Issue 195

News: Derek the Restaurant Critic.
Normally, I do not review restaurants. Normally, I'm just content to eat whatever the menu has that fits within my tastes. However, I recently (twice, as a matter of fact) got dragged to a restaurant so horrible that my experiences simply demand that I have to do so. That restaurant is the Chicago Diner. The restaurant's major sell is that it is a vegan restaurant which apparently manages to use vegan cuisine to mimic diner cuisine to the extent that it is indistinguishable from the real thing. However, is it? The fact is, that it's not. To test and see if this is possible, I ate a "bacon" cheezeburger. (sic) To analyse both of the major meat components, the "burger" was made out of seitan, which is essentially a fancy word for dough. The fact is that it tastes like it, with a lot of spices that are, in theory, supposed to help it taste more like beef, but, apart from failing, that will not sit well with your intestines. As for the bacon part of it, it tastes like nothing. Simply put, it has no taste, and I mean this in the sense that Jean-Baptiste Grenouille had no scent. I had to force myself to eat the entire thing, due to my being malnourished to the point where my own faeces would have been equally appetizing if the smell could be neutralized, but there was no point whatsoever wherein any part of the burger tasted like bacon, cheese, or beef. However, we can probably lay this down to the fact that making dough actually taste like meat is impossible, but this does not excuse their other crimes against cuisine. Both times I was dragged there, I ordered a side of Mashed Potatoes, and somehow, even this was really off, particularly due to it looking neither like a potato nor mashed to any particularly meaningful degree. The taste itself was bland, different from the flavour I'm used to with potatoes in its sheer lack. After the Bacon Cheezeburger fiasco, I decided to order a salad. Surely if there's anything that a vegan could make palatable, it's salad. And yet, I was wrong, especially with what passed off as ranch dressing, tasting like a sub-par variation on the dill dipping sauce that is served with vegetable platters that are supposed to be sold for parties. Of course, the serving staff are kind, as you can expect from people who seem to be incapable of that most basic of human thought processes: rationalising the death of other beings for one's own desires. All that said, would I recommend it? Well, on the condition that you have no sense of taste whatsoever, or all the common sense of Madeline Bassett, then I would. If you don't fit those two criteria, I would guess that it would be the best argument for eating meat, especially human (or at least veal, which is supposed to taste exactly like human flesh). By contrast, if you're looking for a vegetarian restaurant that doesn't decieve, try Sweet Tomatoes. It makes no pretense of claiming that anything in it is supposed to taste like meat, and, for what it's worth, its food actually tastes good.

Quotes:
"Vegetarianism is harmless enough, though it is apt to fill a man with wind and self righteousness."
- Robert Hutchinson
"Veronica forces herself to go through a great deal of labor and preparation just to make her food taste more like meat, with weird-ass spices from around the world sprinkled atop "exotic" (and mandatory) sauces, curries, fungus, Boca burgers, textured vegetable paste, Tofurkey, and other processed blends of soy and gluten."
___________Rotten Library on Eating Disorders.
"It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal. It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable."
___________William Seabrook on Menschenfleisch.
"In a post-apocalyptic world, one man is transported from the microwave dimension to feast upon the remains of those who once lived. Rated R."
_______________Meatwad

Issue 194

News: Three Books I've read to be turned into films. Trailers reviewed here.
The Adventures of Tintin. Relatively recently, I rediscovered the Tintin comics (specifically, Crab with the Golden Claws, Secret of the Unicorn, and Red Rackham's Treasure), and around the time I started college, I learned that there would be a film based on some of the comics, with filming apparently imminent. What was surprising is that, around the same time that I graduated from Oakton, three years later, only now has the trailer finally been released. I must admit that, while I really hate it when classic cartoon characters are given an unusually realistic look (see the recent Alvin and the Chipmunks reboot, and then see the 1980s series for a good reason why). What really surprised me was that, from what I've been able to see from the trailer, the filmmakers seem to have put a lot of effort into making the CGI that many studios seem to prefer to the "Hand-drawn" style these days look a lot like Herge's original drawing style. As for the casting, I was pleasantly surprised when they announced Simon Pegg and Nick Frost from Hot Fuzz as the "twin" detectives Thomson and Thompson, and I can't see any major problems with the casting. So far the only cons I can think of would be that Professor Calculus isn't in the film (he was introduced in Red Rackham's Treasure), and that Steven Moffat has evidently decided that the best books to adapt into a sequel would be the two volumes about Tintin and Co.'s adventures in Peru, because I personally think that, of the official 21 volumes that the Herge estate acknowledges, they are the two weakest, due to the climactic moment, which, apart from being a blatant rip-off of the eclipse scene in A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court, makes less sense in the context of real history (especially jarring considering Herge's commitment to accuracy,) since the real-life Incas were certainly not the kind of people who thought eclipses were signs of the gods like medieval Europeans. My personal pick would be the two volumes dealing with the moon mission; they actually contain some of the strongest plots of the series, with a story arc long enough to sustain a feature-length film, and, on top of all that, would provide a good place to introduce Professor Calculus. Release Date: Christmas 2011.
We Need to Talk About Kevin- Shortly after I read this in November 2009, I discovered that there was to be a film adaptation of the novel. I was apprehensive about the way that the plot could be handled, as I had a fear that the story would be handled as a straight horror film, about a bad seed who hates everyone and everything and decides to take it out on the people in his class one day. The fact is, that the novel is fundamentally a family drama that just so happens to include some genuinely horrifying scenes. There is actually no trailer on Youtube, but there are three short clips, each less than two minutes long, which showcase the style: Simply put, the film feels quite spare, quite possibly a reflection of people trying to recover from a disaster, and also reflecting the relative tranquility of the scenes in the book that aren't horrific. At this point, of the three films I've put here, it's the only one I can find that critics have already seen and been able to post reviews of, due to its being screened at Cannes, and its rating: 92% positive. That said, the ranking will probably be lower, but as of right now, there is only one negative review, and that one was written by somebody who hated the source material. Release Date: None at the moment, but in Britain, it's apparently hitting screens on September 2.
Mr. Popper's Penguins: I only learned about this film's being released this weekend. There doesn't seem to be anything too spectacular about it, though, and I don't really have too many emotional ties to the book at this point. Release Date: June 17.

Film Idea of the Day: Skating Away. A Burned-out composer and a PTSD sufferer on the brink of mental disaster form a friendship (just how they meet, I'm not sure, but I would think that their meeting has something to do with an attempted assault committed while flashing back.) My current climax has the sufferer blowing himself up, and the Composer finally getting some of his creative spark.

Film Review: Moon. I can only speculate that this could very well be part of the reason Moffat hasn't decided to adapt the moon albums of the Tintin series into film. The fact is, that both of the films are amazingly accurate looks at what life would be like for people who go on lunar expeditions (in the Tintin case, the accuracy was especially exceptional due to being published in the days before space travel). However, unlike those albums, Moon tends to have a feel very similar to 1970s Sci-fi films, especially 2001 and Solaris. In the proper plot, Sam Rockwell plays an astronaut who is harvesting Helium for a company on earth, and he meets his clone. I wish I could go into further detail.

Link of the Day: A Death Note Fanfic read aloud.