Yearly Archives: 2020

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window

While Psycho isn’t without its charms, Rear Window is my all-time favorite Alfred Hitchcock movie. I’m certain LEGO builder Mark would agree that you ought to check it out if you haven’t already. If you’re feeling a bit voyeuristic with this scene, that, dear readers, is the point. James Stewart plays a wheelchair-bound photographer with nothing better to do but to peer into his neighbor’s windows while his broken leg heals. (This was before Xbox and the internet, mind you.) While learning a lot about his Greenwich Village neighbors’ lives and habits, he is pretty certain he has also witnessed a murder. The rest of the story unfolds with a flavor of suspense and intrigue that only Alfred Hitchcock could pull off.

Rear window - Alfred Hitchcock

Mark replicates the scene nicely with vivid detail. I can just hear the talented pianist practicing in his apartment with the titillating “Miss Torso” dances in hers. And why are those flowers just a bit shorter than they used to be? The answer is a bit gruesome, and neighborhood pets ought to beware!

I’ll never be your beast of burden. Well, okay, maybe just this once.

Here at The Brothers Brick, we love a good Bantha build. Luis Peña shares a really cool one – rife with plenty of clever techniques. The fur is made of a combination of quarter-circle tiles and rock elements, with ribbed 2×2 round brick for the legs. The horns are achieved by stacking tan 1×2 modified rounded plate, covered with more quarter-circle tile and topped with Wampa horns. The best detail, though, has to be the great use of a yellow rubber-band for the mouth. It gives this creature just a hint of a cheery smile, and I like that.

LEGO Bantha

I’d love to see a mash-up of some of the techniques used here (particularly those sweet horns) with some of the other Banthas we’ve spotlighted. Maybe some adventurous soul is already hard at work at a UCS scale version. Well, we can dream, anyway.

Automotive rebellion, the Japanese way

For a long time, I didn’t really get the point of car customization. I can understand why people might want to make some changes to improve performance. Manufacturers aim their products at a particular market segment and operate under constraints such as environmental regulations. So, if you want to use your car differently, say to tear up the drag strip, some changes make sense. Rebuilding older cars using newer components to improve comfort or handling also makes sense to me. What I didn’t get were things that make a car worse in objectively measurable ways: such as stanced wheels and ill-fitting body kits. However, after building my latest car model, I think I finally get it. It’s a Nissan Skyline C110, modified in a Japanese style popularly known as Bōsōzoku (暴走族).

Trying to distinguish between the many different specific styles covered by his name is like an obscure form of zoology. They all do share some features, though. Modifications can include multiple rear spoilers and a deppa, which is the huge front-end splitter. Externally mounted oil coolers, with lines running through the radiator or a headlight mount, are also popular. This stuff is all race-inspired, but none of it improves the car’s performance. The cars usually have large fender flares, with small wheels and negative camber, particularly on the rear wheels. This reduces the ride height to the point of scraping the road and probably ruins the handling. The cars can also have a lurid paint job, often involving purple or magenta, and oversized exhaust pipes, called takeyari, inspired by bamboo spears. It is all very much over the top. And that is the point.

Japanese society is full of rules on how to behave in order to maintain harmony or Wa (和). But more restrictive norms seem to lead to more extreme rebellion. Bōsōzoku cars aren’t about improved performance or about making the cars look pretty. They’re about being different from the norm to the point where it gets obnoxious.

2020 LEGO Advent Calendars, Day 20

Happy holidays to all of our fellow LEGO builders! As is tradition, we at The Brothers Brick will be opening our advent calendars as we count down to Christmas. We’ll also be sharing commentary on each one, which will be both insightful and hilarious!

This year we have new Harry Potter, Star Wars, City and Friends advent calendars to open. We will be sharing images of the new calendars every day through Christmas, and hope that you’ll join us! Let’s see what there is to open on Day 20.

Continue reading →

Swol Santa is ready for Christmas

Santa Claus is ready to thwack some holiday cheer into the grinchiest of Scrooges. Created by builder Joffre Zheng, this ripped LEGO Santa spends the whole year getting swol to make up for all the cookies he eats on Christmas eve.

White Beard

No beard? No problem. The white pointed mustache is all that’s needed to convince me to stay on the nice list. I really like how well this model is put together. The boots and pants both give a rustic feel to an already super manly Santa. The lack of a tall, pointy hat increases the size of his jaw, adding to the “I bench-press a dozen elves everyday ” vibe.

Let’s look at the candy cane. Some might complain that it’s not as curved in the crook as candy canes usually are, but here it works. The brutalist lack of gentle curves adds to the toughness of the build. I guess Santa’s body was less of a bowl full of jelly than we thought.

This plant is my soil mate

When I look out my window today, there’s snow on the ground. It’s been a long, cold winter already, and I’m starting to really miss the color green. If the drab snows of winter are getting you down, too, here’s some welcome relief. Stilly Bricks collaborated with Jonathan Lopes to create a 45″ inch tall, 18″ diameter topiary wonder. It’s so massive that it required a metal bar through the stem to support the flowers, and even the vine has a metal tube running through it.  From the brick-built pot and leaves to the varied flowers in the ball, this is one creation that should make any plastic-loving botanist smile.

Topiary

If you like LEGO flowers (and really, who doesn’t?) then be sure to check our archives for more leafy goodness!

 

TBB Weekly Brick Report: LEGO news roundup for December 19, 2020

In addition to the amazing LEGO models created by builders all over the world, The Brothers Brick brings you the best of LEGO news and reviews. This is our weekly Brick Report for the third week of December 2020.

We get behind the wheel of the Technic Ferrari 488 GTE. Keep reading our Brick Report to get all the details.

TBB NEWS & REVIEWS: This week we reviewed multiple sets including the next Collectable Minifigure Series, new LEGO road plates and quite a few Marvel sets. PLUS, LEGO reveals even more sets becoming available in 2021!

TBB ADVENT CALENDAR REVIEWS: Happy holidays to all of our fellow LEGO builders! As is tradition, we at The Brothers Brick will be opening our advent calendars as we count down to Christmas. We’ll also be sharing commentary on each one, which will be both insightful and hilarious!

LEGO Advent Calendar

  • 2020 LEGO Advent Calendars, Day 12
  • 2020 LEGO Advent Calendars, Day 13
  • 2020 LEGO Advent Calendars, Day 14
  • 2020 LEGO Advent Calendars, Day 15
  • 2020 LEGO Advent Calendars, Day 16
  • 2020 LEGO Advent Calendars, Day 17
  • 2020 LEGO Advent Calendars, Day 18

    • OTHER NEWS: There were quite a few other interesting LEGO news articles from around the web this week. Here are the best of the rest:

    2020 LEGO Advent Calendars, Day 19

    Happy holidays to all of our fellow LEGO builders! As is tradition, we at The Brothers Brick will be opening our advent calendars as we count down to Christmas. We’ll also be sharing commentary on each one, which will be both insightful and hilarious!

    This year we have new Harry Potter, Star Wars, City and Friends advent calendars to open. We will be sharing images of the new calendars every day through Christmas, and hope that you’ll join us! Let’s see what there is to open on Day 19.

    Continue reading →

    Hardware, home, and holiday cheer

    When you think of a small-town hardware store during Christmas, this has to be what you think of. At least, this is the exact image that comes to my mind. Excellent at architecture and storytelling, the Midwest Builders have struck again with a modular worthy of LEGO store shelves. The line of detailed buildings is in dire need of a hardware store, and this fits the bill perfectly. If we were looking at images of the newest release, it’d be at the top of my Christmas wish list.

    Hardware Store at Christmas

    Click to see inside!

    Minifigures and Mechs – More LEGO Marvel Armor arrives in January [Review]

    LEGO recently announced a slew of new Marvel sets that will be available January 1, 2021. Among them are three Mech Armors – smaller sets that feature a minifigure of a popular character and a minimalistic suit of power armor they can stomp around in.  This wave includes 76168 Captain America Mech Armor (US $9.99 | CAN $13.99 | UK £8.99),  76169 Thor Mech Armor (US $9.99 | CAN $13.99 | UK £8.99), and 76171 Miles Morales Mech Armor (US $9.99 | CAN $13.99 | UK £8.99). At first glance, these sets look a little spindly and low-quality, but is that actually the case? Could these be tiny toys be big wins for LEGO and Marvel fans? We’ll walk through the highs and lows of each set, so you can judge for yourself!

    The LEGO Group provided The Brothers Brick with early copies of these sets for review. Providing TBB with products for review guarantees neither coverage nor positive reviews.

    Click to read the full hands-on review

    2020 LEGO Advent Calendars, Day 18

    Happy holidays to all of our fellow LEGO builders! As is tradition, we at The Brothers Brick will be opening our advent calendars as we count down to Christmas. We’ll also be sharing commentary on each one, which will be both insightful and hilarious!

    This year we have new Harry Potter, Star Wars, City and Friends advent calendars to open. We will be sharing images of the new calendars every day through Christmas, and hope that you’ll join us! Let’s see what there is to open on Day 18.

    Continue reading →

    Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream

    There are plenty of neat Batman LEGO dioramas to go around. For some reason, there’s a bit less love for Marvel’s friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. But Instagram user Hachiroku92 changes all that with this decidedly amazing diorama featuring Spider-Man and Sandman duking it out the only way blockbuster heroes and villains can; with lots of collateral damage. Let’s just say the company insurance paperwork for that cement mixer is going to be a sticky pickle. The scene comes to life with convoluted action and stunning photography. Sandman’s amorphous form and giant hand is nothing short of dreamy. Maybe you can construct your own Spider-Man diorama using the parts from the new Spider-Man sets. And before you comment that the old-fogey title was a missed opportunity to cite a more contemporary Metallica tune, I already had Enter Sandman stuck in my head for like a week and now it’s stuck in yours. So…you’re welcome, I guess.