Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 09/27/24

Early Halloween Voting Starts Today edition

The Administrator, wearing his editing face.

The attitude is festive over here at the bunker as we endeavor to get our Halloween ducks in a row as quickly as possible. There has been some discussion between Admin and Bunker Ops about creating a d20 random horror movie list to work on for the month of October, but nothing concrete has come of it. I suspect this weekend will lock those details down.

This will be the first year in a while where I don’t publish a bunch of Top 5 Horror movie lists, mostly because I’m down to just a few categories and I think I’m going to save them for the crowdfunding campaign. My plan for this is to lay out and design the look and structure of the book itself, and then add in the separate sections based on crowdfunding levels. I’d love to have it ready for next October, but we all know how those kinds of plans shake out, now, don’t we? I’m toying with the idea of publishing a hyperlinked list to the various Top 5 lists on the blog, to make it as easy as possible for you to click through and read them. Is that something you’d be interested in? Let me know in the comments. And speaking of which…

Shilling for Dopamine

I’ve noticed on YouTube now that a portion of every video is devoted to informing and educating the people who are new to the 21^st century in general and YouTube in particular that the algorithm is capricious and wants to murder everyone’s sales, so please like and subscribe and click the bell icon for notifications, and Oh GOD help me fight the machines who are taking food out of my mouth. There’s also a portion of most videos wherein they try to head off the most pedantic and reductive and strident comments by addressing them out front so they won’t clog the comments section with bad vibrations. Some of them even go so far as to entertain the devil’s advocate and explain why that’s not at all what they are saying, so please don’t accuse them of that thing. And nearly everyone on YouTube likes to throw out softball questions like “What color do you like to pain the sky? Put your answers in the comments below.” At least some of the YouTubers do giveaways and other promotional razzle-dazzle.

I know, I just did what I was complaining about, and that’s the nature of the beast. I get it. In my case, I try to only ask for constructive feedback; I’m not talking at you just to talk, although I do enjoy reading your comments. That little hit of dopamine when I see something positive or just plain interesting in the comments is sometimes all I need to change my attitude from shitty to hopeful. It seems as though everyone on YouTube is a little sick and tired of having to insert all of this instructional verbiage into every video they post. For some people, this is how they are making their money, and I won’t put anyone down for getting a little change in their pocket from a creative endeavor. I just wonder when YouTube will rig the system to the point that everyone involved throws up their hands and walks away, or moves to a less horrible platform.

Like I said, I get it; that’s the monster we’ve collectively given birth to, this Social Media thing. I have come to openly resent it and considering all of the hoops a person has to jump through—and then rebuild new hoops and learn how to jump through them every time the algorithm changes—it all feels adversarial and contentious. I don’t have the energy for it, nor the head space, and I never have. The very idea that I’ve got to be my own marketing department, and if I’m not good at my job, other larger publishers and creators won’t bother to deal with me. Doesn’t matter how good a writer I am; if I don’t show up with a minimum of 5000 fans in my “platform” then my “brand” isn’t worth “exploring for meaningful synergistic relationships.”

When are we going to rise up and overthrow the machines? Actually, scratch that, can we please just kick Silicon Valley into the Pacific Ocean? Have a look at the most egregious and flagrantly damning news stories these last twelve years or so, you’ll find most of them were spawned out of Big Tech. I’m not afraid to say that my love affair with “futurists” is over. They have yet to prove their worth to anyone, unless we’re talking about naked cash grabs. Remember that smirking little jerk who tried to raise the cost of insulin? How about every single Cryptobro out there? Do you really think those guys need to be monetizing our human interactions and weaponizing our politics?

I didn’t ask for this. None of you did, either. We deserve better. Y’all let me know when you’re ready to kick Google in the teeth. I have Rage Against the Machine playing on a loop right now.

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Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Note: we would like to formally apologize to all of our readers for the lackluster offerings from Hollywood of late. We have listed all of our concerns in a strongly worded letter which is even now winging its way to Los Angeles, where we are certain it will be received and studied by all relevant parties. We expect things to turn around shortly.

Grotesquerie (FX)

Niecy Nash plays a hard drinking detective investigating a string of increasingly bizarre murders.

Executive Producer Ryan Murphy is one of those guys who, if you love his shows, you watch all of them. I didn’t watch every season of American Horror Story, but I liked the ones I caught. And given the grisly and horrific nature of the murders in Grotesquerie, the first one of which opens the show, this feels like it’s something Ryan Murphy fans are going to dig, as well. You’d think.

• I hate-watched the first two episodes. It’s got actors I really like in it (Niecy Nash and Courtney B. Vance, for starters) and it was obviously put together with great love and care. Technically, it’s gorgeous in its de-saturated colors and inventive gruesomeness. But I had no idea what’s going on after two eps, and that forced me to think about what I did know:
  Grotesquerie is set in the here and now, but everyone is smoking indoors and drinking on the job.

• If I never see another “Quirky Nun” character in a horror or mystery series, It’ll be too soon.

• It’s not a police procedural, to the point of being a distraction.

• Everyone in the show is unlikable for different reasons, and almost for the sake of being “memorable” or “complex.”

• “Grotesquerie” is a moniker given to the murderer, near the end of the second episode, when invalidates all of the ways I’d been trying to apply that very specific word to the show in general. Granted, the stuff I worked out might still be relevant, but that odd word should have been addressed sooner.

All of this leading into a series of murders with a cat and mouse style storyline that appears for all intents and purposes on trying to see how close to David Fincher’s SeVen they can get without being liable for copyright infringement. I will watch the third episode, but if it doesn’t tie up and explain all of the flotsam and jetsam left in the wake of the first two, I will not be finishing Grotesquerie.

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Wolfs (Apple)

Brad Pitt and George Clooney are two professional problem-solvers who are forced to work together on job that spirals increasingly out of control.

The upshot of it is simple: something about the movie is off. I don’t know if it’s the lackluster writing or the giant plot pill we’re being asked to swallow that Clooney and Pitt aren’t good friends. They spend the movie fighting against their own chemistry and it's not even funny enough to elicit a chuckle. What we are left with is two veteran actors who are ordinarily great at whatever they attempt doing scenes with each other while trying to tamp down the smiles behind their eyes. It’s like watching a married couple at a hotel bar pretending they don’t know each other so they can chat each other up and go have hotel room sex like they pulled the wool over someone’s eyes.

I didn’t buy the initial premise, so what’s the rest of the movie going to be about? There’s a larger world being hinted at, but Wolfs is more interested in shenanigans and too few entertaining action sequences, one of which can be seen in the trailer.  For months, this was going to be a September release in theaters. Then a few weeks ago, it was suddenly yanked for streaming. Ask yourself why.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”