by Shannonn Kelly

What do you do when you’re at a movie theater and the person in front of you obscures your view. You do something about it. What do you do if you’re Roger Ebert…you get press for that stand you take and my personal applause.

On Saturday September 6, 2008 an incident began inside the theater, Ebert said, when he could not see subtitles for the film “Slumlord Millionaire” at the Toronto International Film Festival, because the man sitting in front of him was leaning into the aisle.

“In my medical condition I cannot speak, I tapped him lightly on the shoulder, and gestured him to move over a little. He said, ‘Don’t touch me!’ and remained in position. I tapped him lightly again. ‘He said - don’t touch me!’ He leaned further into the aisle, as if making a point of it. I tapped him a third time, and he jumped up and whacked me on the knee with whatever it was,” Ebert said.

Ebert wrote that he tapped the man a fourth time, “just to show I wasn’t intimidated.” The man was later moved to another seat. The “man” was chief New York Post movie critic Lou Lumenick, where he has been reviewing films since 1999.

My Google search on Lou give me 93,800 pages. My Google search on Roger…2,250,000. I’d say Roger has earned a little more respect for Lou who should have in the least turned around to see who he barked at, dismissed and ultimately slapped with a program.

At the time of this writing no public apology has been issued. Nor a private one that’s been reported.

It’s a shame Roger couldn’t have given Lou “2 Thumbs”. In the eye…

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