This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2010, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
For a guy who got laid off earlier in the day, Jeff Vice was a pretty happy fellow Tuesday night.
The Cricket ran into Vice, now the former movie critic for the Deseret News, where he usually does — at a movie screening (in this case, for the exploitation flick "Machete"). He was smiling, beaming even.
Vice couldn't talk about what happened Tuesday at the Deseret News, where 85 full- and part-time staffers were laid off in a major reorganization (which is management-speak for "bloodbath") that included most of the paper's Features staff — including TV critic Scott Pierce, music writer Scott Iwasaki, theater writer Erica Hansen and food editor Valerie Phillips. Non-disclosure agreements were part of the deal for the laid-off employees' generous severance packages.
But Vice assured his colleagues that he was fine, and happy to be doing what he wants to do.
He's still reviewing movies for a variety of outlets: He still has his Thursday morning gig on X96's "Radio From Hell," his perch on the "Geek Show Podcast" with X96's Kerry Jackson, and is a contributor to "The Mediocre Show," a podcast out of Philadelphia.
Also, Vice and Jimmy Martin, the movie critic for SLUG magazine, are launching "The Big Movie Mouth-Off," a movie-review show available on Comcast on Demand. And Vice says he will be a contributor to the movie blog Big Shiny Robot.
And that's all before he has to go out and find a real job.
Good luck, Jeff. Enjoy the journey.