Place: Taco Bell
Lunch: Nacho cheese Doritos Locos Taco Supreme (no tomato), Nachos Supreme (no tomato), beef Enchrito, Mug Root Beer
I have, for the record, tried the new Cool Ranch Doritos Locos taco. I was disappointed. It just doesn't have the 'pop' the nacho cheese one has.
I paid tribute to Roger Ebert last night the only way I knew how...I made a Steak n Shake run.
It was his (and is my) favorite restaurant, after all. And even though the idiots who work the drive-thru at the closest one to me sent me off with the wrong burger...again...I ate the whole thing in his honor.
(Maybe they gave me his favorite burger instead. I don't know.)
Nothing reminds you of growing old like watching your heroes pass, and with Ebert, my five biggest have left us in just a few short years.
There are lots of movie reviewers out there. Even I have a (really silly) movie review blog. But Ebert was my favorite. The thing about his reviews was that even if I didn't agree with his star rating, he told the reader just enough about each movie that I could get a pretty good idea if I would like it or not. He didn't say too little. He didn't say too much. He didn't fill his reviews with big words or over-elaborate descriptions. He wrote sensibly, and witty. For a guy like me who just starts to glaze over at crap like that, he was the perfect writer. That was true about all of his writing, even unrelated to movies. Still, my all-time favorite line of his was movie-related...his plot summary of 2001's "Pearl Harbor", where he described it as "a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on December 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle".
Ebert lost his ability to speak due to cancer in 2006, which ended his television career, but didn't stop him from writing and reviewing movies. If you read him, you pictured the Roger Ebert of the television days. It was a shocking contrast to SEE him in recent years, but his writing...you knew the man was still fully there.
Ebert hadn't been writing many reviews recently as he worked through his latest health issues. Ironically, I've only seen two movies in theatres so far this year. And there's nothing I want to see for the foreseeable future....maybe until Iron Man 3.
That's something Ebert could have changed. Not even necessarily with a positive review...just a good description.
