Meant to post this last week, but what does the future of film coverage in Los Angeles look like? Kind of depressing, but also laughably terrible, truth be told. Since they let film editor and chief critic Andy Klein go last month, CityBeat has, as I understand it, been picking up what little film stuff they’ve run from out-of-town sources (i.e., writers on other papers they own, in Seattle and elsewhere). This has led to some strange circumstances — including the reviewing of things that
have shuttered in L.A., and/or already been reviewed, as well as a complete lack of any updated film material online for several weeks. The new nadir? For the week of
February 6, CityBeat ran a single capsule review of the Weinstein Company’s Fanboys in its print edition. Then, for the week of February 13, they ran… the very same
review of Fanboys. Yikes. I don’t know if this is a case of printer error (very tough to believe, given updated layout), or some cheap, shrugging stop-gap trick that the powers-that-be thought they could slip by, but I can tell you from experience that that sort of thing is not only a white flag of surrender to any reader with half a brain, but will be noticed by movie studios and ad buyers as well.