Davisville

This is the second halfof an interview with Davis' newest City Council members, Lucas Frerichs and Brett Lee, who took office last summer. Find part 1 at http://www.kdrt.org/node/11291.

Joel Davis is a hometown Davis journalist whose book “Justice Waits: The UC Davis Sweetheart Murders” played a key role in solving the 1980 Davis kidnapping and murder of “two stellar kids,” UC Davis students John Riggins and Sabrina Gonsalves. In December 2012, 32 years to the month after the slayings, a Sacramento Superior Court jury convicted Richard Hirschfield of first-degree murder for killing Gonsalves and Riggins, who were both 18.

He spent his time in Kurdistan, the less-violent northern part of the country, working with Kurds, Shias and Sunnis. Pearson describes both tension and reasons to hope—hotel guards with AK-47s, and a lively democracy. A few years ago he went to Bosnia-Herzegovina. Afghanistan is probably next. “Davis,” he says near the end of the show, “needs to get out and see the rest of the world.”

Davis film critic Derrick Bang returns to Davisville this week to talk about some of the big December movies, including The Hobbit debuting Dec. 14, and Quentin Tarentino’s Django Unchained “southern,” which opens on Christmas. We also take up related questions about movies, such as the continuing slump in ticket sales. He blames the degraded experience of going out to a movie, including the pre-show commercials and mediocre presentation—but says the three Davis theaters do a consistently good job in sound and projection. Maybe that’s a selling point for a city banking on arts and entertainment as a major draw for downtown. We also get Bang’s take on the best, and worst, holiday movies through the years. His list of the best is thin on recent titles, compared to his list of the worst.