Weekly Geekly Rundown for January 10, 2025
Fires and Feeling Out of Sorts
I love Los Angeles.
It is without a doubt my favorite city. It is burning and I’m worried about those I love.
I have a fondness for a number of cities. San Francisco is great and home to many fond childhood/high school memories. Chicago is awesome and home to my beloved Cubs. Montreal amazed me with its combination of European and American sensibilities. Munich is wonderful and Bayern is filled with distant family. My family and I really like living in Boise, Idaho which combines all the things I am nostalgic for regarding my childhood in Reno, but without the depression that comes with Casinos.
As much as I have enjoyed all of these places and connected with their residents, there is one city that shines above them all as offering everything I think a city should. It’s Los Angeles and I knew I was an Angelino through and through the first time I visited New York City..
On that first visit, and on every subsequent visit, to New York City I found that I had a somehow developed a proper West Coast disdain for "The City" (a term which always means San Francisco to me -- even though I am using it to describe NYC here). As I walked around talking with “The City’s” wonderful residents, and I’ve always found New Yorkers to be amazing, I always felt like there was a bully pushing me around and telling me what to do. That bully wasn’t a person, as I’ve said New Yorkers are awesome. That bully was Robert Moses reaching across time to tell me where to go and what to do. I never feel a sense of exploration or discovery when I go to New York. Instead it always feels like an event planner has dictated when and where I go places. There might be a “surprise” hole in the wall restaurant that my friends like, but that “surprise” will always be in the right neighborhood. New York tells you where to go, even when it’s telling you to go somewhere fun.
Los Angeles is the complete opposite. There’s a reason I believe Los Angeles is the most noir of all cities. It’s the place where dreams go and then die because it was hard to find out where to go to fulfill them. It’s a place where after your fail, you can’t get home. The comforts of your father’s house in New Jersey (I’m looking at you Coyote Ugly) are not just across the river. Those comforts are a country away. When you hit Los Angeles, you have entered Hotel California. You can check in, but leaving? That’s not going to happen easily. Your initial dream didn’t come true, so now it’s time to get to work and Los Angeles rewards work.
The way I’ve always described Los Angeles is that it is is like a geode. People see its "sparkling riches" from afar, so they go there. When they finally arrive they discover Los Angeles is a pockmarked urban sprawl that doesn't look like the Emerald City of Oz they thought they were visiting. This is the moment when a lot of dreams die, but if you put in the work you see that there’s more than the surface to the city. Eventually, you “crack the city open” and find a wondrous history and hidden treasures everywhere. New York tells you where to go to have a good time, Los Angeles challenges you to use your detective skills to find your joy. Whether that joy is mountain hikes, surfing, or looking around for landmarks from James Cain novels.
Before my wife and I moved to Glendale, the home of Cain’s Mildred Pierce and of an excellent (if unrelated) Chicken restaurant called Dinah’s, we lived in the Baldwin Village part of Crenshaw in the Chesapeake Apartments.
And while Glendale was the town of Cain’s novels, our apartment (pictured above) was 1.1 miles from where Elizabeth (The Black Dahlia) Short’s body was discovered in the real world noir area. Dr. Walter Bayley, one of the suspects, lived very close to where the current Krispy Kreme is in the neighborhood.
Los Angeles has darkness, to be sure, but there is also light and that light is embodied in the people who live there. Many of my best friends were people I met while living in Los Angeles. On the film critic side I met and befriended the late David Chute as well as Luke Y Thompson who is a regular contributor here. Kevin Vasquez, who is one of my closest friends, lives near Echo Park. My former podcast co-host Shawna Benson lives in Hollywood. I have friends who live all over the area and I don’t have space to list them all. I will only say that they all made Los Angeles feel like home. Some of my friends were successful screenwriters and attorneys, but we were all just friends when we hung out and played D&D, talked Formula 1, or went to get some of the best pastrami sandwiches anywhere in the world at The Oinkster.
I am glad my wife and I moved to the Boise area, but there is so much I miss about Los Angeles and most of what I miss is the people I love. Sadly, I know more than one person who lost their house in the ongoing fires. Most of those friends lived in Altadena and lost their homes in the Eaton fire, but I also know more than a couple of people who live in Palisades and Brentwood. I care deeply for all of these people and I am gutted at what is happening to my beloved Los Angeles. The city has been through tragedies before and Angelinos are resilient, but I weep for my friends.
I ask that you keep them in your thoughts.
Major Exhortations
When I started this Weekly Rundown my goal was, and still is, to create a community where we talk about the things we love. One of the first things I decided to do was to highlight two (sometimes three) Los Angeles based critics I thought had a lot to say about films and the film and television industry. One of those voices is Luke Y. Thompson. He was a genre/geek beat critic before it became popular and still knows more about that beat than almost any critic I know.
Recent events, and an actual Lamentation from Luke Y Thompson on Facebook, have reminded me that there is another name I should add to the list in large part because he has been supporting his fellow film critics for years. That critic is Wade Major. I mentioned above that Hong Kong film advocate David Chute was a friend I met in my time in Los Angeles. Well…one of the first things that David told me was that I should make sure to read Wade Major’s short book on Jackie Chan and his chapter in Hollywood East on Jet Li as primers. It was good advice. Wade is a contributor at LAist and is the editor-in-chief of CineGods (a site Luke writes for from time to time). He’s host on the DigiGods podcast and is a relatively frequent guest on KPCC’s FilmWeek show. He also just lost his house in the fires burning Los Angeles and so I’ll be adding him to the regular rotation. Given his penchant for using Gods (DigiGods, CineGods) in his site names, akin to my (-erati obsession), I’ll call his subsection Major Exhortations.
I am praying that Wade gets through this rough time, but prayers come with action and though my beginning to include his content on a more regular basis here is small it is an action I can take because for the writer, views are money (eventually).
The Lamentations of Luke Y. Thompson
Luke has a discussion of the importance and the temporality of possessions. I’ve long been a collector of “things,” but that’s something that’s begun to change of late. When I was younger, I didn’t have a lot but I had a deep affection for the few comic book issues I owned and the few RPG books I purchased. As I grew older, I began to “collect” these things and I added board games to the mix. I was at the point where I had purchased more than I could ever play and I justified this in part by saying “I’ll play these with my daughters when they are older.”
When we moved to Idaho, I had to cull a lot of stuff very quickly because we were on a tight time frame and Covid restrictions made it difficult to sell quickly and easily. My board game and rpg collections were easily cut in half by the move alone. Yet I still have too much and so I am slowly but surely downsizing to the things that truly bring me joy. Sure that number is more than 5 or 6, but it is significantly lower than the number of things I currently have that merely collect dust. I’m not an ascetic. I believe things have value, but their value comes not in the mere possessing (unless it’s something super rare). The value comes in the experiences you share with others and that is what I focus on now.
I don’t think Luke is quite in the same place as I am, but his discussion of loss and possessions is a timely one for a lot of people and it’s good to reflect on what we want versus what we will actually use.
Okay, enough of the sadness! Let’s get on with the celebration of geekdom. Luke’s been very active at SlashFilm lately and he’s come up with some really interesting ideas for lists. This week’s is a discussion of Star Trek’s First Officers. I’d have liked him to separate out the Una/Number One of the pilot from the one in Strange New Worlds. I know they are sort of the same person. It’s currently considered canon, but who knows what will happen in the next few decades. I also think there are subtle differences in the way they are portrayed. That said, I think Luke was spot on that she’s on the higher end of the distribution. Speaking of the higher end of the rankings, I think he got the top three correct but I’d put them in a different order and no I wouldn’t have put Spock at number one for many of the same reasons Luke gave. I think that Spock, Kirk, and McCoy are the best Away Team, but they are a true team.
As an aside, I’m one of the few who think of William Shatner as an actor with a much better range than Patrick Stewart. I know, I know, you’re saying “but Shakespeare!” and you’re right. When it comes to high theatrical, Stewart wins the day. Whether that high theatrical is in Dune or in King Lear, Stewart brings sincerity and gravitas. On the other hand, young Shatner’s Mark Antony has really grown on me over the years.
But his performance in Free Enterprise is mind-alteringly good. If you haven’t seen Free Enterprise, I highly recommend it. Not only is it the perfect commentary film on Gen-X, but it is the beginning of Shatner’s late 20th Century resurgence. Shatner can pull of the sincere in something that is pure camp but also sublimely serious.
Whether it’s Kingdom of the Spiders or Devil’s Rain, Shatner isn’t merely chewing up scenery and collecting a paycheck. He’s playing an actual role and it’s refreshing to watch. Compare that to Stewart’s bizarrely over the top psychologist in Lifeforce or his performance in Gunmen (starring Christopher Lambert and Mario Van Peebles) and you see the difference. Gunmen in particular has become something I refer to frequently in my in jokes about Stewart as a good actor.
If you know about the early days of Film Threat and Geek Magazine, are a fan of Star Wars, Star Trek, and Logan’s Run, and Swingers, or know about Full Moon Features, not to be confused with the wild ride that is Mario Van Peebles’ werewolf cop movie Full Eclipse, then this movie is filled Easter Eggs for your viewing pleasure. In fact, I’d call Free Enterprise a 90 minute look into Christian Lindke’s brain.
From pop culture conversation to actual film reviews, Luke has a review of the latest entry in the Public Domain Horrorverse Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare. Given that the actual story of Peter Pan is a bowdlerized version of the tales of Faeries stealing the children of the innocent, it shouldn’t be hard to create a genuinely scary tale. After all, Guillermo del Toro made the Tooth Fairy creepy as all get out in Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and many of del Toro’s best horror films are Faerie Tales from the horror perspective. Elves, as Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell shows us, are not to be trifled with. The premise of Faerie as dangerous is key to my own personal D&D campaign and I liked that the Pathfinder Kingmaker video game used this trope as well.
It’s easy to make Faeries scary, and Peter is a Fae creature, all you have to do is keep the mystical elements or dial them to 11. Did Jagged Edge Productions do that? Nope. They made it more mundane. Don’t get me wrong, addiction and other things are scary in a real way but they don’t have the same effect and don’t feel as “Peter Pan” as keeping the mysterious would have. This might just end up with Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter and Ulysses Gaze as films I would rather never watch again, not matter how much I like you. I’m still having flashbacks of flying around Lenin’s head from the second of those and I’m pretty certain they are still filming and streaming that film.
Courtney Howard’s View from the Center Seat
Given recent events, and the dearth of screenings etc., there’s no review from Courtney this week. I’m just including this to highlight that she is doing okay and has purchased her tickets for Sundance and I cannot wait to get her responses to some of the films.
Good News from Shout! Studios
According to Variety, Shout! Studios has acquired the rights to a LARGE number (156) of classic Hong Kong films including Hard Boiled and The Killer as well as Tony Ching’s Chinese Ghost Story films. The purchase also includes Swordsman III: The East is Red starring Bridgette Lin, one of the most 4th Edition D&D movies of all time. This series was my introduction to the Wuxia genre and it is mindblowingly good.
The post also highlights how earlier play should be approached with a “Darkest Dungeon” mindset. Your player characters aren’t self-inserts of you. Instead, you are their steward (if you are mindful), chronicler, and might even consider the PCs to be resources to an end. Don’t worry about detailed backstory. The purpose of low level adventures is to BE the backstory and you are the Taliesen who will tell their tales.
has a very insightful post this week discussing how many horror films over explain the occult to the point that it ceases to become scary. She uses Longlegs as an example, which begins eerie and mysterious but then pauses all the action for a 30 minute “research montage” that removes the tension.
Her comments got me thinking about the scene in Stigmata (1999) (link has the actual moment) where Patricia Arquette asks Gabriel Byrne’s character how his faith is, just after she manifested direct evidence of possession and evil. It’s presented as a doubt creating moment, but if I was the Priest in this scene that would be the moment my faith transitioned into knowledge, so my response would be “pretty good actually.” The Usual Suspects has the Devil’s trick correct. If the Devil can convince us he doesn’t exist, then we come to doubt God’s existence too. If people’s heads start spinning around, they start flying, and blood starts weeping from stigmata as they yell at us in Enochian we can be pretty firm in our faith. At that point, I’m Russell Crowe in The Pope’s Exorcist or Vin Diesel in The Last Witchhunter. I might still have some fear, but that’s muted by the truth of life everlasting.
The good Doctor also got me thinking about how Edgar Allan Poe understood this. In the first Auguste Dupin mystery, Murders in the Rue Morgue, the narrator lets us know that prior to the events he and Dupin had been reading rare books.
We first met when we were both trying to find the same book. As it was a book which few had ever heard of, this chance brought us together in an old bookstore. Later we met again in the same store. Then again in another bookstore. Soon we began to talk.
But Poe’s narrator doesn’t linger on the contents of the books, he lets us know that the books are what are done outside the narrative. Sure, Dupin and Poe are familiar with Occult books, but are we going to watch them read them? No. We are going to watch them solve a murder. So too did Manly Wade Wellman discuss the occult in both his John the Balladeer and John Thunstone stories. There were books to be read and knowledge to be learned, but our protagonist has already done them. No library montages for them. just battles against Shonokin and encounters with Hands of Glory.
I thought about including Dangerous Journeys as my recommended role playing game this week, but it’s not available for purchase anywhere and I’m not fond of promoting file trading. Besides Tim Brannan wrote an extensive review of the game that covers its biggest quirk, its written in Double High Gygaxian, and the fact that the system works well despite having an almost impenetrable text.
I think that Gary Gygax was a visionary in the field of gaming, but as was evidenced by AD&D he tended to think that a game evolved by getting more complex. He thought that adding rules added complexity to play. It’s the same mistake Advanced Squad Leader makes over Squad Leader. Sure, SL needed some rebalancing and a revision, but it didn’t need to go full ASL. AD&D was far more complex, and granular, than D&D, but its complexity was exactly the right level for the limit of RPG complexity. Dangerous Journeys dialed it to 11 and this commercial does little to make it seem like an exciting experience.
The play featured in the video above reminds me of a game that I’ve played almost more than any other, and which I consider to be a pinnacle of design, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. All of the Final Fantasy Tactics games are straight fire, but being able to play the game on the Gameboy Advance took it to the next level. Only Golden Sun exceeds this game in hand held RPG excitement, and Golden Sun is a near perfect game. All of which is to say that even if the game has a cast of characters that look more like the band opening for Hosier than one getting ready to battle the hosts of Hell, it still looks like a ton of fun.
I don’t even know if this is technically a role playing game, but it is a simulation of the early computer role playing game experience and it makes for a fantastic party game or ice breaker at a training. Momento Mori’s Parsely is a game that emulates the old text based adventure games on the computer. It was created by the team that brought us InSpectres and Burning Wheel, so I’m already all in. Let me let them describe the game to you and you can see if you are interested.
Parsely games are based on the old text adventure parsers from the late 1970s and early 1980s—games such as Colossal Cave Adventure, Zork and Planetfall. In this version, a person replaces the computer, and a map and script replace the software.
One person (most likely you) is the Parser, the name given to the program that runs a text adventure. It’s your job to relay the game world to the players. You describe what the character sees, the results of their actions and anything else appearing in the game. You also keep track of the character's current location, inventory and score. Refer to yourself as “I” when talking to the players.
Everyone else playing the game shares one character. Refer to each player as “you” during the game. You need at least two humans to play a Parsely game: a Parser and a player. There’s no limit to the number of players, making Parsely games ideal for parties, conventions and other large gatherings of geeks who are into this kind of thing.
Action Castle was created in 2003, on the fly, at a friend’s party. Years later, I’d often bring it with me to game conventions, first with 30 players, then 60, then 200, and eventually over 400! My pal and fellow game designer, Luke Crane, persuaded me to publish it as a Z-fold pamphlet in 2009. Now it’s time to delve back into the source code, recompile it all and bundle it together for this book.
I’m pretty sure that Saga’s On the Loose popped up into my YouTube recommendations entirely because I listened to Icehouse’s Electric Blue approximately 1,000 times last week. I think the YouTube was fed up and was saying, “Okay buddy, you want quintessentially ‘80s soundtrack rock, then here’s some gosh darn 80s soundtrack rock.” It delivered in spades. Saga is a Canadian band that sounds like they are trying to fill the Triumph space, but without the full mix of talent. You listen to a Triumph song and you’re blown away that they never got bigger, you listen to Saga’s On the Loose and you wonder why their guitarist didn’t end up with a bigger band later. I’m serious. The song is overall fun, but after you get past the lead singer nearly being murdered by the fans, the guitar solo is something special. It’s like a Sesame Street one of these things is not like the other moment where you hear an excellent solo in a mid-tier Rock song.
While the guitarist did not go on to perform in a major band, he is currently in a prog rock band called Six by Six. I listened to a few of their tunes, and they are decent prog rock. In fact there are a couple that are better than Spectre, the one I’m sharing, but I didn’t share them because their music videos had way too much AI generated art. I wasn’t sure if they were using it because they didn’t want to pay an actual animator or because they think it’s cool and when it comes to anything other than free amateur stuff, I’m mildly put off by AI. Still, Spectre’s pretty good for a trio of geeky prog rock fans.
Of course there’s prog rock and then there’s PROG ROCK and Genesis when Peter Gabriel was the front man is the latter. The Musical Box is just a straight up banger that I’ve been listening to on loop for the past couple of days. I understand that Peter and the band were going different ways creatively, but I often wonder if Peter were willing to limit his theatrics and let his oddities be in the lyrical space what might have happened.
Sometimes I encounter something that makes me sad, and this is one of those times. Bob Mould has released a new single called Here We Go Crazy that’s about Southern California. It’s kind of a soulless song and his lip synching is almost cartoonish. He also walks around the desert with a gas can, which is mildly out of place this week. There’s a real sense of try hard to the video. I think the song and the video could work, but I think both are trying to be important and aren’t focusing on the sincerity.
What do I mean by trying to hard? Check out the cinematography in the Mould Video. It’s filmed in the high desert, and mountains, of California near Palm Springs. Heck, he probably took the tram up as a part of the shoot. Too be honest, adding guerilla filmed footage of that would have added sincerity and genuine punk attitude that’s lacking here. Look at how that cinematography is trying to be artistic. Can’t you just here someone chanting T.S. Eliot’s wasteland in the background?
Now check out Rozalla’s Faith from the movie Cool as Ice filmed by Janusz Kamiński. Janusz has taken the most banal movie and turned it into real art. How? By being sincere. I unreservedly love Cool as Ice as a work of visual art, not as a movie. The acting is terrible, so I could never love it as a movie. As a visual work? It’s a master class and you can see so many glimpses of why in Rozalla’s song. The framing and use of wind and light in the opening shot? Amazing. The hand-held panning around the motorcycle? C’mon. Who is doing this? Why? This is Vanilla Ice for God’s sake. No one is going to watch this, but Janusz Kamiński doesn’t care. It’s going to look amazing and it does.
Okay, enough of that dance hall music. Let’s return to something with a little edge.
Rounding things off this week is my film recommendation. Coming right after my last comments about cinematography and art this may seem like an odd choice, but if you know me at all it isn’t. Last week
talked about how Hammer films came to define horror for an entire generation. She’s right of course, so much so that I often assume many of my favorite British horror films were made by Hammer. It often turns out though that they were made by Amicus Productions instead. I won’t go into a detailed list now, but I wanted to share one of my favorite Amicus films The Land that Time Forgot. The movie is based on a story by Edgar Rice Burroughs that was published in the August 1918 Blue Book Magazine.
It’s a lost world tale with “modern” men and women coming face to face with dinosaurs. The influence of Poe and Lovecraft are readily apparent, but instead of being a “horror” tale, the Burroughs story is an action tale. Burroughs’ protagonists often face horrific foes, the Skeleton Men of Jupiter are among my favorite, but they all ways face them head on and ready for action. It doesn’t matter whether they are a warrior born like John Carter or an incompetent academic like Carson Napier, they don’t wither in the face of fear. I love these tales for that.
I only recently discovered that this film was written by Michael Moorcock and his writing/band/artistic partner James Cawthorn. I knew that Moorcock was a genuine Burroughs fan. He wrote his own Martian planetary romance series after all. I never knew he wrote a screenplay based on a Burroughs tale with his friend James. Blew my mind.
Since The Land that Time Forgot stars Doug McClure, I couldn’t leave out a Troy McClure reference. I know that The Simpsons were making fun of Doug McClure with these bits because he was in a lot of knock off semi-mockbusters (before the term existed), but I’ve always enjoyed McClure movies and so I laugh with him when I see Troy McClure remembering fondly a Doug McClure movie I watched with my Dad as a kid.
Ay! Thanks for the shoutout. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was also the first thing I thought of when I saw Demonschool.
Probably the best "Satan reveals himself" movie where it still feels hopeless is Mr. Frost, where Satan-in-Jeff-Goldblum creates a no-win situation that essentially forces his psychiatrist to murder him, knowing that that's exactly what he wants her to do. Even if her soul subsequently gets saved by Jesus, hypothetically, her actions will have done the damage they were meant to.