Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 03/29/24

Good Friday/Better Monday Edition

This edition of the Weekly Newsletter will arrive before Easter Sunday and also before April Fool’s Day, which is noteworthy as mine and Janice’s first wedding anniversary. As the new traditional first anniversary gift is paper, we are making paper airplanes written with declarations of our enduring love and hurling them from the Bunker’s observation tower. That’ll surely do it.

For those of you who are celebrating some conflation of Spring Fertility Rites with the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, allow me to wish you a Happy Easter! For years now, I have wondered why the lunatic fringe Christians haven’t tried to completely oust the remnants of the pagans and make chocolate crosses, candy nails, and plastic stones you can roll away to retrieve pieces of candy. No reason to take anything away from the kids, but maybe it’ll finally put the kibosh on those demented Easter photos from the mall where your child can be seen sitting on the lap of a giant, glass-eyed rabbit in a waistcoat and in the middle of a full-blown red-faced freakout temper tantrum. There is not enough chocolate to fix that. I’m just sayin’. I must say, I’d like the twelve apostles molded into SweeTARTS. We can make Judas the sour apple.

From our family to yours, Happy Whatever You’re Doing!

Trip Updates

I’m not sure who has been following along and who hasn’t, so I will simply put all of the links up here if you’d like to read my pithy observations about our recent trip to Spain. There are a number of photos, many of which actually refer to the travelogue.

Day 1 Travel and Madrid

Day 2 Toledo

Day 3 Don Quixote and Cordoba

Day 4 Seville and Flamenco

Day 5 Granada and Alhambra

Day 6 Malaga and Picasso

Day 7 Malaga and the Trip Home

I’ve mentioned it several times before, but it bears repeating. Go somewhere else. Travel as far as you can, as soon as you can. If you can do it in your 20s, do that. If not, figure out when and save up. Find a way. It’s essential for gaining a more nuanced insight into the world.

I was very inspired by my trips to Greece and Spain. Just the act of putting different scenery into your eye holes will alter your perceptions and opinions about everything. You may still talk out of your ass, but it’ll at least be more interesting if you start the sentence with, “When I was backpacking across Europe...” Family vacation, personal group, youth group missionary trip, Spring Break, destination wedding...however it needs to happen, you gotta go somewhere else to really see the place you’re at.

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

Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire (in theaters)

A new threat from the Hollow Earth puts Monarch on high alert, even as Godzilla starts eating radiation in anticipation for another kaiju showdown. When Kong finds another unknown realm, he unwittingly frees a threat to not only his domain but the whole world. The only way to defeat it? Kaiju team-up.

I don’t think they are going to stop until we get the Kaiju Avengers. To that I say, Carry On.

The previews are a bit misleading as to the particulars of the story, and this is so you can see the baby gorilla and get excited that there’s a Queen Kong or something. Yeah, there’s a little gorilla, but it’s a classic bait-and-switch, and then, much later, the bait-and-switch is baited and switched. Confusing, isn’t it? It’ll make perfect sense when you go see this movie for yourself on the big screen.

Look, we’re past the point of needing to stay home, all right? This movie is a spectacle. You need to see it in the biggest theater you can, and the largest format you can. It’s giant monster fights, man. Don’t cheat yourself of the experience of having your sternum vibrate when the monsters do their battle roar.

I will say this: as the what, sixth or seventh of the Legendary Monsterverse movies (and now including the Apple TV show, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, this feels like what they were building towards the whole time. Maybe I’m wrong, but the movie is one giant excuse to get Kong an exo-skeleton upgrade. There’s a slew of giant gorillas, but some great-looking kaiju, including one that looks like Dogora without the fog around it.

Most of these movies have been more about conveying ideas and world building than building cohesive narratives or introducing recurring characters you grow to love. I think two movies in a row is the limit for most of the actors in it, who serve little more purpose than Greek chorus, telling you what’s going on and contextualizing the violence about to unfold.

Having grown up and spent my entire life watching these movies, I am okay with this. I want the thunderous spectacle of giant apes doing a backwards suplex on Godzilla. Yeah! Don’t anyone forget that this is a long and storied film history, and there’s film footage that played on the big screen of a guy in a kaiju suit bouncing up and down on a trampoline, with a miniature set laid out around him. If you’re coming to this expecting to see Remains of the Kaiju Day, then turn right around and get back on that Merchant Ivory boat and re-watch Cloverfield. My world is big enough that it can contain both King Kong (1933) which is one of my favorite movies ever, and Kong: Skull Island (2017), which is an entertaining monster movie with big name actors running away from greenscreens. 

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 film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”