Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 1/8/23
Hunka Hunka Burnin’ Love Edition
Administration is taking some evidently much-needed time to reflect, organize, and in all other ways get its collective shit together. Calendars are being drafted, events planned, deadlines set, campaigns coordinated...it’s a lot. And I can’t hold it all in my brain at the moment. I’ve experienced something of a short-circuit.
Also, the cough won’t go away. The doctor said it was bronchitis, but I’ve made myself quite paranoid obsessing over it and so I’m going to take a COVID test on Monday. Fingers crossed it’s a negative. I have stuff to do this week.
Elvis’ Birthday
January 8th is the day that we all have our special meal, make our yearly Promises to the King, and bask in the reflected glory that is Elvis Aron Presley’s birthday some 88 years ago, for those of you keeping score. I’m sure there’s something auspicious about all those 8’s in one place, but I’m not going to try and suss it out. Root through your own tea leaves if you’re so inclined.
Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review
Inside Man/Glass Onion
A calm has descended over the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker and its inhabitants in the expected and most welcome come-down from a particularly grueling holiday season. We are hopeful, if not exactly optimistic, that the Administration Department can finally gets their calendars organized, for all of our sakes.
Inside Man (Netflix)
Stephen Moffett is best known perhaps as the man who reinvented Sherlock Holmes or the guy who ruined Sherlock Holmes, depending on your slant and how much you like Benedict Cumberbatch. For what it’s worth, I don’t have any skin in the game regarding his Doctor Who episodes or his take on Sherlock. I’ve watched all of it and thought he was a clever writer, but I’m not heavily invested in either Holmes fandom or Whovians, so take that for what it’s worth.
Regardless of how you feel about his take on Sherlock, it’s pretty obvious he likes consulting detective mysteries, and that’s what Inside Man is. Stanley Tucci plays a criminologist on Death Row for the murder of his wife, but he’s also brilliant and so he and his Watson (a murderer with an eidetic memory so he doesn’t have to take notes) are allowed visitors from time to time who bring him little mysteries to solve. That’s the premise, and it’s wonderful.
It's a BBC joint production, which means it’s one story, four episodes long, and that’s it. David Tenet co-stars as the “F*cking Vicar!” and he’s really good as well. This is one of those shows that delighted me because the characters and the writing were very deft and crisp, and also because I had no idea where it was going. There are great twists and turns and a couple of fun, not too difficult fair play mysteries that you can hack away as you watch everyone twisting on their own spits. I want at least one more season of this. It’s obvious there’s a larger story in the works.
Glass Onion: a Knives Out Mystery (Netflix)
I like Rian Johnson. I do. He’s a thoughtful filmmaker and I respect his integrity to his stories and his desire to always do something different or unexpected. That’s why the first Knives Out was such a delight—it watched like how some books read. I knew Johnson’s avowed intention to do more Knives Out movies starring Daniel Craig as the extraordinary Benoit Blanc, as welcome an addition to the Great Detective Canon as we’ve seen in a long while. I just wasn’t expecting Glass Onion to be so antithetical.
There’s a lot to like about the movie. Johnson is great with actors and he pulls great, quirky performances out of them, and it’s pretty apparent they think so to because they are all lining up to work with him. Cool. It’s particularly great seeing people like Dave Bautista stretching his wings in a Non-Drax role, and I always love seeing Ed Norton in whatever he wants to be in.
I just wish this movie hadn’t been so completely different from the first one that it relegated Blanc to the wings to coordinate and direct rather than to solve and detect, and while I totally get what Johnson was going for, it’s just not what I wanted in a movie. In a book? Yeah, sure, probably so. But this particular story’s reach exceeded its grasp, and I think that’s where some of the negative reviews are coming from. I don’t mind a different structure, but we all showed up to the sequel for Daniel Craig, not Kate Hudson, delightful as she may be. Or, more to the point, Janelle Monae—again, one of my favorite people, ever.
I guess the silver lining here is that, thankfully, Johnson doesn’t ever make the same movie twice, so this will be the last time we see something along the lines of Glass Onion. I’ll show up for the third Benoit Blanc mystery, but maybe not with the same high expectations.
Have you seen Moffat's Jekyll? It's one of the better interpretations of the classic Stevenson novella
Even if it is COVID (which I've had several times since September '21), green tea, curcumin (or turmeric, if you're into Asian cuisine), and sunshine will go a long way toward fixing it. Some daily vitamin D3 can't hurt either, used medicinally for a week or three.
It's my observation, which is purely unscientific, that COVID has a tendency to hide, such that one stops treating it because the symptoms are gone but it's actually just lurking here and there ready to cause another round of inflammation. Hence the value of continuing use of natural anti-inflammatories. Studies are just starting to consider the positive effect of low-range IR on the virus, but a daily dose of sunshine is always a good thing in moderation.