Author: Mike

According to web rumor mills, The Chicago Tribune, which has evidently not made enough money from scalping Cubs tickets, is going to ditch their film critic Michael Wilmington in exchange for New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell (The Trib denies this).. They are trying to position themselves with a celebrity darling critic to compete against same-town rivals Ebert/Roeper; this may be part of a large campaign to beat down the Sun Times while their ownership is up in the air.

This is after, according to yet another rumor, that Mitchell is leaving the Times after losing the chief film critic slot to A.

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O. Scott. Now we here at ginandtacos.com like Elvis Mitchell with all of his insane metaphors – and we respect both him and Scott for bringing wit and intelligence to a position that Janet Maslin all but destroyed (don't get us started on Maslin).

But we'll be damn if Chicago is going to eat the scraps off New York's table.

Wilmington is an excellent critic, very dedicated to film in the chicago community, and very much a product of a city with some of the best film criticism in the United States. Leave a comment showing your support for Mr. Wilmington and/or say if you are also going to be pissed off at the Trib if they take this switch.
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My god. This isn't a joke. Please, for the love of all that is good, go to: The Way of the Master webpage and make sure you click on "high speed" – trust me, it's worth it.

"The Way of the Master" sounds too much like a Chinese martial arts movie to be taken seriously. You are going to want to believe that this is a hoax – but I don't think it is.

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Updates to the main content soon (some reviews, some new neocon bingo tiles, and more!), but for now, while the staff of ginandtacos.com suffers under deadlines and term projects, here's some random stuff off the internet:

Doonesbury. Read it, even if you are a new fan, and especially if you haven't read it in a while. B.D. is one of the first characters from the strip (from way back around 1971), who has just recently gone off to fight in Iraq. Bush in Iraq has gotten under Trudeau like Reagan with the AIDS crisis, and he's using a character to let it be known.

New Yorker Profile of Aaron McGruder; it's surprisingly critical (for the new yorker anyway), and it explains why "The Boondocks" has been, well, crappy since last fall (he's given the artwork off to someone else while trying to expand into other media). I'll try and get a reaction to it in the comics section while my boss isn't looking.

Retrospective of Rem Koolhaas, just in time for the opening of his Public Library in Seattle. I'd recommend getting over to the IIT student union (pictured in that profile) whenever you are in Chicago – it's worth all the fuss it's getting.

All the times Giles has been knocked out on Buffy. This is in honor of the fact that Angel, which is having an amazing Season Five, is leaving the networks for good in 1 month. I know the page is missing a few (the living puppet episode the demon gets him in order to try and eat his brains). We may need our own list compiled.

The Sopranos' obsession with having to use the bathroom. I'm glad the show recovered from a so-so season 4 to be worth talking about again. Like Angel, it's having an amazing season 5. The article also calls out the network for having the shows with the most (Sex and the City) and least (Sopranos) glamorous view of American affluence right next to each other:

Compare, for instance, the joyless wealth of the New Jersey clan with Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw and her feel-good material girlfriends. Nowhere else on cable is American consumerism as scathingly portrayed as it is among Tony and his families. If Sex and the City caused its viewers to fantasize about A-list night-clubbing in Manhattan, closets stuffed with designer shoes, apartments in Soho, and eating out seven nights a week, The Sopranos is about rubbing our noses in the grossness of stuff. Once you tunnel under the Hudson River, the unchic nightclubs are packed with creepy guys ogling fake-breasted pole dancers, your clothes came off a truck, real estate is just another shakedown, and dinner is cold pizza.

So I wasn't hallucinating when I turned on Chicago 950AM yesterday morning to find several people talking in spanish instead of liberal talk radio station Air America. I knew 950AM was a spanish station before Air America bought its airtime, but I didn't think they would be pulled after so little time.

Well, yeah, they did get pulled from the Chicago Market, and the L.A. Market as well. Air America finally got around to releasing a statement blasting the station owners for doing this; the Majority Report blog says that the same people own the Chicago and LA radio stations, and want more for LA, and are using Chicago as leverage. The radio owners said that Air America bounced a check for a million dollars, and aren't paying their bills. It was fun while it lasted. Here's the injunction Air America filed to get back on the air.

To be honest, besides Franken and Garafalo's shows, the rest was mostly filler at best. I think it will be better if they can pool their resources on developing those two shows and have them fight it out on the networks each on their own (like, ya know, every other editorial talk show, including Hannity and Limbaugh) instead of trying to create an entire network out of thin air; if you listen close enough you can hear the money going down the toilet while the godawful Randi rants, or Lizz Winstead and Rachel Maddow sort of make logical arguments while Chuck D sleeps.

Well, here's a reason why I can celebrate turning 25 in July – I'm that much closer to being out of the eligible range for a draft.

During the weekend, Ralph Nader held a press conference where he told youth that another draft was coming. "The Pentagon is quietly recruiting new members to fill local draft boards" – which I'm trying to find independent confirmation of, but even the hint of it is scary enough.

People hit the trenches on the radio this morning about the possibility of a draft; a major theme for everyone how the youth today "have it so easy" and "are too busy worrying about Christina Aguilera than worrying about issues in the world" (an actual quote).

As if all people ages 17-20 in 1966 were sitting around talking about containment theory instead of smoking and debating whether Clapton was a better guitarist than Hendrix; and if young people have it any easier today than 25 years ago I'd really like someone to explain it to me in concrete terms.

Speaking of people who should never see combat, aspiring Navy S.

E.A.L., ginandtacos.com founder, and biophysics grad student Erik Martin turns 25 this week! Email him a b-day wish, and see how his competitive mustache growth is going.

Dave Kehr's Kill Bill Allusion Chart

Dave Kehr was an excellent movie critic for the Chicago Reader from 1974 to 1985; he helped established the tone of the Reader's reviews as being the beachhead against the Pauline Kael style of movie criticism that would later dominate all of movie-reviewing; he created the mold for Jonathan Rosenbaum to fill at a later date.

Kehr left his Chicago, like everyone does, to arrive already obscelent in New York City. Where the reader gave him pages and pages (and love!), The New York Times gives him 4 paragraphs to review whatever A.O. Scott and Stephen Holden pass over (for instance, he got to review The Rock's latest movie).

Kehr gives as good as a stab at explaining what Tarantino is up to in Kill Bill as anyone I've seen. And he knows more than enough to walk you through some of the more rocky references; things like the difference between the skillful Chinese martial arts movie tradition versus the sloppy and blood-soaked Japanese tradition , and where spaghetti westerns fit into it all. He also catches a lot that I missed (confession: I had no idea that David Carradine was the monk from the TV series Kung-Fu that is brought up in Pulp Fiction). If the second part is actually focused on various forms of westerns it gives me hope that the Vol. split in the movie wasn't just a marketing decision or a last minute hesitation but actually fits into the overall project.

And damn if that Uma Thurman as John Wayne in "Searchers" shot doesn't make me want to simultaneously hug and slap the guy.

Like the rest of the United States, media or otherwise, I had never heard about Blackwater Security until last week, when four of it's private contractors were killed in the Sunni Triangle. And again, like everyone else, I assumed that they were private contractors, hired to do the things that the army couldn't, like putting out oil fires or getting the electricity back up and running.

So it was very surprising when I flipped open the Post to find a story about Blackwater Security guards being the only people defending the government's base in Najaf (their headline: Private Guards Repel Attack on U.S. Headquarters). During all the rioting going on in Iraq over the weekend, several hundred armed Iraqis stormed the CPA's main government building in Najaf – and the only people who held them off were 1 marine and 8 Blackwater Security guards.
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Also, Blackwater "sent in its own helicopters amid an intense firefight to resupply its commandos with ammunition". Wow, that sounds like something the military should be doing, not hiring people to do. It's important to note that in the picture above, from the CPA, with the exception of the one marine in camos everyone else is one of those private contractors you hear about (evidently not putting out oil fires – notice how that one guy is wearing a collared work shirt with his assult rifle!!!)

What's the benefit to Bush of doing things this way? One is that he doesn't have to count these people as soliders – making the number of americans gunning away in Iraq less. The other? From the Post: "A Defense Department spokesman said that there were no military reports about the opening hours of the siege on CPA headquarters in Najaf because there were no military personnel on the scene.
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" So much for accountability and transparency.

The government, the military and the people they serve/protect will be able to get the reports on that seige from Blackwater headquarters the day after you can subpoena the secret herbs and spices from KFC.

One of the legacies of Pulp Fiction across the way smaller, more independent film is done in America is an emphasis on cleverness. Like a lot of things, Tarantino inherited this from the French New Wave and immediately made it his own, and was talented (or lucky, depending on your opinion) enough to do a good job of it. An emphasis on subtle (and not-so-subtle) allusions to all of pop culture, a bag full of narrative tricks and devices, the kind of cinematography and editing that seemed designed to simply show off, characters who are either too-cool-for-school or sad losers to whom you can feel superior, and a knowing audience (and the baseline cynicism they bring) were suddenly very in vogue – something that was made concrete by the surprise major success of “The Usual Suspects.”

Enter the cleverest of a generation of clever screenwriters, Charlie Kaufman. His movies are the kind of complex brain puzzles that get so lost in its own style that it views the idea of having to have an ending with contempt (Adaptation). He was so good at this, his movies seemed like the possible culmination of the *wink wink* snarky cinema for which the 90s will probably be remembered. So it’s so satisfying to see him be behind a movie that has one of the strongest emotional cores of any movie released this decade: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

In this movie, Jim Carrey stars as a man named Joel Barish, yet another prototypical Kauffman loser stand-in, dating the vibrant but troubled Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet). After a particularly nasty breakup, Clementine goes through a process where all her memories of their relationship are erased from her head. Joel, after learning about this, decides to go through the same procedure, but while his memories are being erased decides he doesn’t want it and tries to fight back. That’s where things get interesting.

For a movie that sounds on its surface to be a sci-fi thriller to turn out to be such a complex reflection on memory, and the way we remember and forget the things that matter the most to us is a very pleasant surprise. The cast is all in top shape. Jim Carrey is able to blend into the movie and serve its goal rather than dominate every scene.

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A group of young technicians who are performing the service while getting stoned and talking about The Clash all provide a perfect balance to the rollercoaster going on in Joel’s head. The cast aside, most of this movie can probably be attributed to esteemed director Michel Gondry. Kaufman penned the story off an initial idea by Gondry – and you can tell the director had a lot to say on this subject matter.

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This movie will force you, as it did me, to sit down and think about the way you remember and forget the emotional parts of your memories. My favorite memories all have colors and tones associated with them, just like this movie. Some parts have virtual spotlights on them, while others blur at the peripheries, something that is accomplished with some really amazing camerawork. When I forget something, it’s not the “remembered/forgotten” binary of most movies (Memento, all Hollywood amnesia thrillers); I lose the little things before losing the big ones. As Joel’s memory fades, he forgets faces on strangers and all the small details that fill out a picture; the borders fade into darkness, grays and whites and then it’s all gone. It’s a remarkable way of handling the subject.

That the ending works so well in this movie may have to be attributed to Gondry. Without giving too much away, it has more in common with the screwball romantic comedy genre of the 40s (think Doris Day) than anything else – and in less capable hands it could have easily been just dismissed as a clever name-drop. Or maybe this was Kaufman’s idea all along and we are seeing the birth of a brand new thing: cleverness for the sake of moving the audience, not pandering to them.

Wow. We finally had a month of strong employment growth.

Among other leadering factors for this jump are the 72,000 idled grocery workers in california who are no longer striking, and are working again, and are thus now being counted as new jobs, and that it is spring again, so construction (the other leading industry in hiring) begins anew.

Wait – we don't mean to be this cynical – the market may actually be improving, and all we had to do was drive the country three trillion dollars into debt to get it.
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My two cents, before everyone else jumps in and starts slapping each other on the back:

($500billion yearly deficit) / (4 for quarterly) / (revised 171,000 jobs created per month * 3 months) = we are taking $243,664 in debt per job created.

Now granted, I'm sure those grocery workers and all the other jobs our economy created this past quarter are paying above the $250,000/yr mark, but let's pretend they aren't.

I'm not an economist by any means, (I've always run to math equations instead of theory) so I'll need someone to explain to me why this is an efficient system.

I'll probably believe you, because like most americans I'll believe anything if there are enough fancy words used – and before we start revising history the sole stated reason for taking this deficit (100 or so billion for Iraq aside) was to save the economy. And no, I'm not a centralizing fan or a socialist – I just think there has to be a way to create a bunch of crappy service-industry jobs that is more cost-effective than this trickle-down – and I want to stop the debate from being "Wow – look how trickle-down saved the country" and turn it into "so, was this worth it? Was there possibly another way?"

With the tragedy in Fallujah, where four private contractors from Black Water Security were killed and dragged through the streets, fresh in our minds it may be a good idea to re-evaulate the idea of a large, privately controlled force taking over for our military. There are no official records, but conservative estimates place contractors in Iraq between 10,000 and 20,000, making private companies the largest contributor of manpower in the entire Coalition of the Willing (England has around 11,000 troops there, and all other countries together are about 15,000 troops.)

I'm not saying if those four victims had proper military training, and co-ordinated their efforts through the local military base, they would be alive today (several other military targets were hit in the same round of violence). But it's certainly would have increased their odds. More importantly, companies are there because they are being paid to do so – democracy building is not in their mission statements – and now that their employees may be targeted will they stay?
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We know that the majority of our fan base consists of investment bankers, titans of industry, and rising entrepreneurs – these are the links for you! In response to these attack we must double our efforts in using private industry and regular citizens to nation build. In order to make sure we can "stay the course" ginandtacos.
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com has compiled a list of where to go if you'd like to secure yourself a fat juicy iraq re-building contract:

Coalition Provisional Authority Business Center.
Department of Commerce – Your Link to Information on Rebuilding Iraq
Iraq Program Management Office

Here are three Monster.com-esque postings of job opportunities:
Jobs in Iraq
USAID – specific government jobs, and
Requests for proposals/applications – good old fashioned private sector proposals. There's a particularly nice one for plans on rebuilding Iraq's media sector.

I'm off to think of how to corner the market on cheap gin and taco stands in the sunni triangle (I imagine they respect a quality made Tom Collins there).
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