Weekly Geekly Rundown for April 19, 2024
Eating on The Orient Express
Agatha Christie is one of my favorite authors and one of the greatest mystery writers of all time. To sing her praises is to be cliché and any discussion of how influential she has been to the genre will more likely understate her impact than overstate it. She looms large over the genre and for good reason. Sadly, many of the modern interpretations of her stories coming out of the UK lately don’t trust her writing and seek to spice things up a bit.
I’m not talking about how and whether they update the stories for a new audience. Such updates can add new textures to the conflicts and motives she presents in her stories. Instead I’m talking about literally not trusting the mysteries and motivations themselves and seeking to improve on the puzzle or formula. That way lies madness. Christie’s mysteries don’t work because they are challenging puzzles, they work because the logic of the motive and method align masterfully in her stories. Change anything else you want, but keep that at the core.
For the most part Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptations of Christie’s Poirot stories have done that. Having said that, it must be pointed out that the best of his adaptations, Murder on the Orient Express, was his first adaptation. There’s a lot that makes Murder on the Orient Express such a wonderful story. The combination of location and class (ever present in Christie) makes it a very compelling mystery tale.
That location, the train itself, is the focus of a recent Tasting History episode from Max Miller. There are a lot of “geek shows” on various websites and applications, but Max Miller has found a wonderful niche to cover, the intersection of food and history. In his Orient Express episode, Max makes and tastes a meal from the famous train line and tells us a great deal about its history. It’s a history that adds to the setting and makes makes me want to revisit some of the film adaptations.
Speaking of adaptations, the second episode of the new CBS series Elsbeth, “A Classic New York Character,” was loosely based on Murder on the Orient Express. The new series is an entry in the Good Wife Universe and has as its lead my favorite recurring peripheral character from that series. While the second episode of the show is an adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express, Elsbeth doesn’t follow the Christie mystery formula. Instead it follows what I find to be the best formula for film and television mysteries. It’s what I call the Columbo formula.
In the Columbo formula, as in the show Columbo, we know from the beginning who the killer is and a part of the killers motivation. The puzzle that engages the audience isn’t finding out whodunnit, rather it’s wonder how Columbo (or Elsbeth) will reveal whodunnit and the full reveal of the motivations behind the killing. Two of my favorite mystery shows use the Columbo formula, the eponymous show and Monk, and Elsbeth borrows from both liberally. Imagine a character that is a mash up of Columbo, Monk, and Monk’s assistant Natalie and you’ve come close to Elsbeth. She’s perky, quirky, and smart. She always has one more question to ask and while her catch phrase isn’t “he’s the guy,” it’s pretty close.
That Elsbeth is so derivative of Columbo and Monk should bother me on some level, but it doesn’t. Carrie Preston, whose husband Michael Emerson plays Wilzig on the new Fallout series, is so ridiculously charming that I fell in love with the series from the moment she showed up on screen. She’s a talented actress who brings a brightness to very dark subject matter. The murders in the show alternate between your typical urban murder and those of “cozy” mysteries and she navigates them perfectly.
Weekly Film Article Cavalcade
The Lamentations of Luke Y. Thompson
If there’s a point to any of it beyond recreating a bunch of Heavy Metal magazine covers, it’s tough to discern.
— Luke Y. Thompson on Rebel Moon: The Scargiver
We’ve got quite a few reviews from Luke Y. Thompson this week. In part because he wrote a couple and in part because I was behind schedule last week and didn’t include a Film Article Cavalcade in the last Weekly Geekly Rundown.
We’ll start things off with the most salient for the pop culture geek in all of us, Luke’s review of Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver over at SuperHeroHype. Luke’s review is a mixed bag, as much a result of the current cut of both Part 1 and Part 2 being the PG-13 “family friendly” first cuts Netflix seems to be demanding as from the subject matter itself. While Zack Snyder might claim that Rebel Moon is his vision of Star Wars adjacent material, any fan of Warhammer 40K recognizes elements of our favorite Imperium tacked on to the Star Wars elements. And of course that is where the biggest flaw of Rebel Moon lies as a story arc. It’s hard to know where the homage to Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven, Star Wars, 40K, Blade Runner, Days of Heaven, and every other intellectual property Zack Snyder likes ends and where the universe of Rebel Moon begins.
Like a lot of modern Dungeons & Dragons material, there is no carving out of any prior genre influence. It’s a jumble of “all the genre” without any seeming curation of ideas. The latest Vecna adventure for D&D includes Lycanthropes in the Dragonlance setting, a setting that expressly states it doesn’t have them. Why? Because the idea of a band of rebel werewolves fighting against a skeletal Death Knight is cool, even if it doesn’t make sense in the setting. Instead of creating a new setting inspired by as the old Mystara campaign would have done, modern D&D writers do the mash up on an existing IP. The reason I’m willing to go along with Snyder is that he is doing the mashup in a new world, his own Mystara if you will, and not trying to force it into an existing fictional universe. If Snyder was doing this to the Star Wars Universe, I’d be livid. Instead, I’m waiting to see where to homage ends and the Snyder begins, because that is when things might get interesting.
Luke also gives the new horror film Abigail a positive review over at AV Club. It’s one that I’ll wait for streaming to see, but Luke’s put it on the top of my to view list when it does hit the apps. Any film that spoils itself in its previews, but manages to entertain is worth watching in my opinion. Sadly, as you know, I’m the only person in my house who likes horror stories and I’d rather not sit alone in a theatre watching it. Alone at home, with the lights out? That’s a different story.
Last week, over at SlashFilm, Luke covered a list of science fiction television shows from the 90s that suffered bad reviews, at least initially for some, but are still worth watching today. It’s an interesting list and I agree that almost all the shows are worth watching. Unlike most people, I never came around on Babylon 5. I still find it meh, at least until Bruce Boxleitner arrives then I’m all in. I am, however, a huge fan of Space Above and Beyond. I initially hated the show because it killed one of my favorite characters relatively early in the series, no spoilers, but when I went back and rewatched it I found it to be a fantastic show. If you are a fan of Helldivers, Wing Commander (the games), or Starship Troopers you should check it out.
Luke’s review of the arachnohorrorcomedy Sting over at ComingSoon.Net is more positive than some of the reviews I’ve read on the film, but he also seems to get what the film makers were doing a little more than some of the other critics. Once again, it’s a film that will have to wait for streaming for me to see, but it’s one I’m looking forward to watching when it comes. I doubt it will live up to Arachnophobia, or Little Shop of Horrors, but it sounds like a fun time.
In his positive review of the new Fallout show, Luke can’t help but follow in the trend of so many modern critics to reference “end-stage capitalism.” The term, Spätkapitalismus, is typically translated as “late-stage capitalism,” but it’s been used to describe capital based economies since prior to WWII so it’s the Frankfurt school equivalent of modern economists predicting 7 of the last 2 recessions. Which is to say that neither Fallout, nor we, are anywhere near actual late-stage capitalism. Joseph Schumpeter’s writings do the best job of discussing the challenges of modern capitalism in liberal democratic societies, but his writings also offer no real solutions just an articulation of the problems. That, of course, is part of why his critiques are so useful. The best fictional examination of post-capitalism I’ve ever read was Iain Banks’ Culture novels.
I don’t mean to call out Luke individually for his use of the term, or to imply that Fallout’s critiques of capitalism are facile, just that I’m finding references to late-stage capitalism cliché. The rest of Luke’s review is far from cliché and he goes into some detail into why the show works so well and it’s a far more insightful review than you’ll find in most places on the internet, especially when compared to the entertainment outrage community.
Courtney Howard’s View from the Center Seat
Courtney Howard has two reviews this week. Okay, one last week and one this week. She reviewed the new remake of Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead over at Variety. She gives it a very positive review which prompted some of the internet outrage gang to ask her “what she knows” since no one wanted a remixed version of a film. There’s been a lot of that kind of outrage lately and I find it very silly. Some of my favorite films were remixes that shifted sex or race of main characters. I loved Ice Cube’s remixed versions of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles and Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. They worked far better than the “in name only” adaptation of Cheaper by the Dozen that Steve Martin put out. A Cheaper by the Dozen that doesn’t include the single most powerful dynamic of the original isn’t really a remake at all. Oh, and His Girl Friday, one of the all-time classic Screwball Comedies, is a gender swapped version of The Front Page. Remixing a movie/play is fine by me, so long as they keep the moral core of the story.
Courtney’s second article is a discussion of the music in the new Lucy Boynton romantic comedy The Greatest Hits and I was very grateful that Courtney covered it because if she didn’t I don’t think I’d have known it existed at all. Lucy Boynton was magical in the recent adaptation of The Ipcress File and The Greatest Hits shares a component with one of my all-time favorite romantic comedies in that it features time travel. If The Greatest Hits has half the heart of About Time, it will be a favorite of mine. Music and romance go hand in hand, so I’m surprised no one had mixed them before. As it stands, I’ll be watching this tonight!
Mendelson’s Melodic Meanderings
Scott Mendelson chats about the recent film Civil War and where A24 falls in importance to the modern film industry.
Glimpses from the Substackosphere and Bloggerverse
shares an interesting ScreenRant article about some of the comic book influences on D&D’s Appendix N over at his newsletter.
It’s an interesting article, but it really only scratches the surface. If you want a deep dive into the connection of Sword & Sorcery comics and D&D, you could do no better than to check out G.W. Thomas’s Dark Worlds Quarterly website. In general Thomas is a very good writer on pulp pop culture and I’ve only found one of his claims to be impossible to verify, but that’s a story for another time. A quick read through of Thomas’ site shows one of the glaring holes in the ScreenRant article in that it mentions Gardner Fox, who both wrote comics and features in Appendix N, but fails to mention that he wrote the first sword and sorcery comic in his Conan derivative Crom the Barbarian.
Regardless, I recommend Critical Hit Parader’s latest and reading the ScreenRant piece, then following that up with a deep dive into Dark Worlds Quarterly land.
does an homage to the classic 1985 Unearthed Arcana rule book cover. If you ever wonder “when did D&D become about adventuring parties filled with non-humans?” you can blame Unearthed Arcana. It’s a rule book filled with mechanics that were controversial at the time, but that have shaped D&D ever since. It was also where power creep really began to kick in and you only have to read about the Cavalier to see what I mean.’s most recent post shares and discusses one of Robert E. Howard’s poems. While some might argue that you can see hints of Howard’s struggles with depression in his Conan stories, he is described as “black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth” after all, but I find that his poetry is where you can really see his struggles. It is also where you really get to see his raw talent as a wordsmith and what the literary world lost when he killed himself at the age of 30. One can only imagine the works he would have written, but I think he would have been a bit of a McMurtry figure. A man who wrote great genre fiction as well as great literary fiction. He never got to develop into the complete artist he would become, but we can see the seeds of it everywhere in his writings.
Role Playing Game Recommendation
Since I published Luke’s article on Cutthroat Island the other day, I was thinking about Pirate themed role playing games I could recommend. There are a couple of excellent games, but I’m going to recommend the first one I ever played. Fantasy Games Unlimited’s best known games may be Villains & Vigilantes and Aftermath! (also called After-Math for the mathematical complexity of the game), but they had a great catalog of games that included one of the best swashbuckling games ever designed Flashing Blades! Flashing Blades! is a d20 based role playing game that was the first time I remember attribute checks being used as the actual core mechanic for a game. It also featured a very interesting, if time consuming, set of rules for fencing. The game also includes art from Matt Wagner. Yes, Grendel Matt Wagner. Check it out!
Music Recommendation
Combining both the old and the new, I find that there are a number of artists who combine modern pop sensibilities with those of the 1980s to very good effect. The Weeknd’s song Save Your Tears is a perfect example of this trend and makes for some excellent listening. While it features a lot of the elements of current “perfect music” production and mixing, it also has heart and a fun melody.
Probably the song that best captures the best elements of mixing the old and new, and the first modern song that made me feel nostalgic for my own youth is Sunroof by Nicky Youre and dazy. The fact that the producer is listed as an artist is symbolic of the modern recording era, but the melody is infectious. I remember when I first heard the song. My family and I were driving to Yellowstone on I-84 (yes, I wanted to write “the 84” because I can’t get the SoCal out) and we just started bopping to the song. Eventually, we were singing along every time it came on the Satellite radio.
As I mentioned, it’s the first time I can remember a modern song making me feel nostalgic. It brought to mind those times as a teenager when my friend David and I would drive down I-80 in Reno with the sunroof of my Volkswagen Bug open singing whatever songs we would sing. It was a joyous time and the song captures it perfectly. Whenever I’m in a down mood, I’ll bring up Sunroof and I almost always perk up.
Music Recommendation
Returning to the pirate theme, I couldn’t let an opportunity to recommend the best pirate film of all-time pass by without taking it. That film? Captain Blood, of course. Michael Curtiz, one of the greatest directors in all of Hollywood history, directed this masterpiece of swashbuckling action. The movie has absolutely everything that a movie needs, romance, drama, action, and Basil Rathbone. The key to its success over so many modern pirate films is that it completely lacks irony. It presents its swashbuckling adventure straight and the audience benefits from it.
While some of the best modern swashbuckling tales (The Princess Bride, Pirates of the Caribbean) take things less seriously, they also borrow liberally from Curtiz’s work and that borrowing is a large part of their success. Do yourself a favor and make some room for Captain Blood. The final duel is worth it.
Thanks for this awesome article :)
Did you know that the Original "Dont tell Mom the babysitters dead" has a big D&D poster on the wall of the kids room?
Thanks for the Critical Hit Parader mention, and I completely agree with your recommendation of the Dark Worlds Quarterly website for sword & sorcery comic info!