Film Review: "Friendly Local Game Store" (Calgary Underground Film Festival)
By: Joseph Perry (Twitter - Uphill Both Ways Podcast)
As a high schooler in the late 1970s, I remember a section of my local comic bookstore in my northern California birthplace having a table or two set up for a group of other kids my age playing a relatively new tabletop game called Dungeons & Dragons. At the time, many people considered it a fringe activity for “nerds,” to use the lexicon of those days, but the game became a cultural phenomenon, and grew from an activity that some kept hidden from friends and peers to a social event loved by many people. Few might have guessed better that this would happen than the folks behind Calgary, Canada’s The Sentry Box — the world’s largest game store and the subject of the new documentary Friendly Local Game Store.
Director Garry Snow’s film chronicles the growth of the store, from what started out as a business run from owner Gordon Johansen’s car trunk, to moving locations, to what is now, more than 40 years later, a 19,000-square-feet mecca for game fanatics and aficionados that carries more than 7,000 games and approximately 100,000 items.
More importantly, though, Snow captures the importance of the store through interviews with current and former employees, long-time customers, and others. Interviewees discuss how The Sentry Box affected and even changed their lives, and how it continues to do so. Johansen is a rather modest but highly knowledgeable subject, and those who know him as their current or former boss or as the friendly owner of their favorite business are happy to discuss their experiences with him and, for the latter group, the store’s welcoming staff.
At the heart of Friendly Local Game Store are the feelings of companionship and closeness that tabletop and board games can bring, from bonding families closer together to making strangers into friends. Snow has crafted a documentary that should bring warm feelings of nostalgia to some and possibly open a new world of fun to others.
Friendly Local Game Store screens as part of the 19th Calgary Underground Film Festival, which takes place April 21–May 1, 2022 both at Calgary’s Globe Cinema and streaming on demand online. For more information, visit https://www.calgaryundergroundfilm.org/.
Joseph Perry is one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast (whenitwascool.com/up-hill-both-ways-podcast/). He also writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine (gruesomemagazine.com), The Scariest Things (scariesthings.com), Horror Fuel (horrorfuel.com), B&S About Movies (bandsaboutmovies.com), and Diabolique Magazine (diaboliquemagazine.com), and film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope (videoscopemag.com) and Drive-In Asylum (etsy.com/shop/GroovyDoom).
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