Last night – the second last day of the year, sufficient to being called the Eleventh Hour, in my judgement – I received an email that another paper (with Savannah Tang, Andrew Li and Alan Scheller-Wolf, on Split Liver Transplantation, see To Split, Or Not to Split) was accepted for publication.
It is the 11 th of this year (see 10), and I thought why not open another good bottle of Red wine! Of course, I have opened (way) more than 11 bottles this year, but I thought I would memorialize some recent ones.
What is my wish for 2025? A sabbatical at MORA, Mythological Oversight and Recovery Agency, headed up by the character played by Lucy Liu in:
Red One is a 2024 American Christmas action film. In the film, Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson), the head of North Pole security, teams up with the hacker Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans) to locate a kidnapped Santa Claus (JK Simmons) on Christmas Eve.
On Rotten Tomatoes, 31% of 163 critics’ reviews are positive, with an average rating of 4.4/10. However, the audience score gave the film a 90% approval rating with an average score of 4.4 out of 5 stars.
It was obviously named after:
Air Force One is a 1997 American political action thriller film (starring Harrison Ford and Gary Oldman). It grossed over $315 million worldwide (on a budget of $85 million).
In any case, Red One is unlikely to dethrone my top Christmas Movie of All Time (see Surely You’re Joking, #11 on this list of Top 100):
Die Hard is a 1988 American action film (starring Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman). It had a box office revenues of about $140 million on a budget under $35 million.
My favorite character of Lucy Liu is from:
Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Volume 2 are 2003 and 2004 American martial arts action films written and directed by Quentin Tarantino starring Uma Thurman as the Bride, who swears revenge on a group of assassins (that includes Lucy Liu). Volume 1 grossed over $180 million worldwide on a $30 million budget. Volume 2 grossed over $150 million worldwide on a production budget of $30 million.
Here is the clip that is so Quentin Tarantino and Lucy Liu:
Moving on, it appears I am not the only one (see Quantum Surge and A Night at the IPF) who has been attracted to (Greek) Mythology in addition to (Quantum) Physics (see The Importance of being Unselected):
Christopher Nolan’s Next Film Is An Adaptation Of Homer’s ‘The Odyssey,’ Universal Reveals
“Christopher Nolan’s next film The Odyssey is a mythic action epic shot across the world,” the studio announced on Monday in a message posted to X. “The film brings Homer’s foundational saga to IMAX film screens for the first time and opens in theaters everywhere on July 17, 2026.” Nolan’s latest will star Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, and Charlize Theron.
I suppose many of us have indeed reached the age that C.S. Lewis had predicted:
Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
The Chronicles of Narnia is a fantasy film series and media franchise based on The Chronicles of Narnia, a series of novels by C. S. Lewis. From the seven books, three were adapted—The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), Prince Caspian (2008), and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010)—which collectively grossed over $1.5 billion worldwide.
Wishing you all a Mythic (as in Fabulous) New Year!
