Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 05/10/24
Rock Me Dr. Zaius Edition
Another week has passed and everyone here at the Bunker is settling in for the inevitable change in the weather from spring showers to 900 degrees Kelvin that makes the beginning of Summer. We are not looking forward to the increased electric bill, nor the amount of body powder we are about to consume. I am personally not ready for summer, the predicted temperatures, or any of the traveling I’ll be doing in those ungodly conditions. Does anyone else find it odd how casually accurate the yearly Farmer’s Almanac is? I wonder what their secret is...
This is Why I Hate the Internet
The Internet...it giveth and it taketh away, you know? Take this guy, for example:
He has nearly 22 thousand subscribers, which is 22 thousand more subscribers than me. He was tasked with reviewing the first Conan collection of stories by Robert E. Howard. He’s got a Patreon—people pay him for his reviews! And a few months ago, he crafted this fourteen-minute-long video that is so front-loaded with some of the most wrong-headed, inaccurate, and specious conclusions I’ve ever seen, it makes me think he’s trolling all of us.
I’m not pointing this out to you to have him bombarded in the comments. Other people have already taken him to task, over two hundred comments and counting. Please don’t go dog-pile on him. That’s not what this is. It’s not worth your time, nor his energy, to deal with any bile spewed in his direction. Besides, I’ve already posted a comment, urging him to read a Robert E. Howard non-Conan story. I double that will happen, but I was very respectful.
What struck me about this review is that it’s an encapsulation of every bad faith opinion of Robert E. Howard since his death in 1936. This guy skimmed and scanned several stories, hit a few things that stuck in his craw, and threw the whole book under the bus, and what’s worse, has decided to paint all of Robert E. Howard’s work with the same Conan-shaped brush. I’ve written about his before that Conan is a lousy point of entrance to the works of Robert E. Howard, because Conan is, in many ways, the exception to Howard’s writing that sometimes proves the rule. The very best of Robert E. Howard’s fiction includes a couple of Conan stories. But not all Conan stories are created equal, and that includes the stories he wrote but did not see published during his lifetime—but that have made their way into the books over time, anyway. I can’t imagine what someone reading “Vale of the Lost Women” would think if that’s their initial exposure to Conan and REH. Not “The Black Stone” or “Horror from the Mound,” but the inarguably worst Conan story Howard ever wrote—one so bad, we don’t know that he even sent it to Farnsworth Wright for consideration. Howard himself didn’t think much of it, evidently.
If you got to REH from Coanan, relax. You did nothing wrong. But this guy reading a bunch (not the whole book, mind) of Conan stories and then recording a fourteen minute diss feels an awful lot like the guy online who started his blog post by describing how much he doesn’t like Martial Arts movies, how he doesn’t “get” them, thinks they are hyper-violent, etc...and then he launches into a review of Kill Bill and pans the movie. Um...okay. I’m not saying you can’t talk about what you dislike on the Internet, but maybe you should know why you don’t like it. Or just expect me to tune your review completely out. As several people have pointed out, this reviewer’s favorite author is Brandon Sanderson. I give this guy partial credit for at least noting that the material is both dated and also groundbreaking, even if he doesn’t understand how it broke the ground and doesn’t like the ground that was broken, nor the way in which the ground was broken. Vegans shouldn’t write fast-food hamburger reviews.
This fellow managed to scoop up every single clichéd and hackneyed criticism leveled at REH and his work. It’s like he was working from a checklist or something. Racist? Check. Closed homosexual? Check. Misogynist? Check. Rape? Shoddy worldbuilding? Overwrought language? Check, check and check. Guys like this often will project other indelicacies onto Howard as needed, all the better to dismiss him outright.
This guy now joins the ranks of all the other so-called ‘literary’ critics over the years who have famously not gotten what Howard was trying to do with his writing. Not having the Conan stories contextualized for them is one thing, and if he’d read the introduction and the included essay, it would have shed some light on some of his problems. It’s funny, when you think about it, because most of the people who read REH for the first time usually “get it” within a couple of stories. But when someone doesn’t get it? They typically ‘don’t get it’ at the granular level. Atomically, this guy is a negative ion and he’ll never be a Robert E. Howard fan. It’s weird, but it does happen.
I hate the Internet because now there’s three thousand people that watched the review, and this guy, positioning himself as a book reviewer, which is, to my way of thinking, like a film critic. Since there’s no college course for that, it seems anyone who knows how to upload a YouTube video can be a “book reviewer.” You don’t have to have any perspective, nor do you need a wider view of the industry. You just have to say what you did or didn’t like about any given book. Despite all of that, I’m glad that most of the comments are people chiding him for such a slipshod effort. I wish that we could do this all at once, en masse, and chase all of the people who are pretending to be more culturally erudite than they really are out of these digital arenas, where they just gum up the actual discussion with their wrong-headed observations and conclusions.
Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review
Note: we have heard reports that “Unfrosted” has garnered some negative reviews, but a casual survey of the Facebook brought none of those reviews to light. Therefore, we won’t be replying to any shade that may or may not have been thrown in the direction of the movie.
Unfrosted (Netflix)
In the battle for breakfast cereal, the two powerhouses of the 1960s, Post and Kellog’s, go head to head to see who can develop the toaster pastry first.
This Jerry Seinfield-developed mock biopic has a go at 1960s popular culture, fervently contrasting with our 21st century value system in order to get a wide variety of laughs. Truly, this movie deploys every kind of humor from sophomoric to sophisticated, from slapstick to satire. In many ways, it’s a lot like how older comedies were made, with little regard for any other metric except, “is it funny?”
It could have just been several of Seinfield’s stand-up jokes mooshed into a single script, but thankfully the movie encompasses more of 1960s culture than just riffing on breakfast cereal. Maybe not every joke will land for you, but there’s more jokes per square inch than a lot of sitcoms, weighted towards the first twenty minutes, when they have to establish not only the premise, but the world in which this goofy story takes place. I like your odds that something will tickle you.
The cast list is a who’s who of comedians you know—make that, it’s every comedian Sienfield knows, and then some. You will enjoy “Where’s Waldo-ing” your way through the movie. You might be tempted to google up a full cast list. Don’t. It’ll ruin a big surprise, one they wisely kept out of the trailer. But my hat is off to them for using Thurl Ravenscroft as a real/fictional character. He’s Tony the Tiger, of course.
Unfrosted does double duty as a kind of hands-on practicum from Seinfield about his thoughts on comedy, which should come as no surprise to anyone who has watched him in the last ten years. See if you can spot references to recent events in our history and how he chooses to handle those scenes. Too soon? Eh, all is fair in love and war, and apparently, also comedy. As long as it’s funny.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (in theaters)
Several generations after the reign of Caesar, a new clan of apes is raided by rival zealots, forcing Noah, a young ape on the verge of adulthood, to leave his ruined home and find where his loved ones were taken. Along the way, he meets an orangutan and a human and together they share the road as they ride ever closer towards the new kingdom of apes. What mysteries from the past will they confront?
If you’re reading this, odds are pretty good you know about my pro-simian lifestyle, and at least tacitly endure my occasional monkey-walks or you implicitly share my values vis a vis gorillas, chimps and orangutans. As a lifelong devoted fan of this 55-year old franchise, I’ve seen every iteration of the various planets of the various apes, including Pierre Bolle’s terrible book that started it all off—I ain’t kidding, that novel is hot French nonsense from start to finish. But in all my years, I never realized what was missing in my life was the combination of intelligent apes and falconry.
As the trailers all point out, these apes train eagles as pets and hunting companions. I don’t know that you need to know any more about the movie than that. A chimp on horseback, a golden eagle on his forearm, is just one of the great set-ups for this new film, the fourth one out of a discussed five movie series (like the original).
We recently re-watched the new series, starting with Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), and the movie hooked Janice and re-affirmed for me that these...what are we calling them? Do-overs? Re-imaginings? Don’t know, don’t care. These movies are awesome. I love the fact that we find ourselves caring about completely digital primates, albeit done with mo-cap, but still digitally rendered, and in fact, most of the scenes in the movie don’t have a single human in frame—but we’re still connecting with the young ape Noah and his friends and family. The actors in the suits did a fantastic job of facially emoting as a human but acting and moving like a chimpanzee.
The allegories continue apace in Kingdom of the Planet of the Ape including the names of the main characters and the appropriation of human wisdom to concoct the laws of the apes. There has never been an apolitical Planet of the Apes movie and this one is no exception.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes isn’t as strong as the one that kicked it off, but it’s better than War for the Planet of the Apes (2017). There’s a number of really pretty shots that deserve to overwhelm you on the big screen. See it sooner rather than later.
He at least checked the right Conan volume- those Del Rey/Ballantines are the editions I first read Howard in, and now own.
While it preceded the Orange one, since 2016, there has been an uptick in the downgrading and de-valuing of expertise and professionalism. Somehow today everyone is an expert and you can become an expert self taught from the internet. So the Conan video exemplifies this for me--though my training as a literary critic has been marginal (thank you Guy Davenport and James Baker Hall and Nicholas Howe for what you did do). Today expertise seems to be defined for me as whomever has a social media following and can babble and be loud.