Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 5/24/25
Graduation 2025 edition
We’d like to offer our sincere congratulations to all of the graduates who have successfully matriculated this month and remind you that we have several exciting career paths available to you at the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker! Take your pick from: Robot Repair Technician, Water Purification Specialist, Computer Networking Specialist, Large Language Model Proofreader, Artificial Intelligence Apologist, Artificial Intelligence Personal Shopper, Hardware Assembly, Software Design, Soylant Green Lab Technician, Alternative Meat Sharecropper, and many more! You can apply online through our Community Outreach portal, but you must drop all samples off at the Bunker pharmacy. Please do not send urine through the mail.
As the great 2025 Memorial Day Scavenging Hunt gets underway this weekend, please remember that this is a friendly competition and we are disqualifying anyone who uses lethal force to dispute a claim. Let’s not have another dust-up like the Charmin Skirmish of 2020. We’re better than that, people. So, let’s all get out there and remember, the biggest pile of usable materials wins!
Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review
Note: As the Summer movie season is already underway, expect the focus of these reviews to shift towards more theatrical content for the next few months.
Sinners (in theaters)
Michael B. Jordan stars as twin brothers, trying to set up a juke joint in Mississippi in the 1930s when they are interrupted by vampires. Written and directed by Ryan Coogler.
There’s a lot to love about this movie, starting with the ol’ switcheroo. I’m not giving away anything that hasn’t already been spoiled to reveal that the first half of the movie is this interesting, slice-of-life story about a pair of brothers coming home after several years away, and at the halfway point, it suddenly becomes a survival horror story with all the trimmings. Sinners is drawing comparisons to From Dusk ‘til Dawn, and that’s not really fair, as they are tonally as far apart as possible. For my money, it’s closer to a mash-up of Crossroads and Near Dark.
Sinners threads the social issues without alienating modern audiences and shows the various minorities in white Mississippi banding together in their own communities, however fleeting, and the prevalent threats of the KKK, not to mention society in general, ratchet up the tension that breaks in the second half of the movie. It works because of Coogler’s confidence in telling the story of twins, Smoke and Stack, and making us sympathize with them. We care about these people, which is crucial for any good survival horror story.
Coogler put a lot of work in as producer, writer and director, and it makes sense he’d want to lean on Jordan as a collaborator (who does an amazing job, by the way). The effects used to double up Jordan are impressive in their invisibility, or maybe I just bought all the way into the story. And the music is particularly good, one of the standouts in the film. They are calling it a horror movie, but it’s not the usual fare. There’s more to Sinners than meets the eye. This movie lives up to its hype.
My friend Doug and I watched it last weekend, and I gotta tell you, I think it would be an amazing Broadway Musical! That main musical sequence about at the halfway point mesmerized!
I mean... if they can do it with Spiderman....
Toilet Paper Rustlers
Back in 2020 at the height of supply chain shortages and COVID pandemic hoarding, I lived in Savannah, Georgia while attending SCAD for screenwriting. None of the supermarkets could keep toilet paper on the shelf. One day, I found a small stack on the shelf at the rich people’s store on Skidaway. I was stoked when I drove home with my purchase. I had the music on and the windows rolled down. But, when I brought my big package of TP in, my wife immediately ordered it returned. “What were you thinking getting lilac scented toilet paper” she waved. “It smells so bad!” After I showered and regrouped, the smell hit me fresh. It was terrible. When I drove back to the store with my receipt, the store manager informed me they had adopted new return policies on toilet paper and would not refund the purchase.
I was stunned and walked my grocery cart and TP back toward my car when it occurred to me that I couldn’t take the TP home. I left the cart and walked back to try and negotiate a trade for like goods. That also didn’t work. When I got back to the cart however, the unattended TP had been stollen. The cart was empty but my heart was full. Admittedly, it was a mixture of comic irony and spite that my heart was full of. I’m imagining the cycle of TP shunting continues.