Weekly Geekly Rundown for March 22, 2024
Nostalgic for Conversations I Had Yesterday
A Shout Out to a Good Friend
It’s often hard to come up with ideas for the “miscellaneous” section of the Weekly Geekly Rundown. It tends to be the portion of the Rundown that takes more cognitive load to come up with than the others because it’s the least formulaic. It also requires me to adopt the my alternate personality of the Troll Detective Dupin (pictured above) to scour my mental dungeon to remember things I’ve encountered recently that would be of interest to a general audience.
In the past I’ve covered the discovery of the Einstein Tile or How to Calculate Pi (that was last week) and I like to keep them educational to some degree if I can. I’ve got a plan for a future post that features my favorite mathematician. Long time readers know who that is, but for the uninitiated it’s Hannah Fry. Any mathematician who writes a mathematical proof to defend the existence of Santa Claus is going to rate high in my book. Any future screenwriters who want to remake A Miracle on 34th Street should make sure to read her book. Oh, her book also uses this equation as an opportunity to talk about how math(s) (the extra S is for non-American English users) play around with abstract concepts in interesting ways. A key example of this is the 1 + 2 + 3 … = - 1/12 controversy in which you learn that someone with a German accent can actually have a sense of humor.
Ha! Look at that, I managed to include an educational interesting video even as I was building to something else. The point here being that I try to have this section be a place where I share interesting things I’ve learned.
This week is a little different. This week, I’d like to give a shout out to my friend Jason Parker. He’s a good friend who was a regular player in my D&D campaigns over the years and is the only person I’d trust to play a Gnome Bard. Yes, I’d trust him to play the DREAD COMBINATION. I have many fond memories of gaming with him and discussing a lot of miscellaneous pieces of trivia (not “factoids” as factoid means “thing that is similar to a fact but isn’t one” and not “small fact”). I would say that over half the gaming sessions we played together were just shooting the breeze. I’m sure that’s true of a lot of people though.
Those conversations are one of the things that inspired me to do the miscellanea section of the Rundown, but more than that they reflected why he was such a natural choice for the job he’s been doing for years and years. You see, my friend Jason was a staff member working for MatPat’s Theory channel. He was Theory’s first official employee and in a recent video, MatPat’s last, he got a shout out from the creator and I really wanted to share it with you.
Why? Because Jason’s an awesome guy who puts a lot of work into everything he does. I still wish we’d been able to put together our “people who game” documentary and hold out hope that we can someday schedules permitting. I’m also sharing it because the “Theory” videos are a regular view around the house and I realized that I haven’t shared enough of them over the past year. The “Theory” channel has led to so many interesting conversations in our household and resulted in my ability to add even more movies to the “movies we need to watch together” list.
So congratulations Jason! (The embedded video should load to the acknowledgement if you are interested in seeing it.)
Okay, enough of me praising friends, it’s time to share random geekiness.
Weekly Film Article Cavalcade
The Lamentations of Luke Y. Thompson
This past week was a busy week for Luke and he got to review movies within his stereotyped wheelhouse and a bit outside of it to give us a good overview of the movies that just came out.
Luke’s most interesting piece this week is his review of Winnie the Pooh Blood and Honey 2. The review is so good, both as a recommendation and as a piece of writing, that I’m almost tempted to watch the entire series. When Winnie the Pooh entered public domain, it meant that two things were guaranteed to happen and one of those was that the character would feature in a slasher film.
In general, I have no interest in watching a slasher film featuring a beloved character from my childhood and I tend to dislike films that “shit on nostalgia or simple things” whether they are slasher films or other. AND that’s where it appears I was wrong in my assumptions regarding the Blood and Honey franchise. You see one of the things about the original Pooh stories, the most heartbreaking thing, is that Christopher Robin leaves Pooh and friends behind. In many ways it’s a Pauline First Corinthians 13:11 act. Christopher Robin is “leaving childish things behind.” That never felt right to me.
As a child, I hated Christopher Robin for abandoning his friends. As an adult, I see it as even more childish to leave Pooh behind than to incorporate Pooh into he grows older. One of the things I hated about Inside Out, and there’s a lot I hated, was that it (HUGE SPOILER) killed the kid’s imaginary friend. The imaginary friend dies to save the child’s memories, and thus the child. It was heartbreaking and cruel and so was what Robin did to Pooh and his friends in the Hundred Acre Wood.
I never had an imaginary friend, but I did have an escape. When I was sad as a kid, I would “play D&D.” I didn’t play with others in these moods, instead I would roll up characters and navigate them solo through a module or two. When I discovered Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks and Tunnels & Trolls solo adventures, they were a Godsend for my lonelier moments. I still have the character sheets for the characters I played in these times. I still think about them from time to time. I have integrated them into my adulthood and use them as NPCs when I run D&D for my daughters. Some childhood things become vitally important when you are raising your own children and those who leave all the things they think are childish leave behind many tools to good parenting.
The fact that Blood and Honey has Pooh and the crew raging against being abandoned actually appeals to me. I don’t know if it appeals to me in this particular execution, but it has cache and it makes for a legitimate critique of modernity. Horror movies often highlight, in masked or obvious ways, things we fear in society. Vampires are about sex, which in pre-modern times can lead to death. Zombie movies are about many things: conformity, consumerism, isolation, societal breakdown, or disease. It Follows is about STIs and social contagion. Smile is about social contagion and suicide. Maybe Blood and Honey is about how a lack of childhood play is leading to disfunction. I’ll have to watch it to find out and I’m still on the fence about it, but Luke makes a convincing argument.
Luke’s other reviews include an examination of the new Russell Crowe film Sleeping Dogs, which highlights how murder mysteries can fail when you only adapt one-third of a book’s examination and focus on being Memento-light. The Wallander series and Memento cover similar conflicts to this film, which leaves out multiple storylines.
Back in exploitation land, Luke gives a relatively positive review to Immaculate. Contra Luke’s thoughts, I find if funny that we have more horror movies about Nuns now that fewer people are educated by horrible harridans in habits. When that was more common, we got films like Audrey Hepburn’s The Nun’s Story and the all-time classically musical mistakenly placed as a Christmas film The Sound of Music. That’s not a commentary on the quality of the Nun/Priest horror film genre, of which I am a fan in general but love to mock in particulars, rather that I think it’s more socially acceptable in a time when the response is to tales of harridans in habits rather than experience. Though, to be fair, coming from Ireland Luke might actually have first hand memories unlike many today.
Luke’s review of the new Ghostbuster’s film, like a lot of reviews of it, is mixed. For all the critiques, I’m still excited to see it. As someone who’s watched more adaptations of King Arthur tales than I care to think about, ranging from great to terrible, I’m not one to experience IP fatigue. My suspension of critique is high with this franchise and as long as the characters are charming, I’m in.
Courtney Howard’s View from the Center Seat
Courtney’s reviews for the week include a fairly critical review of Ghostbusters Frozen Empire. That’s two genre critics who feel cool to the production, but that’s not enough to scare me away. As both Luke and Courtney highlight, Ghostbusters holds a weird place in a mapping of genre. It’s too comedic to be horror (even “horror comedy”), but it has too many horror elements (and isn’t funny enough really) to be strictly comedy. The first movie was charming and silly with jump scares and real stakes. Each remake/reboot has faced different challenges, though I adored the nostalgia of the last one, which made me weep, so I’m still looking forward to Frozen Empire.
Where her review of Ghostbusters was on the more critical end, Courtney is more forgiving in her review of the latest Road House film. In the review, she covers most of the things that made this film more enjoyable for me than I thought it would be. The new Road House is a mashup of Road House (no surprise there), Shane, and The Quiet Man. That’s a workable combination if you include either a meaningful relationship with a mentored younger character or a meaningful romantic element, but the new version provides neither of those.
What’s odd is that even as the film lacks any real connection between Dalton and the “mentored youth,” the performance by Hannah Love Lanier is delightfully charming. Hannah gets to deliver one of the best lines in the film about how bad things happen everywhere but when they happen in the Keys it’s always on a beautiful day. That’s a moment to build a movie around, but it’s just tossed aside. So too with the potential romance. It’s ignored for the action. To be fair, that action results in some great one liners like “Who taught you shapes?” but fails to result in a cohesive narrative. Road House is a series of moments, any of which could be in a great movie but that are only in a mid-movie.
I’m still going to watch it again because the cast did a good job and Doug Liman shot some beautiful footage.
Mendelson’s Melodic Meanderings
Regular reader Kevin will want to listen to
’s recent podcast which discusses a number of underrated animated films, some of which are among Kevin’s favorites. Scott is starting to put together some real chemistry with his team and it shows here, even if a part of that team was out for an episode.
Glimpses from the Substackosphere and Bloggerverse
’s latest homage is to the classic Githyanki illustration on the cover of the original Fiend Folio. The source image is fantastic and Stan’s rendering is a lot of fun. has a timely homage to Éowyn in his post this week. As with many of his posts, it’s art heavy and has some good commentary. My daughter Mystery (not her real name) adores Lord of the Rings and when I told her that her birthday is close to Tolkien Reading Day it made her extremely happy.
I wish I’d been able to post this last week, but
has a discussion of the demon St. Patrick battled. Like the story of St. Nicholas raising three children from the dead, this is a story I hadn’t read before so I found it very interesting.
Richard Baker on the Sorcerer Class
Given Chris Perkins’ more recent comments on D&D core books having too many character classes in them, more on that later this week, Richard Baker blogged about how the Sorcerer class came to be. As I’ve mentioned before, the 3rd edition was the “have a rule for everything” edition and subsequent editions have been a response to that, but it’s interesting to see behind the scenes on some of the design decisions for 3e.
Game Recommendation
I am a HUGE fan of super hero role playing games. There was a time when I owned every super hero role playing game in publication. I still own a ton of them, but there are so many out there now that I can’t keep up. That doesn’t mean I’ve given up on trying to get the best of them though and so I’m always up for a new attempt to model comic books in a role playing game.
My tastes in super hero games range from the highly mathematical and tactical like Champions to abstract and judgement call oriented games like Supercrew. Both ends of the design spectrum can do a great job emulating the genre, it all depends on the execution and advice given. This week’s game recommendation falls more on the abstract and judgement call side of the design schematic, but it is one of my all-time favorite games.
Alan Bahr’s Tiny Supers manages to provide relatively granular superhero rules with robust character creation akin to a more mathematical and tactical game while focusing on more storytelling design elements. If you are willing to take an “effects” based approach to the powers in the book, the game has almost all the powers that you need to emulate any super hero and even if it doesn’t it has enough to create a meaningful and fun campaign. Alan recently released the H.O.M.E. Handbook and it includes information about the Hero Orientation and Mentorship Experiment aimed at younger supers. It’s the Sky High or Titans supplement for Tiny Supers and it’s a ton of fun. In addition to setting material, H.O.M.E. includes a couple of new powers and a new archetype that will be a favorite for Green Arrow fans.
Check it out.
Film Recommendation
I’ve watched a lot of movies in the past couple of weeks ranging from classics to crap, but one of the best moments came during my twin daughters’ recent “8 Days of Birthday.” When our twins turned 8, my wife and I had a really difficult time scheduling birthday events with our daughters’ friends. Since it was around Spring Break everyone had travel plans and so no one could make it on the same day. We took this lemon and made lemonade out of it creating a new octo-annual event. The twins turned 16 this year and that meant it was time for 8 Days of Birthday 2.0 and one of those days was “Mean Girls” Day.
My daughters are huge fans of the Mean Girls Broadway Soundtrack and really wanted to watch the stage show when it came to our area. Sadly, it sold out almost instantly. Not so sadly, the reviews of the local production were not good and it appears that there were production and performance problems in the travelling show. I may have missed the stage play, but I was committed to giving the girls a movie viewing day where we watched both the original Lindsay Lohan vehicle and the new musical variant.
The original film held up remarkably well. As a kind of Heathers light with a kinder message, the film still had jokes and moments that hit hard or referenced reality nicely. My favorite is when the principal has brought all the female students to the gym and tells them he’s going to keep them there all night if he has too. He is quickly reminded that he can only keep them until 4pm, after which he immediately says “I will keep you here to 4 o’clock.” It’s hilarious and hits at the limits of authority that schools have. It’s especially funny when contrasted with the fact that the principal pulls out a baseball bat like Morgan Freeman in Lean on Me. It’s a funny film that captures the struggles teens face nicely and would make a great marathon entry with Pump Up the Volume, The Breakfast Club, Ginger Snaps, The Craft, Heathers, and a couple more teen angst films.
The original Mean Girls has transitioned from fun film to new classic. Now is when you think I’m going to recommend the musical version, right? Yeah, that’s not going to happen. The songs that are included in the musical are performed very well, but it’s missing songs from the play. Similarly, the musical version is missing some of the best moments from the original film. I understand that it needed to separate itself as more than a remake, but the musical element captures that fine. The movie felt less brave than either the stage musical or the original film. In his review of Blood and Honey, Luke included a list of directors who were once pushing boundaries who were now making safe fare. I’m not saying the original Mean Girls was pushing boundaries, but I am saying that it played it less safe than the remake. In doing so, the original ends up being a really fun and sometimes biting film.
Music Recommendation
Since Luke has me in a punk mood, read his review and you'll see why, I think it’s time to recommend a little punk music. Since the new Mean Girls movie played it a little safe, I’m going to recommend Minor Threat by Minor Threat because they're just a Minor Threat.
And since there’s a lot of discussion of nostalgia in this week’s entry and because, as Greta Gerwig’s husband wrote in Kicking and Screaming (the good one not the Will Ferrell one), Gen X is “nostalgic for conversations it had yesterday” it’s time for Black Flag’s TV Party. It’s filled with TV references that were nostalgic for “right now” when it was right now.
In case you haven’t seen Kicking and Screaming, and I swear I’ve recommended it, here’s the clip that the quote is from.
That’s it for this week. That’s what I’m geeking out about.
What are you geeking out about?
I loved the Minor Threat and Black Flag recommendations! Personally I'm partial to the Repo Man soundtrack version of TV Party.
It is interesting how -- from my memories -- MOST books about kids who make magical friends end with them having to separate. Willy Wonka was a huge exception and that regard. I'm sure the idea is to teach kids about innocence lost or something, but I'm equally sure I wasn't the only one who loved that Mowgli doesn't leave the jungle at the end of Favreau's remake.
I'm thinking Disney's Christopher Robin (recently rewatched, underrated) will probably suit you better than Blood and Honey in the end, but if you watch it, let us know.