moments indicated, were unlikely to all see each other in the same place at the same time again, the sequel has four different storylines, each taking place on a successive New Year’s Eve in 1964, 1965, 1966, and 1967, intercut but easily legible thanks to the different characters and styles for each time period. The way the story splits off into dark war farce, semi-miserable domestic drama, and youth-culture chronicle perfectly captures the divergent (and, yes, sometimes disappointing) paths the characters find themselves on. Of course the movie must turn to New Year’s; as adults, the characters can no longer rely on school years and those attendant rituals to mark the passage of time. More diffuse by design, American Graffiti can’t be as powerful as its predecessor, but as a holiday-themed follow-up, it’s a fascinating experiment.New Year’s Evil (1980)The post-Halloween slasher boom provided two New Year’s-themed horror movies in 1980. Terror Train is the more traditional entry: Masked killer, young people getting offed at a prodigious rate, Jamie Lee Curtis, with the bonus of a Agatha Christie-ish gimmick: most of the action takes place on a moving train. But there was a better train-themed New Year’s movie coming down the track. 1980’s quickie oddity New Year’s Evil—which started shooting in mid-October and came out in time for the titular holiday two months later!—wins the token holiday-themed slasher spot. Though the killer eventually, halfheartedly dons a creepy mask (a caricature of Stan Laurel, no less!), much of the movie is an unusual hybrid of ridiculous-gimmick slasher (a killer picks off victims one by one, timed to New Year’s celebrations across time zones), and serial-killer thriller, where we see the guy’s face from the jump. The de facto final girl is a glamorous DJ (Roz Kelly) hosting a live countdown show all evening, ringing in the year from coast to coast as bands described by the movie as “punk” and “new wave” play. (The two real-life bands on display, Shadow and Made in Japan, are more pop-metal and power-pop, respectively.) The live footage and accompanying neon lighting gives this 86-minute movie an extra jolt of novelty; it’s not exactly terrifying, but it’s entertaining perverse and has genuine holiday atmosphere, giving a Dick Clark-style TV broadcast a menacing, purgatorial feel that now doubles as a time capsule. Also and relatedly, the theme song by Shadow rips.Ghostbusters II (1989)It’s nowhere near as good as the first Ghostbusters; the cast feels like they’re cheerfully going along, rather than enthusiastically inspired, the story engages in some lazy resetting before getting the group together, and the tone feels more oriented toward the surprising number of young fans the first movie picked up. Yet that last bit also makes this sequel a strong New Year’s choice for families, especially considering that the plot revolves around a river of pink slime underneath New York City that feeds off of bad vibes and negativity. Is it a little corny that the Ghostbusters rally the dyspeptic citizenry to their cause by animating the Statue of Liberty with “positively charged” slime and using it as a vehicle for engendering feelings of togetherness? No—it’s extremely corny. But it’s also a zany, amusing alternative to the pure hell people must experience watching the ball drop in Times Square.Metropolitan (1990)What lesser New Year’s Eve movies like New Year’s Eve and 200 Cigarettes get wrong is their understandable insistence on packing as much one-crazy-night action as possible into 24 hours or so; what Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan gets right is how the whole last week of the year, when schools are often out and offices often closed, can feel like a melancholy culmination of something, even if we’re not exactly sure what. That’s especially true for young people on some kind of in-between break, and Stillman’s film is one of the great young-people-on-break movies (an admittedly niche subgenre), wherein a group of mostly upper-class college-aged friends attend deb balls and after-parties during (but not necessarily of) the holiday season. They pontificate and posture as befits their social status, while possibly starting to realize an inkling of the world outside that youthful bubble, and the myriad opportunities for failure and disappointment that await there. Like Stillman’s terrific Last Days of Disco, it’s about existing in a season of parties and starting to see the end of it on the horizon.Peter’s Friends (1992)Peter’s Friends is essentially a British Big Chill where the reunion takes place on a New Year’s weekend rather than forced by tragedy – though there is a dash of the tragic in this dramedy co-written by comedian Rita Rudner (who also has a supporting role as a famous spouse on the outside of the semi-estranged friend group). It’s easy to see why it feels less zeitgeisty than Big Chill did in its day; the latter’s 15-year gap between college in 1968 and reuniting in 1983 feels a lot more eventful than Peter’s trip from 1982, when the friends are working together in some kind of insufferable performance troupe, to their 1992 adulthood (though the super-familiar soundtrack cuts are at least less musty today than some of those Big Chill needle drops). What makes the movie memorable, and a worthwhile evocation of the holiday, is how director Kenneth Branagh (who also plays one of the friends) captures the simultaneous chumminess and rancor of longtime friends, particularly those with a flair for the dramatic. At the center is a lovely, understated performance from Stephen Fry as Peter, a privileged young man who has reached a crossroads seemingly by accident, for reasons that become more clear as the movie goes on. If you’re missing your old school chums on New Year’s, Peter’s Friends can offer some surrogates, or maybe remind you of what a headache those group dynamics can be.Strange Days (1995)One of director Kathryn Bigelow’s best – and, in its initial release, most slept-on – features, Strange Days takes place during the last few days of 1999, generating a turn-of-millennium tension that became more subtextual during actual movies from 1999; maybe Y2K rattled enough real-life nerves to cause filmmakers to back off. Strange Days, co-scripted by James Cameron, certainly doesn’t back off, at least for most of its running time: It folds in police brutality and digitally augmented living in a way that felt like slamming a bunch of hot buttons back in ’95, and has circled back around to feeling contemporary again decades later. Lenny (Ralph Fiennes), a slickster dirtbag, peddles illegal memory recordings designed to let people live through other people’s experiences, with all of the sleaze, thrills, violence, and sadness that entails; it’s like a chilling solution to Instagram FOMO that someone at Facebook is probably working to recreate at this very instant. When one of Lenny’s memory discs turns out to contain evidence of a murder, he and his longtime gal pal Mace (Angela Bassett) are drawn into a dangerous conspiracy. If you tend to experience the passage of another year as if you’re on the precipice of disaster, Strange Days is jittery and paranoid enough to give you a fix, but not so dark (maybe even, in the end, a little too squishy) to fry your brain.Four Rooms (1995)Once regarded as a massive disappointment in the way that only “Quentin Tarantino’s directorial follow-up to Pulp Fiction” could, the fullness of time has revealed Four Rooms as an uneven novelty—also known as an anthology film, a format that gets a bad rap for its inability to produce flawless gems. But flawless is clearly not what the eclectic Four Rooms is going for as it offers a quartet of entertaining stories taking place at the same hotel on New Year’s Eve, all involving the green and overtaxed bellman Ted (Tim Roth). Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, and Tarantino each take a go at torturing poor Ted, and though the results are uneven, the segments are brisk and amusing enough to make the whole thing worthwhile as a tour through other people’s leisure time. The slapsticky Rodriguez segment “The Misbehavers” clearly prefigured his Spy Kids series, and Tarantino’s “The Man from Hollywood,” a riff on an old Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes, is the perfect seedy post-fame hangover/hangout for the pre-dawn hours.Highball (1998)Noah Baumbach would not put this movie on this list. Noah Baumbach would, by all indications, prefer that this movie did not exist; it was made with leftover time and money from his second film Mr. Jealousy, and according to the filmmaker, it wasn’t really properly finished—a failed experiment that was released to the home-video market with Baumbach’s name pseudonymously removed from the writing and directing credits (though amusingly, he remains properly credited as an actor; yes, like Tarantino, he appears in his own film here, and he’s very funny.) But you should not listen to Noah Baumbach on this particular matter, because Highball is up there with Mistress America and Kicking and Screaming as one of his flat-out funniest movies, a more purely comic gloss on his typically sharp explorations of social niceties and relationship dynamics. The whole thing doesn’t actually unfold on New Year’s; that’s the final segment in a triptych of party sequences with the same loose friend group (including Metropolitan’s Chris Eigeman!) gathering at the same Brooklyn apartment: a birthday party, a Halloween bash, and the New Year’s event, with a variety of relationships ebbing and flowing both at the parties and offscreen in between them. The birthday party is the most grounded in elegantly wrought cringe comedy, based around the presence of Felix (Carlos Jacott), an asshole who Travis (Christopher Reed) considers his best friend in a way that is both inexplicable and familiar. The Halloween party is the funniest, with a lot of costume-based shenanigans (including Baumbach accidentally dressing like Hitler). But the weird, uncomfortable soul of the movie is the New Year’s segment, where the characters’ regret and confusion really takes shape.Snowpiercer (2013)Aren’t holidays like New Year’s just social constructions, anyway? If you want to take a deconstructionist approach to the holiday, consider Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi thriller Snowpiercer, which (like New Year’s non-classic Terror Train) takes place mostly on a moving train. In the aftermath of a new ice-age apocalypse, remaining humans are packed (or, if you’re wealthy, comfortably spaced out) onto a massive 10-mile train, which circumnavigates the iced-over globe in an endless loop. To celebrate their trip around the planet, train denizens perform a New Year’s countdown every time it passes a landmark bridge – which is more often than the typical 365-day calendar, but when the whole planet is covered in ice and snow, what’s the difference? If you want to chase your pessimism with just the faintest glimmer of hope about the dawning of a new year, while acknowledging how arbitrary that specific marker may be, just hop aboard the Snowpiercer train. Source link

[chilimili212]

Ask someone to name the best New Year’s Eve movies, and more than likely they’ll come back with either a great movie with a single extremely memorable New Year’s Eve scene, or a terrible one centered around the holiday itself. That’s all well and good, but if you’re in the mood for a post-Christmas movie that maintains the holiday spirit without necessarily reminding you of the other holidays that just ended, you don’t need to throw on Boogie Nights, Phantom Thread, When Harry Met Sally, or Diner (or anyway, you don’t need to use New Year’s as an excuse to watch or rewatch any of those). And rest assured: You never need to throw on New Year’s Eve or 200 Cigarettes, ever. There may not be a wealth of great New Year’s Eve movies, but there is a solid group of good New Year's Eve movies from the past century or so. Rather than subjecting yourself to cacophonous musical performances (or a Garry Marshall ensemble comedy), consider ringing in the new year by time-traveling through this mix of classics and curiosities in which the holiday plays a central role. If you want to stay home on New Year’s Eve (or need something to watch from the couch the next day), one of these should do the trick.After the Thin Man (1936)The Thin Man, the first mystery-comedy featuring married semi-sleuths Nick and Norah Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy), is set during the Christmas season, and one of the most delightful aspects of the sequel (the first of five featuring Powell and Loy) is that it heads straight into New Years; would that more Christmas-set entertainments saw fit to follow this trajectory. Now, is After the Thin Man as good as the original? No, it is not. This is one of those series where the first one is the one everyone loves most, for good reason. But it’s also one of those series where the opportunity to simply spend more time with its lead characters as they banter, bicker, and solve additional mysteries is still a welcome one, and seasonally celebratory; Nick and Norah are essentially hosting a New Year's mystery party you’re not desperate to leave. Sadly, the series drops its holiday progression after this installment; maybe the further sequels would be better-regarded if they headed straight into Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s, and so on.Holiday (1938)Though the title refers to the plans Johnny Case (Cary Grant) has to take a much-deserved holiday after years of hard work, much of the pivotal action in this classic George Cukor-directed romantic dramedy takes place on New Year’s Eve. Over the course of the evening, Johnny finds himself increasingly drawn to the free-spirited Linda (Katharine Hepburn), the older sister of his fiancée – and during the lavish engagement party thrown by his business-minded future father-in-law, no less. Imbued with Cukor’s graceful touch along with Grant and Hepburn’s undeniable chemistry, Holiday is essentially a New Year’s resolution movie, with the heartening twist that Johnny is attempting to keep a promise of passion, freedom, and leisure, rather than hold himself to an exacting standard of capitalistic self-improvement.Repeat Performance (1947)As a recent Criterion Channel series illustrated, there are plenty of noirs and noir-adjacent thrillers set around Christmas. There are fewer that revolve around New Year’s Eve—and fewer still that use the holiday as an excuse for a thematically resonant fantastical do-over. Sheila Page (Joan Leslie) literally jumps the gun on the new year, as the movie opens with her standing over her slain husband with a smoking pistol in her hand. (Regrets, she has a few.) But on the morning of January 1st, she wakes up a full year earlier—husband alive, mistakes unmade, second chance magically granted. The movie follows her attempts to steer her life away from murder, raising questions about fate, the universe, and whether we’re doomed to repeat our worst impulses. For extra metatexual zing, Leslie’s character is an actress – but when dealing with what feels like fate, aren’t we all?Ocean’s 11 (1960)Look, let’s be real: the Soderbergh-Clooney version of Ocean’s 11 is better. A lot better; one of the best of its kind. But the Rat Pack version with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. (among others) is the one that actually places its heist on New Year’s Eve, which is admittedly an inspired idea. Even better, the arc of this earlier crack at this material is undoubtedly New Year’s-coded: You start off excited to see a bunch of familiar faces, start to get bored and wonder if you’ve arrived too early as the party meanders through its early stages, get more excited and engaged once the clock inches closer to midnight and everything starts to feel livelier, and feel a bit of a letdown in the aftermath as the evening amounts to a long set-up with a modestly amusing punchline.More American Graffiti (1979)Did you know there was a sequel to George Lucas’s seminal 1973 film American Graffiti, and that it shares a title with a second volume of the original film’s soundtrack? Though it’s not nearly as great as the original (which is mainly to say it’s not one of the best movies of the 1970s), More American Graffiti does come up with an ingeniously overelaborate solution to following up an ensemble one-eventful-night narrative. Rather than reuniting all the characters who, as the previous movie’s final moments indicated, were unlikely to all see each other in the same place at the same time again, the sequel has four different storylines, each taking place on a successive New Year’s Eve in 1964, 1965, 1966, and 1967, intercut but easily legible thanks to the different characters and styles for each time period. The way the story splits off into dark war farce, semi-miserable domestic drama, and youth-culture chronicle perfectly captures the divergent (and, yes, sometimes disappointing) paths the characters find themselves on. Of course the movie must turn to New Year’s; as adults, the characters can no longer rely on school years and those attendant rituals to mark the passage of time. More diffuse by design, American Graffiti can’t be as powerful as its predecessor, but as a holiday-themed follow-up, it’s a fascinating experiment.New Year’s Evil (1980)The post-Halloween slasher boom provided two New Year’s-themed horror movies in 1980. Terror Train is the more traditional entry: Masked killer, young people getting offed at a prodigious rate, Jamie Lee Curtis, with the bonus of a Agatha Christie-ish gimmick: most of the action takes place on a moving train. But there was a better train-themed New Year’s movie coming down the track. 1980’s quickie oddity New Year’s Evil—which started shooting in mid-October and came out in time for the titular holiday two months later!—wins the token holiday-themed slasher spot. Though the killer eventually, halfheartedly dons a creepy mask (a caricature of Stan Laurel, no less!), much of the movie is an unusual hybrid of ridiculous-gimmick slasher (a killer picks off victims one by one, timed to New Year’s celebrations across time zones), and serial-killer thriller, where we see the guy’s face from the jump. The de facto final girl is a glamorous DJ (Roz Kelly) hosting a live countdown show all evening, ringing in the year from coast to coast as bands described by the movie as “punk” and “new wave” play. (The two real-life bands on display, Shadow and Made in Japan, are more pop-metal and power-pop, respectively.) The live footage and accompanying neon lighting gives this 86-minute movie an extra jolt of novelty; it’s not exactly terrifying, but it’s entertaining perverse and has genuine holiday atmosphere, giving a Dick Clark-style TV broadcast a menacing, purgatorial feel that now doubles as a time capsule. Also and relatedly, the theme song by Shadow rips.Ghostbusters II (1989)It’s nowhere near as good as the first Ghostbusters; the cast feels like they’re cheerfully going along, rather than enthusiastically inspired, the story engages in some lazy resetting before getting the group together, and the tone feels more oriented toward the surprising number of young fans the first movie picked up. Yet that last bit also makes this sequel a strong New Year’s choice for families, especially considering that the plot revolves around a river of pink slime underneath New York City that feeds off of bad vibes and negativity. Is it a little corny that the Ghostbusters rally the dyspeptic citizenry to their cause by animating the Statue of Liberty with “positively charged” slime and using it as a vehicle for engendering feelings of togetherness? No—it’s extremely corny. But it’s also a zany, amusing alternative to the pure hell people must experience watching the ball drop in Times Square.Metropolitan (1990)What lesser New Year’s Eve movies like New Year’s Eve and 200 Cigarettes get wrong is their understandable insistence on packing as much one-crazy-night action as possible into 24 hours or so; what Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan gets right is how the whole last week of the year, when schools are often out and offices often closed, can feel like a melancholy culmination of something, even if we’re not exactly sure what. That’s especially true for young people on some kind of in-between break, and Stillman’s film is one of the great young-people-on-break movies (an admittedly niche subgenre), wherein a group of mostly upper-class college-aged friends attend deb balls and after-parties during (but not necessarily of) the holiday season. They pontificate and posture as befits their social status, while possibly starting to realize an inkling of the world outside that youthful bubble, and the myriad opportunities for failure and disappointment that await there. Like Stillman’s terrific Last Days of Disco, it’s about existing in a season of parties and starting to see the end of it on the horizon.Peter’s Friends (1992)Peter’s Friends is essentially a British Big Chill where the reunion takes place on a New Year’s weekend rather than forced by tragedy – though there is a dash of the tragic in this dramedy co-written by comedian Rita Rudner (who also has a supporting role as a famous spouse on the outside of the semi-estranged friend group). It’s easy to see why it feels less zeitgeisty than Big Chill did in its day; the latter’s 15-year gap between college in 1968 and reuniting in 1983 feels a lot more eventful than Peter’s trip from 1982, when the friends are working together in some kind of insufferable performance troupe, to their 1992 adulthood (though the super-familiar soundtrack cuts are at least less musty today than some of those Big Chill needle drops). What makes the movie memorable, and a worthwhile evocation of the holiday, is how director Kenneth Branagh (who also plays one of the friends) captures the simultaneous chumminess and rancor of longtime friends, particularly those with a flair for the dramatic. At the center is a lovely, understated performance from Stephen Fry as Peter, a privileged young man who has reached a crossroads seemingly by accident, for reasons that become more clear as the movie goes on. If you’re missing your old school chums on New Year’s, Peter’s Friends can offer some surrogates, or maybe remind you of what a headache those group dynamics can be.Strange Days (1995)One of director Kathryn Bigelow’s best – and, in its initial release, most slept-on – features, Strange Days takes place during the last few days of 1999, generating a turn-of-millennium tension that became more subtextual during actual movies from 1999; maybe Y2K rattled enough real-life nerves to cause filmmakers to back off. Strange Days, co-scripted by James Cameron, certainly doesn’t back off, at least for most of its running time: It folds in police brutality and digitally augmented living in a way that felt like slamming a bunch of hot buttons back in ’95, and has circled back around to feeling contemporary again decades later. Lenny (Ralph Fiennes), a slickster dirtbag, peddles illegal memory recordings designed to let people live through other people’s experiences, with all of the sleaze, thrills, violence, and sadness that entails; it’s like a chilling solution to Instagram FOMO that someone at Facebook is probably working to recreate at this very instant. When one of Lenny’s memory discs turns out to contain evidence of a murder, he and his longtime gal pal Mace (Angela Bassett) are drawn into a dangerous conspiracy. If you tend to experience the passage of another year as if you’re on the precipice of disaster, Strange Days is jittery and paranoid enough to give you a fix, but not so dark (maybe even, in the end, a little too squishy) to fry your brain.Four Rooms (1995)Once regarded as a massive disappointment in the way that only “Quentin Tarantino’s directorial follow-up to Pulp Fiction” could, the fullness of time has revealed Four Rooms as an uneven novelty—also known as an anthology film, a format that gets a bad rap for its inability to produce flawless gems. But flawless is clearly not what the eclectic Four Rooms is going for as it offers a quartet of entertaining stories taking place at the same hotel on New Year’s Eve, all involving the green and overtaxed bellman Ted (Tim Roth). Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, and Tarantino each take a go at torturing poor Ted, and though the results are uneven, the segments are brisk and amusing enough to make the whole thing worthwhile as a tour through other people’s leisure time. The slapsticky Rodriguez segment “The Misbehavers” clearly prefigured his Spy Kids series, and Tarantino’s “The Man from Hollywood,” a riff on an old Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes, is the perfect seedy post-fame hangover/hangout for the pre-dawn hours.Highball (1998)Noah Baumbach would not put this movie on this list. Noah Baumbach would, by all indications, prefer that this movie did not exist; it was made with leftover time and money from his second film Mr. Jealousy, and according to the filmmaker, it wasn’t really properly finished—a failed experiment that was released to the home-video market with Baumbach’s name pseudonymously removed from the writing and directing credits (though amusingly, he remains properly credited as an actor; yes, like Tarantino, he appears in his own film here, and he’s very funny.) But you should not listen to Noah Baumbach on this particular matter, because Highball is up there with Mistress America and Kicking and Screaming as one of his flat-out funniest movies, a more purely comic gloss on his typically sharp explorations of social niceties and relationship dynamics. The whole thing doesn’t actually unfold on New Year’s; that’s the final segment in a triptych of party sequences with the same loose friend group (including Metropolitan’s Chris Eigeman!) gathering at the same Brooklyn apartment: a birthday party, a Halloween bash, and the New Year’s event, with a variety of relationships ebbing and flowing both at the parties and offscreen in between them. The birthday party is the most grounded in elegantly wrought cringe comedy, based around the presence of Felix (Carlos Jacott), an asshole who Travis (Christopher Reed) considers his best friend in a way that is both inexplicable and familiar. The Halloween party is the funniest, with a lot of costume-based shenanigans (including Baumbach accidentally dressing like Hitler). But the weird, uncomfortable soul of the movie is the New Year’s segment, where the characters’ regret and confusion really takes shape.Snowpiercer (2013)Aren’t holidays like New Year’s just social constructions, anyway? If you want to take a deconstructionist approach to the holiday, consider Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi thriller Snowpiercer, which (like New Year’s non-classic Terror Train) takes place mostly on a moving train. In the aftermath of a new ice-age apocalypse, remaining humans are packed (or, if you’re wealthy, comfortably spaced out) onto a massive 10-mile train, which circumnavigates the iced-over globe in an endless loop. To celebrate their trip around the planet, train denizens perform a New Year’s countdown every time it passes a landmark bridge – which is more often than the typical 365-day calendar, but when the whole planet is covered in ice and snow, what’s the difference? If you want to chase your pessimism with just the faintest glimmer of hope about the dawning of a new year, while acknowledging how arbitrary that specific marker may be, just hop aboard the Snowpiercer train. Source link

[oliviajoyice21]

Ask someone to name the best New Year’s Eve movies, and more than likely they’ll come back with either a great movie with a single extremely memorable New Year’s Eve scene, or a terrible one centered around the holiday itself. That’s all well and good, but if you’re in the mood for a post-Christmas movie that maintains the holiday spirit without necessarily reminding you of the other holidays that just ended, you don’t need to throw on Boogie Nights, Phantom Thread, When Harry Met Sally, or Diner (or anyway, you don’t need to use New Year’s as an excuse to watch or rewatch any of those). And rest assured: You never need to throw on New Year’s Eve or 200 Cigarettes, ever. There may not be a wealth of great New Year’s Eve movies, but there is a solid group of good New Year's Eve movies from the past century or so. Rather than subjecting yourself to cacophonous musical performances (or a Garry Marshall ensemble comedy), consider ringing in the new year by time-traveling through this mix of classics and curiosities in which the holiday plays a central role. If you want to stay home on New Year’s Eve (or need something to watch from the couch the next day), one of these should do the trick.After the Thin Man (1936)The Thin Man, the first mystery-comedy featuring married semi-sleuths Nick and Norah Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy), is set during the Christmas season, and one of the most delightful aspects of the sequel (the first of five featuring Powell and Loy) is that it heads straight into New Years; would that more Christmas-set entertainments saw fit to follow this trajectory. Now, is After the Thin Man as good as the original? No, it is not. This is one of those series where the first one is the one everyone loves most, for good reason. But it’s also one of those series where the opportunity to simply spend more time with its lead characters as they banter, bicker, and solve additional mysteries is still a welcome one, and seasonally celebratory; Nick and Norah are essentially hosting a New Year's mystery party you’re not desperate to leave. Sadly, the series drops its holiday progression after this installment; maybe the further sequels would be better-regarded if they headed straight into Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s, and so on.Holiday (1938)Though the title refers to the plans Johnny Case (Cary Grant) has to take a much-deserved holiday after years of hard work, much of the pivotal action in this classic George Cukor-directed romantic dramedy takes place on New Year’s Eve. Over the course of the evening, Johnny finds himself increasingly drawn to the free-spirited Linda (Katharine Hepburn), the older sister of his fiancée – and during the lavish engagement party thrown by his business-minded future father-in-law, no less. Imbued with Cukor’s graceful touch along with Grant and Hepburn’s undeniable chemistry, Holiday is essentially a New Year’s resolution movie, with the heartening twist that Johnny is attempting to keep a promise of passion, freedom, and leisure, rather than hold himself to an exacting standard of capitalistic self-improvement.Repeat Performance (1947)As a recent Criterion Channel series illustrated, there are plenty of noirs and noir-adjacent thrillers set around Christmas. There are fewer that revolve around New Year’s Eve—and fewer still that use the holiday as an excuse for a thematically resonant fantastical do-over. Sheila Page (Joan Leslie) literally jumps the gun on the new year, as the movie opens with her standing over her slain husband with a smoking pistol in her hand. (Regrets, she has a few.) But on the morning of January 1st, she wakes up a full year earlier—husband alive, mistakes unmade, second chance magically granted. The movie follows her attempts to steer her life away from murder, raising questions about fate, the universe, and whether we’re doomed to repeat our worst impulses. For extra metatexual zing, Leslie’s character is an actress – but when dealing with what feels like fate, aren’t we all?Ocean’s 11 (1960)Look, let’s be real: the Soderbergh-Clooney version of Ocean’s 11 is better. A lot better; one of the best of its kind. But the Rat Pack version with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. (among others) is the one that actually places its heist on New Year’s Eve, which is admittedly an inspired idea. Even better, the arc of this earlier crack at this material is undoubtedly New Year’s-coded: You start off excited to see a bunch of familiar faces, start to get bored and wonder if you’ve arrived too early as the party meanders through its early stages, get more excited and engaged once the clock inches closer to midnight and everything starts to feel livelier, and feel a bit of a letdown in the aftermath as the evening amounts to a long set-up with a modestly amusing punchline.More American Graffiti (1979)Did you know there was a sequel to George Lucas’s seminal 1973 film American Graffiti, and that it shares a title with a second volume of the original film’s soundtrack? Though it’s not nearly as great as the original (which is mainly to say it’s not one of the best movies of the 1970s), More American Graffiti does come up with an ingeniously overelaborate solution to following up an ensemble one-eventful-night narrative. Rather than reuniting all the characters who, as the previous movie’s final moments indicated, were unlikely to all see each other in the same place at the same time again, the sequel has four different storylines, each taking place on a successive New Year’s Eve in 1964, 1965, 1966, and 1967, intercut but easily legible thanks to the different characters and styles for each time period. The way the story splits off into dark war farce, semi-miserable domestic drama, and youth-culture chronicle perfectly captures the divergent (and, yes, sometimes disappointing) paths the characters find themselves on. Of course the movie must turn to New Year’s; as adults, the characters can no longer rely on school years and those attendant rituals to mark the passage of time. More diffuse by design, American Graffiti can’t be as powerful as its predecessor, but as a holiday-themed follow-up, it’s a fascinating experiment.New Year’s Evil (1980)The post-Halloween slasher boom provided two New Year’s-themed horror movies in 1980. Terror Train is the more traditional entry: Masked killer, young people getting offed at a prodigious rate, Jamie Lee Curtis, with the bonus of a Agatha Christie-ish gimmick: most of the action takes place on a moving train. But there was a better train-themed New Year’s movie coming down the track. 1980’s quickie oddity New Year’s Evil—which started shooting in mid-October and came out in time for the titular holiday two months later!—wins the token holiday-themed slasher spot. Though the killer eventually, halfheartedly dons a creepy mask (a caricature of Stan Laurel, no less!), much of the movie is an unusual hybrid of ridiculous-gimmick slasher (a killer picks off victims one by one, timed to New Year’s celebrations across time zones), and serial-killer thriller, where we see the guy’s face from the jump. The de facto final girl is a glamorous DJ (Roz Kelly) hosting a live countdown show all evening, ringing in the year from coast to coast as bands described by the movie as “punk” and “new wave” play. (The two real-life bands on display, Shadow and Made in Japan, are more pop-metal and power-pop, respectively.) The live footage and accompanying neon lighting gives this 86-minute movie an extra jolt of novelty; it’s not exactly terrifying, but it’s entertaining perverse and has genuine holiday atmosphere, giving a Dick Clark-style TV broadcast a menacing, purgatorial feel that now doubles as a time capsule. Also and relatedly, the theme song by Shadow rips.Ghostbusters II (1989)It’s nowhere near as good as the first Ghostbusters; the cast feels like they’re cheerfully going along, rather than enthusiastically inspired, the story engages in some lazy resetting before getting the group together, and the tone feels more oriented toward the surprising number of young fans the first movie picked up. Yet that last bit also makes this sequel a strong New Year’s choice for families, especially considering that the plot revolves around a river of pink slime underneath New York City that feeds off of bad vibes and negativity. Is it a little corny that the Ghostbusters rally the dyspeptic citizenry to their cause by animating the Statue of Liberty with “positively charged” slime and using it as a vehicle for engendering feelings of togetherness? No—it’s extremely corny. But it’s also a zany, amusing alternative to the pure hell people must experience watching the ball drop in Times Square.Metropolitan (1990)What lesser New Year’s Eve movies like New Year’s Eve and 200 Cigarettes get wrong is their understandable insistence on packing as much one-crazy-night action as possible into 24 hours or so; what Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan gets right is how the whole last week of the year, when schools are often out and offices often closed, can feel like a melancholy culmination of something, even if we’re not exactly sure what. That’s especially true for young people on some kind of in-between break, and Stillman’s film is one of the great young-people-on-break movies (an admittedly niche subgenre), wherein a group of mostly upper-class college-aged friends attend deb balls and after-parties during (but not necessarily of) the holiday season. They pontificate and posture as befits their social status, while possibly starting to realize an inkling of the world outside that youthful bubble, and the myriad opportunities for failure and disappointment that await there. Like Stillman’s terrific Last Days of Disco, it’s about existing in a season of parties and starting to see the end of it on the horizon.Peter’s Friends (1992)Peter’s Friends is essentially a British Big Chill where the reunion takes place on a New Year’s weekend rather than forced by tragedy – though there is a dash of the tragic in this dramedy co-written by comedian Rita Rudner (who also has a supporting role as a famous spouse on the outside of the semi-estranged friend group). It’s easy to see why it feels less zeitgeisty than Big Chill did in its day; the latter’s 15-year gap between college in 1968 and reuniting in 1983 feels a lot more eventful than Peter’s trip from 1982, when the friends are working together in some kind of insufferable performance troupe, to their 1992 adulthood (though the super-familiar soundtrack cuts are at least less musty today than some of those Big Chill needle drops). What makes the movie memorable, and a worthwhile evocation of the holiday, is how director Kenneth Branagh (who also plays one of the friends) captures the simultaneous chumminess and rancor of longtime friends, particularly those with a flair for the dramatic. At the center is a lovely, understated performance from Stephen Fry as Peter, a privileged young man who has reached a crossroads seemingly by accident, for reasons that become more clear as the movie goes on. If you’re missing your old school chums on New Year’s, Peter’s Friends can offer some surrogates, or maybe remind you of what a headache those group dynamics can be.Strange Days (1995)One of director Kathryn Bigelow’s best – and, in its initial release, most slept-on – features, Strange Days takes place during the last few days of 1999, generating a turn-of-millennium tension that became more subtextual during actual movies from 1999; maybe Y2K rattled enough real-life nerves to cause filmmakers to back off. Strange Days, co-scripted by James Cameron, certainly doesn’t back off, at least for most of its running time: It folds in police brutality and digitally augmented living in a way that felt like slamming a bunch of hot buttons back in ’95, and has circled back around to feeling contemporary again decades later. Lenny (Ralph Fiennes), a slickster dirtbag, peddles illegal memory recordings designed to let people live through other people’s experiences, with all of the sleaze, thrills, violence, and sadness that entails; it’s like a chilling solution to Instagram FOMO that someone at Facebook is probably working to recreate at this very instant. When one of Lenny’s memory discs turns out to contain evidence of a murder, he and his longtime gal pal Mace (Angela Bassett) are drawn into a dangerous conspiracy. If you tend to experience the passage of another year as if you’re on the precipice of disaster, Strange Days is jittery and paranoid enough to give you a fix, but not so dark (maybe even, in the end, a little too squishy) to fry your brain.Four Rooms (1995)Once regarded as a massive disappointment in the way that only “Quentin Tarantino’s directorial follow-up to Pulp Fiction” could, the fullness of time has revealed Four Rooms as an uneven novelty—also known as an anthology film, a format that gets a bad rap for its inability to produce flawless gems. But flawless is clearly not what the eclectic Four Rooms is going for as it offers a quartet of entertaining stories taking place at the same hotel on New Year’s Eve, all involving the green and overtaxed bellman Ted (Tim Roth). Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, and Tarantino each take a go at torturing poor Ted, and though the results are uneven, the segments are brisk and amusing enough to make the whole thing worthwhile as a tour through other people’s leisure time. The slapsticky Rodriguez segment “The Misbehavers” clearly prefigured his Spy Kids series, and Tarantino’s “The Man from Hollywood,” a riff on an old Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes, is the perfect seedy post-fame hangover/hangout for the pre-dawn hours.Highball (1998)Noah Baumbach would not put this movie on this list. Noah Baumbach would, by all indications, prefer that this movie did not exist; it was made with leftover time and money from his second film Mr. Jealousy, and according to the filmmaker, it wasn’t really properly finished—a failed experiment that was released to the home-video market with Baumbach’s name pseudonymously removed from the writing and directing credits (though amusingly, he remains properly credited as an actor; yes, like Tarantino, he appears in his own film here, and he’s very funny.) But you should not listen to Noah Baumbach on this particular matter, because Highball is up there with Mistress America and Kicking and Screaming as one of his flat-out funniest movies, a more purely comic gloss on his typically sharp explorations of social niceties and relationship dynamics. The whole thing doesn’t actually unfold on New Year’s; that’s the final segment in a triptych of party sequences with the same loose friend group (including Metropolitan’s Chris Eigeman!) gathering at the same Brooklyn apartment: a birthday party, a Halloween bash, and the New Year’s event, with a variety of relationships ebbing and flowing both at the parties and offscreen in between them. The birthday party is the most grounded in elegantly wrought cringe comedy, based around the presence of Felix (Carlos Jacott), an asshole who Travis (Christopher Reed) considers his best friend in a way that is both inexplicable and familiar. The Halloween party is the funniest, with a lot of costume-based shenanigans (including Baumbach accidentally dressing like Hitler). But the weird, uncomfortable soul of the movie is the New Year’s segment, where the characters’ regret and confusion really takes shape.Snowpiercer (2013)Aren’t holidays like New Year’s just social constructions, anyway? If you want to take a deconstructionist approach to the holiday, consider Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi thriller Snowpiercer, which (like New Year’s non-classic Terror Train) takes place mostly on a moving train. In the aftermath of a new ice-age apocalypse, remaining humans are packed (or, if you’re wealthy, comfortably spaced out) onto a massive 10-mile train, which circumnavigates the iced-over globe in an endless loop. To celebrate their trip around the planet, train denizens perform a New Year’s countdown every time it passes a landmark bridge – which is more often than the typical 365-day calendar, but when the whole planet is covered in ice and snow, what’s the difference? If you want to chase your pessimism with just the faintest glimmer of hope about the dawning of a new year, while acknowledging how arbitrary that specific marker may be, just hop aboard the Snowpiercer train. Source link

[napoleonic-sexyman-tournament]

With two days left to submit nominees, here is where the list stands:

France:

Jean Lannes

Josephine de Beauharnais

Thérésa Tallien

Jean-Andoche Junot

Joseph Fouché

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand

Joachim Murat

Michel Ney

Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (Charles XIV of Sweden)

Louis-Francois Lejeune

Pierre Jacques Étienne Cambrinne

Napoleon I

Marshal Louis-Gabriel Suchet

Jacques de Trobriand

Jean de dieu soult.

François-Étienne-Christophe Kellermann

Louis Davout

Pauline Bonaparte, Duchess of Guastalla

Eugène de Beauharnais

Jean-Baptiste Bessières

Antoine-Jean Gros

Jérôme Bonaparte

Andrea Masséna

Antoine Charles Louis de Lasalle

Germaine de Staël

Thomas-Alexandre Dumas

René de Traviere (The Purple Mask)

Claude Victor Perrin

Laurent de Gouvion Saint-Cyr

François Joseph Lefebvre

Major Andre Cotard (Hornblower Series)

Edouard Mortier

Hippolyte Charles

Nicolas Charles Oudinot

Emmanuel de Grouchy

Pierre-Charles Villeneuve

Géraud Duroc

Georges Pontmercy (Les Mis)

Auguste Frédéric Louis Viesse de Marmont

Juliette Récamier

Bon-Adrien Jeannot de Moncey

Louis-Alexandre Berthier

Étienne Jacques-Joseph-Alexandre Macdonald

Jean-Mathieu-Philibert Sérurier

Catherine Dominique de Pérignon

England:

Richard Sharpe (The Sharpe Series)

Tom Pullings (Master and Commander)

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington

Jonathan Strange (Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell)

Captain Jack Aubrey (Aubrey/Maturin books)

Horatio Hornblower (the Hornblower Books)

William Laurence (The Temeraire Series)

Henry Paget, 1st Marquess of Anglesey

Beau Brummell

Emma, Lady Hamilton

Benjamin Bathurst

Horatio Nelson

Admiral Edward Pellew

Sir Philip Bowes Vere Broke

Sidney Smith

Percy Smythe, 6th Viscount Strangford

George IV

Capt. Anthony Trumbull (The Pride and the Passion)

Barbara Childe (An Infamous Army)

Doctor Maturin (Aubrey/Maturin books)

Scotland:

Thomas Cochrane

Colquhoun Grant

Austria:

Klemens von Metternich

Friedrich Bianchi, Duke of Casalanza

Franz I/II

Archduke Karl

Marie Louise

Franz Grillparzer

Wilhelmine von Biron

Poland:

Wincenty Krasiński

Józef Antoni Poniatowski

Józef Zajączek

Maria Walewska

Władysław Franciszek Jabłonowski

Adam Jerzy Czartoryski

Antoni Amilkar Kosiński

Zofia Czartoryska-Zamoyska

Stanislaw Kurcyusz

Russia:

Alexander I Pavlovich

Alexander Andreevich Durov

Prince Andrei (War and Peace)

Pyotr Bagration

Mikhail Miloradovich

Levin August von Bennigsen

Pavel Stroganov

Empress Elizabeth Alexeievna

Karl Wilhelm von Toll

Dmitri Kuruta

Alexander Alexeevich Tuchkov

Barclay de Tolly

Fyodor Grigorevich Gogel

Ekaterina Pavlovna Bagration

Prussia:

Louise von Mecklenburg-Strelitz

Gebard von Blücher

Carl von Clausewitz

Frederick William III

Gerhard von Scharnhorst

Louis Ferdinand of Prussia

Friederike of Mecklenburg-Strelitz

Alexander von Humboldt

Dorothea von Biron

The Netherlands:

Ida St Elme

Wiliam, Prince of Orange

The Papal States:

Pius VII

Portugal:

João Severiano Maciel da Costa

Spain:

Juan Martín Díez

José de Palafox

Inês Bilbatua (Goya's Ghosts)

Haiti:

Alexandre Pétion

Sardinia:

Vittorio Emanuele I

Denmark:

Frederik VI

Sweden:

Gustav IV Adolph

[brookston]

Holidays 12.6

Holidays

Abolición del Ejército (Costa Rica)

Adore You Day

Armed Forces Day (Ukraine)

Christkind (Central & Southern Europe)

Dia de la Constitucion (a.k.a. Constitution Day; Spain)

Dogecoin Day

Dubrovnik Defenders’ Day (Croatia)

Ed Tech Appreciation Day

Encyclopedia Britannica Day

Give a Secret Gift Day

Gorse Day (French Republic)

Gospell Day (Marshall Islands)

Gramophone Day

Halifax Explosion Anniversary Day (Canada)

Ice Cube Day (Astronomy Club)

International Bad Hair Day

International Desk Day

International Femicide Remembrance Day

International Memecoin Day

International Sweater Vestival

Main Directorate for Drug Control Day (Russia)

Miner's Day (West Virginia)

Ministry of Communications and Information Technologies Day (Azerbaijan)

Mitten Tree Day

Musical Instrument Gift Day

National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women (Canada)

National Microwave Oven Day

National Miner's Day

National Pawnbrokers Day

National Sunnies Day (Australia)

National Tell Your Best Friend You Love Them Day

National Travis Day

Prosecutor’s Day (Kazakhstan)

Put On Your Own Shoes Day

Sindhi Topi and Ajrak Day (Pakistan)

Food & Drink Celebrations

Make & Bake Day

National ‘Cook For Christmas’ Day

National Gazpacho Day

Pizza Day (Google)

Samichlaus Day

Independence & Related Days

Åland Islands (from Russia, 1917)

Bophuthatswana (from South Africa, 1977)

Constitution Day (Spain)

Finland (from Russia, 1917)

Ireland (from the UK, recognized in 1922)

Kingdom of Titan (Declared; 2020) [unrecognized]

Quito Day (Ecuador)

Western Province Day (Solomon Islands)

1st Friday in December

Bandcamp Friday [1st Friday]

Bartender Appreciation Day [1st Friday]

Comfort Food Friday [Every Friday]

Eccentric Day (Bell's Brewery; Michigan) [1st or 2nd Friday or Another Day]

Farmer’s Day (Ghana) [1st Friday]

Faux Fur Friday [1st Friday]

Five For Friday [Every Friday]

Flashback Friday [Every Friday]

Friday Finds [Every Friday]

Fry Day (Pastafarian; Fritism) [Every Friday]

Gospel Day (Marshall Islands) [1st Friday]

International Sweater Vestival [2nd Friday after Thanksgiving]

National Salesperson Day [1st Friday]

Open It! Weekend begins [1st Friday]

Purple Friday (UK) [1st Friday]

Saba Day (a.k.a. Flag Day; Netherlands Antilles) [1st Friday]

TGIF (Thank God It's Friday) [Every Friday]

Weekly Holidays beginning December 6 (1st Full Week of December)

Deck the Halls Weekend (Seneca Lake region, New York) [thru 12.8]

Festivals Beginning December 6, 2024

Candlelight Christmas Walk (Augusta, Missouri) [& 12.13]

Christmas Town Festival (Bethlehem, Connecticut) [thru 12.7]

Colisium International Music Forum (Novosibirsk, Russia) [thru 12.7]

Country Christmas Lighted Farm Implement Parade (Sandusky, Michigan) [thru 12.7]

German Christmas Market (Augusta, New Jersey) [thru 12.8]

Gingerbread Celebration and Holiday Mart (Gettsburg, Pennsylvania) [thru 12.8]

Gingerbread Village (Caro, Michigan) [thru 12.7]

Kimmswick Christmas Festival (Kimmswick, Missouri) [thru 12.8]

Medora's Old Fashioned Cowboy Christmas (Medora, North Dakota) [thru 12.8]

Night of the Proms (Munich, Germany)

Oslo Christmas Market (Oslo, Norway) [thru 12.7]

PAX Unplugged (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) [thru 12.8]

Salon du Cheval de Paris (Paris, France) [thru 12.8]

Southport Holiday Stroll & Cocktail Crawl (West Lakeview, Illinois)

Stockbridge Main Street At Christmas (Stockbridge, Massachusetts) [thru 12.8]

St. Paul Ice Fishing & Winter Sports Show (St. Paul, Minnesota) [thru 12.8]

St. Petersburg Fall Seafood & Music Festival (St. Petersburg, Florida) [thru 12.8]

Tree Lighting and Holiday Parade (Batesville, Indiana)

Feast Days

Abraham of Kratia (Christian; Saint)

Aemilianus (Roman Catholic Church)

Akibasan Gongen Hibuse Matsuri (Fire & Water Festival; Japan)

Bodhi Season, Day 6 (Buddhism; Secular Date) [Leading Up to 12.8] (a.k.a. ... 

Principles: Perfection

Secular: Trip to Your Bodhi Day Place

Eightfold Path: Awakened Effort

The Heart Sutra: Issue Me Ke Kanaka Wai Wai (Jesus and the Rich Man)

Crossover Doozer (Muppetism)

Day of the North Wind (Pagan)

Days of Reckoning Begin (Shamanism)

Denise and companions (Christian; Saints)

Dionysia, Dativa, Aemilianus, Boniface, Leontia, Tertius, and Majoricus (Christian; Martyrs)

Doug Marlette (Artology)

Eliot Porter (Artology)

Frank Springer (Artology)

Frédéric Bazille (Artology)

Gamera Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)

Henk van Woerden (Artology)

Insult a Religious Fanatic Day (Pastafarian)

James Bernouilli (Positivist; Saint)

János Scheffler (Christian; Blessed)

Joyce Kilmer (Writerism)

Mall Nukke (Artology)

María del Monte Carmelo Sallés y Barangueras (Christian; Saint)

Masami Kurumada (Artology)

Math Ap Mathonwy (Celtic Book of Days)

Nicholas of Myra (Christian; Saint) [brewers]

Nicola De Maria (Artology)

Peter Paschal (Christian; Saint)

Pirate Appreciation Day (Pastafarian)

Rudolf Schlichter (Artology)

Shio Satō (Artology)

Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch (Christian; Saint)

Thor's Day (Norse)

Turnover (The Seasons of Earnings begins; Church of the SubGenius)

Lucky & Unlucky Days

Butsumetsu (仏滅 Japan) [Unlucky all day.]

Tycho Brahe Unlucky Day (Scandinavia) [35 of 37]

Unglückstage (Unlucky Day; Pennsylvania Dutch) [28 of 30]

Very Unlucky Day (Grafton’s Manual of 1565) [56 of 60]

Premieres

Adaptation (Film; 2002)

Aeronauts (Film; 2019)

As Good As It Gets (Film; 1997)

Beggar’s Banquet, by The Rolling Stones (Album; 1968)

Bullseye Bullwinkle, or Destination Moose (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S1, Ep. 3; 1959)

Cinderella (Ub Iwerks Disney Cartoon; 1922)

Cock-a-Doodle Dino (Noveltoons Cartoon; 1957)

Day Tripper, by The Beatles (Song; 1965)

A Dopey Hacienda (Tijuana Toads Cartoon; 1970)

DuBarry Was A Lady (Broadway Musical; 1939)

Dumb and Dumber (Film; 1994)

Ferry Cross the Mersey (Documentary Film; 1964)

The Fox and the Grapes (Color Rhapsody Cartoon; 1941)

Gimme Shelter (Concert Film; 1970)

Going To A Go-Go, by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles (Song; 1965)

The Hand of Oberon, by Roger Zelazny (1976) [Chronicles of Amber #4]

A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, recorded by Bob Dylan (Song; 1962)

The Hep Cat (Mighty Mouse Cartoon; 1946)

Hip Hip-Hurry! (WB MM Cartoon; 1958)

King-Size Canary (Tex Avery MGM Cartoon; 1947)

The Lake District Murder, by Ernest Elmore, writing as John Bude (Novel; 1935)

Live at the BBC, by The Beatles (Compilation Album; 1994)

Mary Had a Little Lamb, recorded by Thomas Edison (Song; 1877) [1st Recording of the Human Voice]

Mr. Willowby’s Christmas Tree (Muppet TV Special; 1995)

The Night Before Christmas (Tom & Jerry Cartoon; 1941)

19th Nervous Breakdown, recorded by The Rolling Stones (Song; 1965)

One Droopy Night (Droopy MGM Cartoon; 1957)

Out of an Old Man’s Head (Swedish Animated Film; 1968)

Popeye (Film; 1980)

Red Bank Boogie, recorded by The Count Basie Orchestra (Song; 1944)

Rubber Soul, by The Beatles (Album; 1965)

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (Animated TV Special; 1964)

Running on Empty, by Jackson Browne (Live Album; 1977)

Sixteen Stone, by Bush (Album; 1994)

Smoke on the Water, recorded by Deep Purple (Song; 1971)

Squeeze Play or Invitation to the Trance (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S1, Ep. 4; 1959)

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (Film; 1991)

Still Crazy After All These Years, by Paul Simon (Album; 1975)

The Story of an Hour, by Kate Chopin (Short Story; 1894)

The Stroll, by The Diamonds (Song; 1957)

Sympathy for the Devil, by The Rolling Stones (Song; 1968)

Tommy Tucker’s Tooth (Disney Cartoon; 1922)

Turn! Turn! Turn!, by The Byrds (Album; 1965)

We Can Work It Out, by The Beatles (Song; 1965)

Whole Lotta Love, by Led Zeppelin (Song; 1969)

Today’s Name Days

Denise, Henrike, Nikolaus (Austria)

Nikola, Nikolai, Nina (Bulgaria)

Nikica, Niko, Nikola, Nikša, Vladimir (Croatia)

Mikuláš (Czech Republic)

Nikolaus (Denmark)

Klaus, Laas, Laus, Nigul, Nigulas, Niilas, Niilo, Nikolai, Nils (Estonia)

Niila, Niilo, Niki, Niklas, Niko, Nikolai, Nikolas (Finland)

Nicolas (France)

Denise, Henrike, Nikolaus (Germany)

Nikolaos, Nikoleta, Nikos (Greece)

Miklós (Hungary)

Nicola (Italy)

Klāvs, Niklāvs, Nikolajs (Latvia)

Bilmantas, Mikalojus, Norvydė (Lithuania)

Nikolai, Nils (Norway)

Dionizja, Emilian, Jarema, Jarogniew, Mikołaj (Poland)

Nicolae (România)

Mikuláš (Slovakia)

Nicolás (Spain)

Niklas, Nikolaus (Sweden)

Nicholas (Ukraine)

Claus, Ira, Nicholas, Nichole, Nicholet, Nick, Nicklaus, Nickolas, Nico, Nicolas, Nicole, Nicolette, Nikki, Niko, Nikolas (USA)

Today is Also…

Day of Year: Day 341 of 2024; 25 days remaining in the year

ISO: Day 5 of Week 49 of 2024

Celtic Tree Calendar: Ngetal (Reed) [Day 13 of 28]

Chinese: Month 11 (Bing-Zi), Day 6 (Jia-Chen)

Chinese Year of the: Dragon 4722 (until January 29, 2025) [Wu-Chen]

Hebrew: 5 Kislev 5785

Islamic: 4 Jumada II 1446

J Cal: 11 Black; Foursday [11 of 30]

Julian: 23 November 2024

Moon: 29%: Waxing Crescent

Positivist: 5 Bichat (13th Month) [Römer / Bradley]

Runic Half Month: Is (Stasis) [Day 15 of 15]

Season: Autumn or Fall (Day 75 of 90)

Week: 1st Full Week of December

Zodiac: Sagittarius (Day 15 of 30)

[brookstonalmanac]

Holidays 12.6

Holidays

Abolición del Ejército (Costa Rica)

Adore You Day

Armed Forces Day (Ukraine)

Christkind (Central & Southern Europe)

Dia de la Constitucion (a.k.a. Constitution Day; Spain)

Dogecoin Day

Dubrovnik Defenders’ Day (Croatia)

Ed Tech Appreciation Day

Encyclopedia Britannica Day

Give a Secret Gift Day

Gorse Day (French Republic)

Gospell Day (Marshall Islands)

Gramophone Day

Halifax Explosion Anniversary Day (Canada)

Ice Cube Day (Astronomy Club)

International Bad Hair Day

International Desk Day

International Femicide Remembrance Day

International Memecoin Day

International Sweater Vestival

Main Directorate for Drug Control Day (Russia)

Miner's Day (West Virginia)

Ministry of Communications and Information Technologies Day (Azerbaijan)

Mitten Tree Day

Musical Instrument Gift Day

National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women (Canada)

National Microwave Oven Day

National Miner's Day

National Pawnbrokers Day

National Sunnies Day (Australia)

National Tell Your Best Friend You Love Them Day

National Travis Day

Prosecutor’s Day (Kazakhstan)

Put On Your Own Shoes Day

Sindhi Topi and Ajrak Day (Pakistan)

Food & Drink Celebrations

Make & Bake Day

National ‘Cook For Christmas’ Day

National Gazpacho Day

Pizza Day (Google)

Samichlaus Day

Independence & Related Days

Åland Islands (from Russia, 1917)

Bophuthatswana (from South Africa, 1977)

Constitution Day (Spain)

Finland (from Russia, 1917)

Ireland (from the UK, recognized in 1922)

Kingdom of Titan (Declared; 2020) [unrecognized]

Quito Day (Ecuador)

Western Province Day (Solomon Islands)

1st Friday in December

Bandcamp Friday [1st Friday]

Bartender Appreciation Day [1st Friday]

Comfort Food Friday [Every Friday]

Eccentric Day (Bell's Brewery; Michigan) [1st or 2nd Friday or Another Day]

Farmer’s Day (Ghana) [1st Friday]

Faux Fur Friday [1st Friday]

Five For Friday [Every Friday]

Flashback Friday [Every Friday]

Friday Finds [Every Friday]

Fry Day (Pastafarian; Fritism) [Every Friday]

Gospel Day (Marshall Islands) [1st Friday]

International Sweater Vestival [2nd Friday after Thanksgiving]

National Salesperson Day [1st Friday]

Open It! Weekend begins [1st Friday]

Purple Friday (UK) [1st Friday]

Saba Day (a.k.a. Flag Day; Netherlands Antilles) [1st Friday]

TGIF (Thank God It's Friday) [Every Friday]

Weekly Holidays beginning December 6 (1st Full Week of December)

Deck the Halls Weekend (Seneca Lake region, New York) [thru 12.8]

Festivals Beginning December 6, 2024

Candlelight Christmas Walk (Augusta, Missouri) [& 12.13]

Christmas Town Festival (Bethlehem, Connecticut) [thru 12.7]

Colisium International Music Forum (Novosibirsk, Russia) [thru 12.7]

Country Christmas Lighted Farm Implement Parade (Sandusky, Michigan) [thru 12.7]

German Christmas Market (Augusta, New Jersey) [thru 12.8]

Gingerbread Celebration and Holiday Mart (Gettsburg, Pennsylvania) [thru 12.8]

Gingerbread Village (Caro, Michigan) [thru 12.7]

Kimmswick Christmas Festival (Kimmswick, Missouri) [thru 12.8]

Medora's Old Fashioned Cowboy Christmas (Medora, North Dakota) [thru 12.8]

Night of the Proms (Munich, Germany)

Oslo Christmas Market (Oslo, Norway) [thru 12.7]

PAX Unplugged (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) [thru 12.8]

Salon du Cheval de Paris (Paris, France) [thru 12.8]

Southport Holiday Stroll & Cocktail Crawl (West Lakeview, Illinois)

Stockbridge Main Street At Christmas (Stockbridge, Massachusetts) [thru 12.8]

St. Paul Ice Fishing & Winter Sports Show (St. Paul, Minnesota) [thru 12.8]

St. Petersburg Fall Seafood & Music Festival (St. Petersburg, Florida) [thru 12.8]

Tree Lighting and Holiday Parade (Batesville, Indiana)

Feast Days

Abraham of Kratia (Christian; Saint)

Aemilianus (Roman Catholic Church)

Akibasan Gongen Hibuse Matsuri (Fire & Water Festival; Japan)

Bodhi Season, Day 6 (Buddhism; Secular Date) [Leading Up to 12.8] (a.k.a. ... 

Principles: Perfection

Secular: Trip to Your Bodhi Day Place

Eightfold Path: Awakened Effort

The Heart Sutra: Issue Me Ke Kanaka Wai Wai (Jesus and the Rich Man)

Crossover Doozer (Muppetism)

Day of the North Wind (Pagan)

Days of Reckoning Begin (Shamanism)

Denise and companions (Christian; Saints)

Dionysia, Dativa, Aemilianus, Boniface, Leontia, Tertius, and Majoricus (Christian; Martyrs)

Doug Marlette (Artology)

Eliot Porter (Artology)

Frank Springer (Artology)

Frédéric Bazille (Artology)

Gamera Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)

Henk van Woerden (Artology)

Insult a Religious Fanatic Day (Pastafarian)

James Bernouilli (Positivist; Saint)

János Scheffler (Christian; Blessed)

Joyce Kilmer (Writerism)

Mall Nukke (Artology)

María del Monte Carmelo Sallés y Barangueras (Christian; Saint)

Masami Kurumada (Artology)

Math Ap Mathonwy (Celtic Book of Days)

Nicholas of Myra (Christian; Saint) [brewers]

Nicola De Maria (Artology)

Peter Paschal (Christian; Saint)

Pirate Appreciation Day (Pastafarian)

Rudolf Schlichter (Artology)

Shio Satō (Artology)

Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch (Christian; Saint)

Thor's Day (Norse)

Turnover (The Seasons of Earnings begins; Church of the SubGenius)

Lucky & Unlucky Days

Butsumetsu (仏滅 Japan) [Unlucky all day.]

Tycho Brahe Unlucky Day (Scandinavia) [35 of 37]

Unglückstage (Unlucky Day; Pennsylvania Dutch) [28 of 30]

Very Unlucky Day (Grafton’s Manual of 1565) [56 of 60]

Premieres

Adaptation (Film; 2002)

Aeronauts (Film; 2019)

As Good As It Gets (Film; 1997)

Beggar’s Banquet, by The Rolling Stones (Album; 1968)

Bullseye Bullwinkle, or Destination Moose (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S1, Ep. 3; 1959)

Cinderella (Ub Iwerks Disney Cartoon; 1922)

Cock-a-Doodle Dino (Noveltoons Cartoon; 1957)

Day Tripper, by The Beatles (Song; 1965)

A Dopey Hacienda (Tijuana Toads Cartoon; 1970)

DuBarry Was A Lady (Broadway Musical; 1939)

Dumb and Dumber (Film; 1994)

Ferry Cross the Mersey (Documentary Film; 1964)

The Fox and the Grapes (Color Rhapsody Cartoon; 1941)

Gimme Shelter (Concert Film; 1970)

Going To A Go-Go, by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles (Song; 1965)

The Hand of Oberon, by Roger Zelazny (1976) [Chronicles of Amber #4]

A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, recorded by Bob Dylan (Song; 1962)

The Hep Cat (Mighty Mouse Cartoon; 1946)

Hip Hip-Hurry! (WB MM Cartoon; 1958)

King-Size Canary (Tex Avery MGM Cartoon; 1947)

The Lake District Murder, by Ernest Elmore, writing as John Bude (Novel; 1935)

Live at the BBC, by The Beatles (Compilation Album; 1994)

Mary Had a Little Lamb, recorded by Thomas Edison (Song; 1877) [1st Recording of the Human Voice]

Mr. Willowby’s Christmas Tree (Muppet TV Special; 1995)

The Night Before Christmas (Tom & Jerry Cartoon; 1941)

19th Nervous Breakdown, recorded by The Rolling Stones (Song; 1965)

One Droopy Night (Droopy MGM Cartoon; 1957)

Out of an Old Man’s Head (Swedish Animated Film; 1968)

Popeye (Film; 1980)

Red Bank Boogie, recorded by The Count Basie Orchestra (Song; 1944)

Rubber Soul, by The Beatles (Album; 1965)

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (Animated TV Special; 1964)

Running on Empty, by Jackson Browne (Live Album; 1977)

Sixteen Stone, by Bush (Album; 1994)

Smoke on the Water, recorded by Deep Purple (Song; 1971)

Squeeze Play or Invitation to the Trance (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S1, Ep. 4; 1959)

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (Film; 1991)

Still Crazy After All These Years, by Paul Simon (Album; 1975)

The Story of an Hour, by Kate Chopin (Short Story; 1894)

The Stroll, by The Diamonds (Song; 1957)

Sympathy for the Devil, by The Rolling Stones (Song; 1968)

Tommy Tucker’s Tooth (Disney Cartoon; 1922)

Turn! Turn! Turn!, by The Byrds (Album; 1965)

We Can Work It Out, by The Beatles (Song; 1965)

Whole Lotta Love, by Led Zeppelin (Song; 1969)

Today’s Name Days

Denise, Henrike, Nikolaus (Austria)

Nikola, Nikolai, Nina (Bulgaria)

Nikica, Niko, Nikola, Nikša, Vladimir (Croatia)

Mikuláš (Czech Republic)

Nikolaus (Denmark)

Klaus, Laas, Laus, Nigul, Nigulas, Niilas, Niilo, Nikolai, Nils (Estonia)

Niila, Niilo, Niki, Niklas, Niko, Nikolai, Nikolas (Finland)

Nicolas (France)

Denise, Henrike, Nikolaus (Germany)

Nikolaos, Nikoleta, Nikos (Greece)

Miklós (Hungary)

Nicola (Italy)

Klāvs, Niklāvs, Nikolajs (Latvia)

Bilmantas, Mikalojus, Norvydė (Lithuania)

Nikolai, Nils (Norway)

Dionizja, Emilian, Jarema, Jarogniew, Mikołaj (Poland)

Nicolae (România)

Mikuláš (Slovakia)

Nicolás (Spain)

Niklas, Nikolaus (Sweden)

Nicholas (Ukraine)

Claus, Ira, Nicholas, Nichole, Nicholet, Nick, Nicklaus, Nickolas, Nico, Nicolas, Nicole, Nicolette, Nikki, Niko, Nikolas (USA)

Today is Also…

Day of Year: Day 341 of 2024; 25 days remaining in the year

ISO: Day 5 of Week 49 of 2024

Celtic Tree Calendar: Ngetal (Reed) [Day 13 of 28]

Chinese: Month 11 (Bing-Zi), Day 6 (Jia-Chen)

Chinese Year of the: Dragon 4722 (until January 29, 2025) [Wu-Chen]

Hebrew: 5 Kislev 5785

Islamic: 4 Jumada II 1446

J Cal: 11 Black; Foursday [11 of 30]

Julian: 23 November 2024

Moon: 29%: Waxing Crescent

Positivist: 5 Bichat (13th Month) [Römer / Bradley]

Runic Half Month: Is (Stasis) [Day 15 of 15]

Season: Autumn or Fall (Day 75 of 90)

Week: 1st Full Week of December

Zodiac: Sagittarius (Day 15 of 30)

[bremont]

(via (117) Biden's Decision: On the Brink of a Big War. - YouTube)

1492 is 1492 / The power of Washington is given by Europe 🎭When EUROPE say's Russia is part of EUROPE all hostilities end in Ukraine Israel Iran *NATO ends/ and you have a real united EUROPE 🌍 * for the People ...There is a difference between Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban, 1st Lord Verulam. AND Hernan Cortez same as a 🗡️sword a 🌎✝️and a 🖋 🏔️that is the problem with Washington ⛽💲🌎DC better say Hollywood 1913 🛒🎥DC / 1776 Washington does not exist now you got AI 2024 🛰️🗽 Washington on teleprompter 🌎🐑⛽. The European problem is that Gallo Romans do not understand the 21 century and believe 🪖⛳NATO is EUROPE Love your servitude🐑 long live the Marshall🐑⛳ Ceasar💲 plan 🌎🐑and lest destroy EUROPE for the sake of loving our servitude. Once EUROPE tell Zelensky to return to reason or be send to Bollywood he will understand however the Gallo Roman are doing the oposite are telling Russia and Eurasia to believe🤡 Ceasar love your servitude and enjoy hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic/1922*1923/ v🤔Version 2024/2025💲🌎🏦

[the-paintrist]

Louis-François, Baron Lejeune (3 February 1775 in Strasbourg – 29 February 1848) was a French general, painter, and lithographer. His memoirs have frequently been republished and his name is engraved on the Arc de Triomphe.

He studied painting in the studio of Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, alongside Jean-Victor Bertin, but left the studio to volunteer in the Compagnie des arts de Paris in 1792. He received his baptism of fire in the battle of Valmy later that year. He became a sergeant in the 1st Arsenal battalion and in 1793 moved to the artillery at La Fère, assisting in the sieges of Landrecies, Le Quesnoy and Valenciennes. At Valenciennes he became aide-de-camp to General Jacob then, as a lieutenant on attachment to the engineers, took part in the 1794 Holland campaign and the 1795 campaign.

Called to the depot in 1798, he succeeded brilliantly in his exams and was made a captain on attachment to the engineers. He became aide-de-camp to Marshal Berthier in 1800, a post he retained until 1812 and in which he took an active part in practically all of the Napoleonic campaigns. He was wounded and captured in Spain. He was promoted to full captain after Marengo and chef de bataillon after Austerlitz, also becoming a knight of the Légion d'honneur and a colonel at the Siege of Saragossa.

In 1812, during the French invasion of Russia, he was made général de brigade and chief of staff to Davout. Frostbitten on the face, Lejeune left his post during the retreat from Russia and was arrested on the orders of Napoleon. Freed in March 1813, Lejeune was then sent to the Illyrian provinces, before rejoining the army under the orders of Marshal Oudinot, becoming his chief of staff. During the Saxony campaign, Lejeune was present at the Battle of Lutzen (1813), the crossing of the River Spree and at Bautzen. He was made an officer of the Légion d'honneur and a commander of the Order of Maximilian of Bavaria. At the battle of Hoyersverda, when Bülow's corps wiped out the 12th corps formed up in square on the plain, Lejeune (at risk of being kidnapped) ventured into the enemy lines with one battalion, General Wolf's cavalry and six 12 pounder guns. He thus broke the whole of the Prussian artillery and saved marshal Oudinot and his army. Wounded several times and lastly at Hanau, he was authorised to leave the army in November 1813 after more than 20 years' service. After his departure from the army, he devoted himself to painting.

After an initial grant in Hanover in 1808, and a second in Westphalia in 1810, he was made a baron d'Empire in 1810. Already a member of the cross of the Order of Leopold, Lejeune was made a knight of St Louis by Louis XVIII and in 1823 a commander of the Légion d'honneur. He returned to the army (now under the Bourbons) from 1818 to 1824, becoming commander of Haute-Garonne in 1831. On 2 September 1821 he married Louise Clary, sister of General Marius Clary and niece of Désirée Clary, queen of Sweden by her marriage with Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte. In 1824 the king of Sweden conferred on Lejeune the grand-cross of the Order of the Sword. In 1837 he became director of the École des beaux-arts et de l’industrie in Toulouse, a city of which he became mayor in 1841 and in which he died of a heart attack aged 73.

Louis-François Lejeune (1775-1848) had an exciting career as a soldier and  painter. He served mostly under Berthier, and also under Davout and Oudinot. This was his most daring feat: 

“At the battle of Hoyersverda [1813], when Bülow’s corps wiped out the 12th corps formed up in square on the plain, Lejeune (at risk of being kidnapped) ventured into the enemy lines with one battalion, general Wolf’s cavalry and six 12 pounder guns. He thus broke the whole of the Prussian artillery and saved marshal Oudinot and his army.”

Lejeune painted a bunch of battle scenes and continued painting into the reigns of the Bourbon restoration.

This was an interesting sidelight:

“The German campaign of 1806 brought him to Munich, where he visited the workshop of Alois Senefelder, the inventor of lithography. Lejeune was fascinated by the possibilities of the new method and whilst there he made the drawing on stone of his famous Cossack. Whilst he was taking his dinner, and with his horses harnessed and waiting to take him back to Paris, one hundred proofs were printed, one of which he subsequently submitted to Napoleon. The introduction of lithography into France was greatly due to the efforts of Lejeune.”