Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 03/22/24
Spanish Influence Edition
The Bunker Administrator and the Head of Bunker Ops have returned from a trip through Spain, looking at castles, eating tapas, drinking Spanish wine, and in general just yukking it up, big time. I’m sure everyone else in the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker was simply thrilled with their selfies and status updates on social media.
The daily briefings have been filed over at the Administration office, and are being displayed daily for your perusal here: https://northtexasapocalypsebunker.com/2024/03/23/ntab-field-report-spain-and-andalusia-2024-day-1/
I tried to keep the reports as factual as possible, but for the weekly update, a more informal tone will be struck, along with some asides and observations for you, the insiders.
Ten Minute Walk
I’m going to propose to this august assemblage that we stop trying to explain distances by how long it takes to walk there. Tour guides just love to say, “It’s just a ten-minute walk to the plaza, no problem.” Oh, really? I’ve been hearing that expression all my life, and here’s two things I know for a fact. Numero Uno, that’s not a reliable unit of measurement, because people’s legs are different lengths, strides are different, speeds are very different (Madrid walking speeds and Athens walking speeds are about the same; just shy of a trot), and Numero Two-o, I’ve never, not ever, made a “ten-minute walk” in ten minutes. There’s a metric conversion, I’m sure of it, that is not dissimilar to the Celsius to Fahrenheit trick, which is to double the number and add thirty. Ten minutes? Try fifty. And don’t rush me, either. I’m a Texan. We invented the Mosey.
Our guide eventually stopped saying it, because he knew that we were going to be walking at one-third the speed of everyone else, and they were struggling to keep up with the guide, who would zip ahead as if he were wearing roller blades, then stop and hold up his guide flag for us to see so we could catch up. EVEN THEN, I was in danger of throwing up twice, because we were also doing this on steep hills. “Ten minute walk.” Please.
Spanish Doppelgangers
All throughout Spain, I kept seeing Spanish versions of people I know. It was Glitch-in-the-Matrix weird; I did several double and triple takes, wondering if my buddy was in Spain, unbeknownst to me. It’s not the first time I’ve been surprised by friends on a trip. Alas, this was not the case, but after a while, it took on a “Where’s Waldo?” game quality; instead of playing I Spy, we’d lean over to one another, point, and say, “Spanish Rick Klaw,” or “Madrid Justin Mitschke.” This game comes to us by way of Shane Black and the underrated movie, Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, by the way.
Little Change in my Pocket
Euros are fun. The bills are all different sizes and colors, and their one and two EUs are coins. They don’t have pennies, either; everything is rounded up to the nearest nickel. Despite the weight, I like the EU coins; it makes me feel like a pirate, or like my D&D game just got real. My favorite thing about the 1 EU is that every country made their own. The front is the same for everyone, but the back, the “tails” side, that’s where the National pride came out. It is kind of like the state quarter project. I didn’t collect those, but I thought the idea was awesome. But paying for an adult beverage by slapping coins down on the bar? Come on, man. The only thing missing is some shadowy guy in the corner, waiting to hire us for a quest.
No Habla Espanol
To my chagrin, I am not a Spanish speaker; I wish I was, and moreover, I really wish someone had made me take Spanish for four years in high school. As it is, all I can do in Spanish is count to 21 and start a bar fight. However, I’m also a Texan, which means I can hear Spanish being spoken, catch certain words, and sometimes, occasionally, piece together what is being said.
Or so I thought.
Spanish people don’t speak the same kind of Spanish I hear in Texas, nope. Also, they speak their Spanish very fast, and for the life of me, I could not follow, at all. To make matters worse, there were not a lot of Spanish people who also spoke English. Those that did were quite fluent. Those that did not, well, they didn’t seem too concerned with communicating with us. I get it; people get mad as hell here when someone can’t speak English.
I found myself having to learn words and repeat them like a toddler until I could place an order. It was never a scene, nor a big deal, as we were never too far off of the beaten path, but I got the distinct impression that the Spanish people, much like another European country, are very proud of their history and cultural identity and so why learn another language when Spanish is so widespread? They aren’t wrong. But it sometimes made for a frustrating restaurant experience.
Interestingly, smoking is still kind of a thing in Spain. The thing about it is this: their tobacco isn’t packed with chemicals, so while it smells like a cigarette burning, it’s not like a Pall Mall. Plus, they just look cooler when they smoke. It’s that whole Euro-thing they got going; thin build, black turtleneck, leather jacket, hair tousled and hanging over one eye, flicking ash off of a smoke and looking like they have nowhere else in the world to be than hanging outside of the restaurant, being European. I think that’s actually a job you can have over there.
It’s the Little Differences
Vincent Vega was right: they got the same shit over there that we got over here, it’s just a little different. First off, they have Duff Beer for sale in the grocery stores. I don’t need to say any more about that, do I? I mean, come ON, America! Why isn’t that our thing? Why is it a Spain thing? Are you suggesting that they are bigger Simpson’s fans than us?
One of the minor, stupid, goofy things I have enjoyed is looking at the snacks of another country and wondering if they know something we don’t. Spain wins again, insofar as Pringle’s are concerned. My new favorite flavor is Paprika, and good luck finding them around here. But man, they were tasty.
Oh, one last thing: I am delighted to report that Spain has normal-sized toilets. A lot of them are square. Enjoy your wide stance, Senator!
Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review
Once again, it seems that Administration is changing the weekly schedule. We have been told that the media reviews will continue apace. We’ll see how long this lasts.
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (in theaters)
The Spengler family has moved into the once and future headquarters of the Ghostbusters, in New York City, following the events in Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021). Operating as Ghostbusters, they all struggle to find their place in the family business even as something strange begins to threaten the neighborhood and the containment grid. Can the original team help out?
This story picks up two years after the first movie, but it might as well be a smash cut. Everyone from Afterlife is here, using whatever excuses were quickly decided to get them to New York City so they could all pitch in and help out. Now that we’ve established that the original guys are still around, it’s cool to see them working with Spengler’s family and friends to improve and expand their operations—and there’s certainly some cool hints that we’ll be seeing more of that in the third movie. Yes, there’s a third movie coming, don’t be silly.
Look, it’s fan service, but it’s well done. I mean, if nothing in the first movie set you off, then it’s a lock that you’ll be all in for this one, as well. Ignore the people who seem angry that the franchise movie took elements from the franchise content to make new franchise content that nearly 100% of the target audience hasn’t seen and doesn’t know anything about and just enjoy the callbacks, the special appearances, and the promise of a third film where we might finally see the company expanding into franchises.
In a weird coincidence, I watched the first Ghostbusters (1984) on the international flight to Madrid with the sound off, and I was not surprised to find that I knew nearly every line of dialogue. I recited it for Janice until she put her own headphones in. This movie goes on the same mental shelf for me as Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s peak Murray and Ackroyd, doing the things that they are best known for. Harold Ramis gets a lot of the best lines. And the quotable lines! Oh, so many quotable lines that I find myself saying nearly every day.
I’m telling you this to let you know I have zero objectivity about this movie. I was all in, sight unseen, especially after Afterlife. You don’t have to be as big a fan as me to dig the movie (Janice liked it, too), but it’s funny and breezy and has a lot of the old Ghostbusters razzle-dazzle. As a warm-up to Godzilla and Kong, a new Planet of the Apes movie, and a Deadpool and Wolverine Rom-Com, you could do so much worse than to check it out in a theater near you.
Road House (Amazon Prime)
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Dalton, a former MMA fighter who takes a job cleaning up a rowdy road house in the Florida Keys in this remake-adjacent film directed by Doug Liman. They are calling it a “re-imagining” but I don’t know if it even goes that far.
I can only tell you about this movie if I explain my position first: I think the original Patrick Swayze 1989 cult classic is at best a guilty pleasure and at worst a movie that is less than the sum of its parts. For all of the Sam Elliot and Jeff Healy, the movie also has sweaty barn sex, a female lead that may as well have been a mannequin, and acting that is so wooden, it gives the breakaway furniture in the numerous stuntmen extravaganzas a run for its money. Do I like it? Yeah, sorta, kinda. I gotta be in the mood for it, which isn’t very often, and it always feels like I’m slumming when I watch it. It’s not the worst thing Swayze ever starred in, not by a long shot, but I would be hard-pressed to call Road House a cinematic masterpiece.
So, all that aside, how does the new movie compare? I actually liked it. I’m not a Gyllenhaal fan by any stretch of the imagination, but I think he did a great job of being quirkily funny (his version of “I want you to be nice”) and both he and Limon know what this movie is, as evinced by his meeting a young girl upon his arrival to town and she asks him if he’s a gunfighter who has come to clean up the place, you know, like in westerns. Circle gets the square, kiddo.
Limon’s interest in violence serves him well by bringing us into the swinging fists for a dizzying and disorienting look at what it’s like to get smashed in the face by a giant naked Australian cage fighter. That’s a thing I didn’t know I needed, but there you go. Probably the most impressive thing about this new Road House is that it somehow manages to be its own movie without stepping on any toes. There’s no cute cameos, no call backs, no throw backs, no copied signature kung fu moves (you know what I’m talking about), none of that. Instead, they kept only the premise and rewrote everything else as if there wasn’t a beloved 80s Swayze delivery system of the same name. There’s even some funny bits that I’ve not seen before in an action movie in a long time, if ever. We were entertained all the way through, and we were prepared to hate-watch it.
Will you like the new Road House? That depends on you, my friend. If the original movie is sacrosanct, and you’re upset that someone even dared to attempt a reboot, you might want to give this a pass and up your magnesium intake. If you want to feel like you’re watching a cheesy action flick from back in the day, only better shot and acted because we’re forty years down that road, then by all means, this is the thing to watch with pizza and beer.
Those coins look beautiful. I still have some Swedish Crowns coins from my trips there many years ago.