I really wasn’t aware there was a fanbase for these until recently (though I’m fairly certain that former editors of mine are not among that base). But for all y’all who’ve been waiting, there’s a brand new item in town, at least out here in the west…
Okay, so for those of you who don’t know, Jack in the Box is not a Mexican place or even a fake-Mexican place like Taco Bell. Its tacos are notorious — they’re deep fried and feature a slice of processed cheese instead of the usual grated, plus salsa, lettuce (thankfully not fried) and a kind of meat paste that has a texture closer to refried beans than ground beef.
They’re love it or hate it deals. Either way, your health hates it.
“Taco nachos” takes two of their usual style tacos, minus any filling except the meat paste. They’re then cut into segments, topped with both melted cheese AND nacho sauce, atop a bed of lettuce, with jalapeno slices on top. The picture promises salsa, but mine didn’t come with any.
The jalapenos are a nice touch; mine were mostly seed-free, which keeps the heat at a manageable level. But the tacos are so greasy that they don’t always stay hard enough to scoop up the nacho sauce, so beware of droopage if you’re using only your hands. I think some diced tomatoes would make a nice addition, but then I’m not Jack (thank goodness — the latest series of commercials for JITB features mascot Jack being hit by a bus and getting his head cracked open).
And once you’re done with the taco part, there’s that bed of lettuce. Now, I used to think nacho sauce could go great on everything, but I have just been proven mistaken. Nacho cheese on a bed of lettuce isn’t so good, because lettuce is mostly water, and nobody wants watered down orange cheese product. Nobody sane, at least. I appreciate that they thought to put in a green vegetable just so the rest doesn’t look as artery clogging as it is, but this would be a tastier product if the bed of lettuce were replaced with a bed of tortilla chips. Or hell, why not French fries or curly fries? Jack used to do chili cheese curly fries way back when, and they were the best.
So, mixed grade on the Taco Nachos. I’d say ditch the lettuce and add tomatoes, if I met anyone to say it to.
In other Jack news, the new pomegranate berry smoothie is pretty good, though the berries outweigh the pomegranate. At $3 for a small, though (hey, it is real fruit, and an antioxidant), it seems pricey when you can get a whole combo for that much.
And the appetizer sampler finally ditched the spicy chicken lumps that sucked hardcore, and replaced them with two egg rolls instead. It’s a better deal, but after the Taco Nachos I was unable to finish the sampler.
I could have forced myself, but why? I’m not suffering for you!
I was just reading this eminently sensible article in the UK Guardian about defusing U.S.-Russia tensions, when something occurred to me.
Check out the comments on the article. Some are knee-jerk and hostile, but almost all are actually thoughtful and make good points, unlike the semi-literate rants often seen over here that gave rise to the notion of Godwin’s Law.
Perhaps my UK blood makes me more sensible. Though as I’ve often mentioned here to much incredulity, I’m practically the “conservative” one in my English family.
There are times when an alt-weekly’s cover story is not the most photogenic thing in the paper. I get that.
A few issues ago, the LA Weekly’s main story was about billboards. As they had already had a cover picture on the topic, they ran with an image of a psycho-looking Norwegian black-metal performer being profiled in the music section. Good call.
At New Times LA, we once ran a cover image of some fire-eating bondage chick. She maybe got a paragraph of text devoted to her inside, but she moved issues quicker than the news feature likely would have.
However, I have never, EVER seen a publication run a cover image complete with a large cover headline that has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with it.
Look at the above. A cinema-savvy reader will recognize it instantly as an image from WALTZ WITH BASHIR. But the headline refers to a story on dueling mortuaries. A story the cover calls “Deathmatch 2009,” and the interior article calls “Deathmatch 3000.”
Look really closely at that image above, and maybe you’ll see the tiny white text beside the soldier’s collar, identifying the cover image as being from a movie. I do note with some interest that they’re using the old CityBeat logo rather than the new revamped one.
So what do they have inside about WALTZ WITH BASHIR? A review. A fairly short one, too. Gee, you’d think maybe CityBeat brass might realize they already reviewed the movie back when it actually opened? Ahh, but you see, it opens this week in Seattle, where the reviews now come from. Other L.A. media outlets championed this movie when it premiered at AFI Fest. Congrats for being dead last on the bandwagon, waiting till after its Oscar nomination.
The other major review is for a movie called WERE THE WORLD MINE. A movie that was also previously reviewed — back when it opened in L.A. on December 12. It has since left and IS NOT PLAYING ANYWHERE HERE. Just, you guessed it, in Seattle. Seriously, can no-one at CityBeat be bothered to check Moviefone? It would take seconds.
No mention of the Dreamworks horror movie THE UNINVITED, which screened for press and will likely be #1 this weekend. No mention either of Renee Zellweger’s NEW IN TOWN, also a national release.
Full-page ad for UNDERWORLD 3, which the paper never even acknowledged was opening.
Oh, and NONE of these film reviews appear on the CityBeat website, a week after the two Seattle reviews from last week went up and then got scrubbed. Also no letters section since Andy Klein was fired. You speculate as to why that is.
The folks on staff at CityBeat are not this dumb or incompetent. So I wish I knew why they were acting like it.
(backstory on this post HERE, follow the links you find there also)
Okay, so as of this posting, CityBeat has scrubbed the syndicated movie reviews by Seling and Kiley from its website completely, and Andy Klein’s final review for them is now on the main page, the only article from the previous week rather than the current issue.
It’s not like they can pretend Andy’s not gone, so what’s going on here?
(If you’re just joining us, backstory HERE and HERE)
I have decided to flag the word “cocksucker” in comments, based on the fact that I don’t think any commenter has ever used it, I would disapprove of most possible uses in comments anyway, and a particularly pernicious spammer is using it as an alias.
To recap, other flagged words that might be inadvertently used include poker, holdem, wiki, and blogspot. If you use any of them in a comment it will most likely fall into the junk folder automatically and I cannot guarantee it will be found.
The curiosity of the Andy Klein dismissal gets even stranger when one considers the actual print edition of CityBeat this week. Again, I have to wonder if they really knew what a deal they were getting out of him.
Let me stress that I have no ax to grind with any individual at CityBeat. I like all the people I know there — former OC Weekly-er Tom Child is no slouch himself when it comes to cinema — and have no idea who made the actual call to go without a film editor. And I also have nothing against any of the syndicated film critics I’m about to mention. We all gotta eat. If they’re young and new at this, I hope they train to do something else, for the sake of making a living.
In trying economic times, it does make sense to cut the roster of critics. Sucks (for me, among others), but it’s true. Nonetheless, it is my belief that AT MINIMUM, any paper, even if it carries syndicated reviews, if it is to be remotely relevant to a film audience in Los Angeles, needs at least one in-house film section editor and one staff critic. In CityBeat’s case until recently, and in the case of the LA Weekly now, they’re one and the same person. At the Village Voice, two different people.
It doesn’t look like CityBeat has anyone lined up to replace Andy as film editor, and let’s take a look at what happens as a result.
Editorial staff box: Andy is still listed as film editor. Wakey wakey, folks.
Reviews: Written by Megan Seling, Brendan Kiley, and Lindy West. Who? Well, I couldn’t find them on Rotten Tomatoes, which seems odd in a time when even Some Dude With A Website can be listed on there. So I did some checking around, and noticed that some of these reviews also ran in The District Weekly out of Long Beach, and The Stranger in Seattle. I suspect they may originate in Seattle, since one of the capsule reviews is for a movie called OUTLANDER, which CityBeat says is opening “Citywide.” Not in Los Angeles, though. A quick trip to Moviefone could have cleared that up. (I kinda like West’s stuff so far, but her capsules rely too heavily on “shocking” swear words).
Didn’t notice the capsule for OUTLANDER? That’s probably because neither it nor the capsule for INKHEART actually made it online. Yet they ran — in both — a moderate-length review of PAUL BLART: MALL COP: a week-old movie that had already been given a capsule review in the previous issue. See now why a section editor might be useful?
Completely unmentioned, editorial-wise, either in print or online, are the fairly significant releases UNDERWORLD 3 and DONKEY PUNCH. The former, granted, didn’t screen for review, but the latter did. And traditionally, Andy would write one or two-line synopses of non-screened movies. The LA Weekly’s tactic is to say that the movie was not screened in time, but a review will appear online shortly. Both easy fixes, not done here.
No Special Screenings or Now Playing section, which you could chalk up to space cuts. I know from experience that those are sometimes the things an editor has to fight for; with no editor, forget it.
Tangentially related — I notice CityBeat has added a feature called CityBitch, in which readers issue anonymous rantings or praises, accompanied by a cartoon based on their text; this is a direct copy of an OC Weekly feature called “Hey You!”, and The District also did something similar. My fear is that Will Swaim — the common factor in each paper — is thinking that the same formula which worked for him in an OC paper and a Long Beach paper will also work for an L.A. paper, hence the use of the same critics as the District (It should be noted that both OCW and The District relied on syndicated reviews). Maybe it can, but I just don’t think so. Cinema in OC and LBC is literally not much beyond the multiplex and a few museum screenings…to the extent that there was more, I was often the only guy at OC Weekly to ever hear about it (Indiefest, SoCal Independent Film Fest), but you have to dig to find it, whereas in Los Angeles, it’s a scene so thriving that even the LA Times doesn’t try to cover everything. Can we say goodbye to film-related cover stories, too?
I’d love for the current CityBeat staff to prove me wrong, and for CityBeat to be around this time next year. But if firing Andy is the first move, boy, I don’t see it.
Now, as part of the year-end barrage of LAFCA award stuff, I got a copy of the WALL-E screenplay. And it’s more specific than the casual viewer might imagine — it specifies, usually, exactly what sort of emotional tone should be in a given robot’s voice while reciting the lines. It’s descriptive. And while we can argue — and I will — that it’s basically IDIOCRACY meets SILENT RUNNING, it is a well-written script.
That said, as a screenwriter, I know how damn hard it is to get people to read scripts!
And I can say that leading up to the LAFCA vote, when WALL-E was brought up as a possibility for screenplay, some ridiculed the dialogue.
If we critics can think that way, then the Academy voters, who seem a lot more obtuse, definitely will.
To reiterate: screenplays aren’t just about dialogue, but I’m not sure anyone who’s never written one realizes just how much that is true.
