I’ve been meaning to write up the rest of the SIFF films I saw, as well as the Minutemen documentary We Jam Econo, but I’ve been too busy. Origins is coming up and things like WFRP, True20, and Thieves’ World demand my attention. And of course the usual litany of things I can’t yet talk about. Somehow day after day slips by and I can’t find time to write a few movie reviews. So, in place of the more detailed reviews of previous SIFF films, here are some quickies.

Mysterious Skin: Gregg Araki’s latest is a tale of two 8 year olds molested by their baseball coach and how the experience affects them as they become teenagers. While I thought his Doom Generation flick was terrible, this was pretty good.

A World Without Thieves: Stylish HK flick about a pair of scam artists and what happens when one of them gets pregnant. Most of the action takes place on a long train ride across China. While story and character are the focus, it does include some cool action sequences as well.

R-Point: This is a Korean horror film set during the Vietnam War. A patrol of South Korean soldiers is sent to a remote location to find any survivors from a lost platoon. No one mentions that the area is built over an ancient massacre site. Whoops! Hauntings and freakouts ensue. While not exactly groundbreaking, this was fairly entertaining.

El Crimen Ferpecto: Another triumph for Álex de la Iglesia, the “Ferpect Crime” is a vicious black comedy set almost entirely in a large Spanish department store. It centers on Rafael, a suave ladykiller who only wants to live in elegance. When his dreams of being floor manager are shattered, he accidentally kills his rival. He is saved by a mysterious guardian angel, but she traps him into the type of common life that he abhors. Funny and biting.

We Jam Econo: This is the story of the Minutemen, one of the great punk bands of the 80s. Like the Gits, the Minutemen’s time was cut short by the tragic death of a key member, in this case guitarist, songwriter, and singer D. Boon (killed in a van accident). Lots of great live footage of the band, interviews with everyone from Flea to Richard Hell, and the heart wrenching earnestness of Mike Watt, who still clearly misses his best friend even 20 years later. Recommended.

Batman Begins: Treated myself to the Bats on my birthday. You probably don’t need me to tell you this, but this is by far the best big screen adaptation of Batman. The franchise lives again.

Ten years ago this week, I came out to the Pacific Northwest for the first time. My friend Dave AKA “Jabone” had moved to Seattle a year earlier and having a place to stay was about all the excuse I needed to take a vacation out here. At the time I was in grad school, freelance writing in the game industry, singing in a punk rock band, and working retail in a coffee store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I decided a break was in order and arranged the trip for early summer, which was good timing. The weather was absolutely gorgeous (unlike June so far this year), sunny, temperate, and pleasant.

I stayed with Dave and his girlfriend Rachel in Seattle and they showed me around town. We went (to the Crocodile, IIRC) to see the Boss Martians, a cool garage band that have kept at it and have been getting some attention over the past couple of years. Rachel’s sister, who I had also known in NYC, was acting in a Star Trek parody musical (later shut down by Paramount) so we checked that out and it was pretty damn funny. I also visited the old corporate offices of WotC. This was when they still had their old roleplaying division and they were preparing the release of Everway.

After a few days in Seattle I took the bus up to Bellingham and visited another friend there for a day, getting to see a bit of the rain forest. Then I went on to Vancouver, where Nicole was living at the time. This was when she was pregnant with Kate too (little did I know at the time what in store for me!). I had timed my visit well because the Subhumans, one of the Vancouver’s greatest punk bands (not to be confused with the also great English band of the same name), were doing a reunion show and I managed to get a ticket at the last minute and catch an awesome show. Nicole also introduced me to Tojo’s, a kickass Japanese restaurant that we still patronize when we go to BC.

I returned to Seattle for a couple more days with Dave and Rachel and then flew home. I had had a great time and thought to myself, “I could totally live in the Pacific Northwest.” And only two years later I moved to Seattle. That trip laid a lot of groundwork for me, though I didn’t realize it at the time, and it seems weird that ten years have gone by already.

I had a weird ass dream last night. For some reason, I was with a group of people near a volcano that was erupting. We thought we were far enough away to escape harm but then we spotted a rush of fast moving lava heading our way. I got behind a car, trying to use it for cover, but the lava flow overcame us and I thought it was the end. Somehow, I survived this encounter, though it was quite painful. An indeterminate amount of time later, I and other survivors were slogging our way through the mud, as rain brought the ash down to the earth. Then we saw these monstrous creatures that were sort of like orcs but they were made of animated volcanic ash. A whole horde of these things was coming towards us, so I suggested we get out of sight. I went to look for a hiding place while my companions milled around confused. I had just found a good spot when I heard more of the creaturs approaching from a different direction. I got behind a rock and let them pass me by. This was a small patrol of three and I couldn’t let them come up behind my companions. I pulled out the only weapon at my disposal: a spoon. Yep, a spoon. Then I jumped out and used the spoon to gauge out the throat of the nearest ash creature. Then I grabbed up his big honkin’ mace…and promptly woke up.

Fifty more dreams like that and I’ll have a new monster book. Or perhaps it’s time for a vacation.

Nik and I went to the midnight showing of Night of the Living Dorks last night in the latest of our SIFF screenings. It’s a German film that’s best described as a teenage zombie comedy and my god is it funny. Try to imagine a cross between Risky Business, Revenge of the Nerds, and Night of the Living Dead—in German. The heroes are three young goobers—Phillip, Konrad, and Weener—who get no respect from the in-crowd at their high school (the aptly named Friedrich Nietzsche Gymnasium). Phillip lusts after “it girl” Uschi and he is so desperate he and his pals end up at a graveyard with the three Goth kids at school, one of whom is Phillip’s next door neighbor and childhood friend, Rebecca. The incompetent Goths are trying to use a copy of the Necronomicon, a store bought chicken, and a screwed up pentagram to raise the dead, though Phillip is more interested in getting their help with a love spell. The Goth leader’s plan is to master the art of necromancy and then go to Seattle to raise up zombie Kurt Cobain (this got huge laughs from the Seattle crowd). Naturally enough, the evening goes awry and the next thing the guys know they wake up in a morgue.

At first, the friends don’t believe they are zombies but they soon discover that they feel no pain, have increased strength, and crave raw meat. Of course, these guys are zombie teenagers so their thoughts soon turn to what they can do with their newfound powers. Konrad has a “book of shame” that records every humiliating thing ever done to him. He begins to track down all of his tormenters and take his vengeance upon them. This culminates with him eating the sadistic gym coach “Stalin”, who has a great line to the students about how Germany would a lost the war if the soldiers had their bad attitudes (“But, sir, we did lose the war!”).

Things go wrong when their body parts start dropping off, which results in the creative use of a staple gun. Phillip and Weener agree that they must find an antidote, while Konrad is too in love with his power to want to give it up. The rest of the film is uses the zombie gag to turn a typical teen movie plot on its head. The humor is broad and while the gags are sometimes obvious, they also work. Night of the Living Dorks is a riot and is sure to become a cult hit amongst gamers and nerds of all varieties.

The latest Game Trade has some sample pages from the upcoming Dungeon Master’s Guide II, which I checked out with interest. One feature is a new format for stat blocks that is apparently becoming WotC and Paizo standard. WotC’s designers have recognized that the current stat blocks can be hard to use, as they have an awful lot of info crammed into to them. The new stat blocks are indeed easier to read and do a lot of calculations for you with attack options and feats and so on. As I was looking them over, I had two overwhelming feelings:

· This is a superficial fix for what is, in fact, a much bigger problem (a band-aid for your head wound, as I put it in the post title). Namely, that D&D; in its current incarnation is bloated and overcomplicated. Stat blocks, particularly those for high level characters and big hit dice monsters, are certainly a symptom but they are not the most important things to fix here. I suppose it’s against my interest to want to see 4th edition any time soon, since 3.5 was such a kick in the nuts to the d20 industry, but there’s a lot more wrong with D&D; than stat blocks.

· Now it’s going to take a full column to stat out the average NPC. That means books will have even more space dedicated to stats and less dedicated to other content.

In the original Death in Freeport, when I was statting up NPCs, I had one entry for “Important Skills and Feats” in which I provided you the key elements you’d need for each NPC based on his role in the adventure. If a NPC was a combat obstacle, I reasoned, you don’t need to know how every skill point was spent or what his Craft skill modifier is. We moved away from that because the d20 crowd was keen to see companies follow the WotC standard in most things. I’m now sorry we did and I’m thinking we should move back towards the idea. I don’t see us adopting the new stat block except for special NPCs that are worth the extra space.

Last week I was taking the bus downtown to do a bank and post office run. I was trying to get some checks deposited before 3 so I took the 2:30 bus, which is earlier than I usually go. Turned out the teenagers had just gotten out of school and the bus was packed, so I had to go all the way to the back and sit in the middle of the last row of seats. I pulled out a copy of Honour of the Grave by Robin Laws and started reading. On my left there was a pimply faced teenager with baggy pants half way down his ass, but I didn’t pay him any attention. Not so the two young girls who bounced down the aisle. They had their eyes on him and walked right up to introduce themselves.

“Would you like to join our naked treehouse?” the skinny one asks energetically. Baggy pants looks boggled. “Your what?” he asks.

“Our naked treehouse,” the Latina girl says. “We have a treehouse and if you join our club you can come there and get naked. We also have pool parties.”

“What do I have to do to join?” he asks, the hint of suspicion in his voice.

“Well,” the skinny girl says, “You have to either get naked right here, right now or you have to learn our special handshake.”

I nearly interjected, “Dude, your pants are already half off, go for it!” Instead, I hid my big smirk behind my book and just listened. The teenagers soon established that they were all 16 years old. The girls also said they went to a private Christian school downtown with only 30 students. Ah, Christian school girls, it all made so much sense.

After the guy made it clear he wasn’t going to get naked on the bus, the girls decided to show him the special handshake. It started with with three big jerking off motions and a grunt and got weirder from there. I found it really hard not to laugh.

At this point a police officer got on the bus and girls said, “Oh, maybe we should ask him to join our naked treehouse.” The skinny one starts yelling over the cop. “Excuse me, Mr. police officer!” She finally gets his attention but then changes tactics. She says, “Do you have a dollar? A dollar!”

The cop, to his credit, gives them a whithering glance and says, “J-O-B.”

Soon after the cop and baggy pants get off the bus, so I figure the entertainment is over. But oh no, the girls then turn their attention to me. “What about you? Do you want to join our naked treehouse?”

I said, “Oh, I don’t think that’s a good idea, considering.”

The Latina girl says, “Oh, don’t worry, we don’t discriminate based on age. Anyone is welcome in the naked treehouse.”

“Yeah, but I think the authorities frown on that sort of thing.”

They consider this then ask, “If you were 16, would you join our naked treehouse?”

“Oh, absolutely,” I reply. And I’m not lying. Where were these girls when I was 16?

At this piont my stop comes up. I get up to go and say, “Good luck with your naked treehouse, girls.”

“Thanks!” they say, with utmost perkiness.

It was the most entertaining bus ride I’ve had in quite some time. And I got a great reaction out of Nicole at game night when I said, “Two 16 years old girls asked me to join their naked treehouse today.”

I saw my second SIFF movie today, a documentary called the Gits about a Seattle punk rock band from the early 90s. I liked the Gits when they were around, though they never came to New York so I never got to see them. Musically, they weren’t groundbreaking or anything, but they had a secret weapon in singer Mia Zapata. She had a great voice and a magnetism that made her a born frontwoman.

The film documents the band from their beginnings at Antioch college to their halcyon Seattle days in the early 90s to their sad end in 1993. This is not a typical band story of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The Gits were at their peak when it all came to an end. The cause: the rape and murder of Mia Zapata in 1993. This was big news in the punk rock scene at the time and I certainly heard about it in NYC. Band members overdosing on heroin was not that surprising, but rape and murder were something else entirely.

The story of the band is told through interviews with surviving members, friends, and family. Unfortunately, there just isn’t a lot of good video footage of the Gits in existence, so most of what’s shown is from two shows (one in Seattle that was actually shot for the film Hype! and one in LA). Nonetheless, the filmmakers carry it off with deft editing, the use of stills, and the occasional cartoon segue.

Although the film is about the band as a whole, it can’t help but focus on Mia, since her death was so tragic and had repercussions throughout the Seattle scene. And for over a decade her murder was unsolved and that just made it worse. None of her friends or bandmates knew why she had been killed or who might have done it. Her loss was bad enough, but the senselessness of it made it that much worse.

Interestingly, the film was well under way when Mia’s cold case was unexpectedly revived. The police had recovered a DNA sample from saliva found on her corpse but there were no matches at the time. Eleven years later her murderer was arrested in Florida and his DNA profile entered the system. He was brought back to Seattle, tried, and sentenced to 36 years for Mia’s rape and murder. This gave her friends and family (and the film for that matter) a sense of closure, which was something at least. Sadly, the crimes did turn out to be entirely random. This guy didn’t know her at all. She was just a convenient target who walked down the wrong Seattle street on the wrong night. A bright young artist’s life cut short for no reason at all. It’s a terribly sad story and the film tells it well.

Afterwards there was a Q + A with the filmmakers and part way through it the ex-drummer for the Gits came up as well (these days he’s a psycho-therapist; coincidence?). This was the world premier of the film. It was quite appropriate that this take place not only in Seattle, but at a theater that’s mere blocks from the Comet Tavern, a central hang out for the band and the last place her friends saw Mia alive.

My SIFF schedule will now shift to things other than punk rock documentaries.

The Seattle International Film Festival is going on at the moment and there’s an abundance of interesting movies coming up. Nik and I have a hit or miss history with the SIFF. Some years we make a real effort and see a lot of movies, while in others we’re too caught up in other things to see anything. Last night we went to our first SIFF movie of the year, a film called Punk: Attitude. It was about perfect for me.

Punk: Attitude is a film by Don Letts. You may know Don as the former DJ of the famed Roxy club in London back in the day, or the soundman for the Clash, or the maker of the Punk Rock Movie. If you don’t know his work, suffice to say that he was at ground zero of the British punk explosion and so has the right cred to make this film.

The movie is a documentary that traces the punk attitude through the years. Naturally enough, it also supplies a potted history of punk rock. What makes it really work is that Letts has the participants speak for themselves. This is not a documentary done in the omniscient narrator style. The story is carried forward by interview snippets from a wide range of scenesters, not all of whom were musicians either. The lineup is pretty impressive. Letts interviewed members of the Velvet Underground, MC5, New York Dolls, Ramones, Dictators, the Clash, the Damned, the Buzzcocks, X-Ray Spex, the Slits, Siousxie and the Banshees, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, the Screamers, the Contortions, Dead Kennedys, Sonic Youth, and many more. He also interviewed the creators of Punk Magazine, filmmakers Jim Jarmusch and Mary Haddon, photographer Bob Gruen, and other people from the various punk scenes. And it’s not stock footage but new interviews done for this film. I liked that because the participants were reflective on what they had done and experienced and many were quite articulate. The shame of it is that so many people weren’t alive to be involved. We’ll never see an old Johnny Thunders, Stiv Bators, or Joe Strummer look back on what they had done and that’s too bad.

The first half of the film tells a story familiar to music fans. It follows punk from precursors like the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, the MC 5, and the New York Dolls through to the rise and fall of the New York and London scenes in the 74-79 era. If you’ve read the book Please Kill Me, this section of the film is like the live version of the book but with equal time given to the English scene. That narrative up through the rise of hardcore works fairly well in chronological fashion, but after that punk splinters and you it’s no longer an easy story to tell.

After this point the film can’t help but jump around and it sometimes goes from 1980 to 1992 and back again in five minutes. It covers thing like the New York No Wave bands and touches on scenes in DC and CA. It’s here that the limitations of the two hour movie come into play though, because there’s simply too much to talk about. Hardcore is talked about but the band that coined the phrase, DOA, is not. The section on DC talks about straight edge and Minor Threat and then catapults forward to Fugazi, skipping nearly the entirety of the important DC hardcore scene. Several people, notably Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth, talk about how music historians often skip from the early 80s to the rise of Nirvana and grunge as if nothing happened in between. The film, however, doesn’t really follow up on this and that’s too bad. There’s no mention at all of hugely influential 80s bands like Mission of Burma, Husker Du, and the Minutemen. The entire anarcho-punk scene in England (Crass, Subhumans, Conflict, Flux of Pink Indians) is ignored in its entirety. Later, when talking about the commercialization of punk, someone comments that bands like Rancid “came from nowhere.” No, no they didn’t. Rancid came out of Operation Ivy, a seminal ska punk band from the Gilman Street scene of the later 80s.

I don’t want to harp on this too much because overall this is a great film and one well-worth seeing if you have any interest in punk rock. I will say though that the decade from 81 to 91 is always given short shrift in discussions about punk. People pretend that punk was dead but that’s not true. I started going to punk rock shows in 1985 and I saw an awful lot of bands in an era when “nothing happened.” More than that, it was during this period that the punk scene really came into its own as a self-supporting network of clubs, record labels, and fanzines. So many of the early bands had problems because they couldn’t tour or get their records made without getting sucked into the hell of major labels. Well, that changed in the 80s. It became possible to put out your record on an independent label and tour North America and Europe without the involvement of the commercial Music Industry. That is an achievement and not one often recognized.

Getting back to the film, it continues on from the so-called “Year That Punk Broke” and to the present day, though it doesn’t do much more than mock MTV bands like Sum 41 and Blink 182 (which was fine by me). It then tries to tie everything up by noting the continuity of punk attitude through the years. And it takes little more than flashing some shorts of Bush and Blair to give the message that the punk attitude is needed now more than ever. It is, in fact, quite illuminating to think back on the social and political situation that helped birth punk in the 70s and compare it to what’s going on today. In many ways, the state of the world has only gotten worse and even more Orwellian. There will almost certainly be a reaction against NeoCon hell we are living in. The question is, what form will it take this time?

As for Punk: Attitude, I recommend it, though I’m not sure where you’ll be able to see it. It is associated with Independent Film Channel, so maybe it’ll end up being show there. Otherwise, watch your local art theaters. If you want a two-hour lesson in punk rock history, there isn’t a better source.

Yes, it’s true, Black Industries has gotten an RPG license from DC comics.

http://www.gamingreport.com/article.php?sid=17244&mode;=threadℴ=0

Many folks are asking me what that means, considering that we are BI’s design house for GW’s properties. Well, it means one of three things:

1) GR will design a new DC game for BI.

2) GR will do a DC variant of Mutants & Masterminds for BI.

3) BI will design its own DC game or hire another design house to do so.

Right now all BI has said is that they have the license. It isn’t GR’s or my place to say anything else until they are ready. All I can do is sit back and watch the wild ass speculation, which admittedly is pretty amusing. And no, I won’t tell you the answer if you e-mail me privately, even if you ask really nicely. It’s not that man wasn’t meant to know, just that man can’t know right now.

My game group has been having a hell of a time meeting with any regularity the last few months. Apart from the three Ronins we’ve got two Microsofties and two guys who work on MMOs for different computer game companies. When events like E3 happen, forget about it. Same for the Ronins during convention season. As a result our James Bond 007 has been going in fits and starts. Several weeks we’ve gotten just about everyone together but the missing guy was the Game Master. Whoops. On those weeks, we’ve played games like Family Business instead and while that’s fun the group generally favors roleplaying.

Monday I decided that what we needed was a back up game. When James Bond goes off, great. When it doesn’t, we play the back up game. I made the decision with the full knowledge that of course I’d have to run the back up game. Since I’ve managed to have a break from being the GM since my WFRP campaign wrapped up, that’s OK.

I ultimately decided to run a Freeport game for three reasons. First, it’s been several years since I’ve run one and it’d be nice to return to Freeport. Second, it’ll allow us to playtest some upcoming GR material. Third, I have a text copy of Shadows in Freeport, an adventure Goodman Games is publishing later this summer that was written by Rob Schwalb, my d20 developer. The last point is important because it means I can run the game without much prep, which is often a must when trying to keep up a casual game night with a busy schedule.

The group started making up characters on Monday. The party is shaping up to be…interesting. Right off the bat we’ve got a Cavalier and an Assassin. How could that not be entertaining?