Now I expect this behaviour from Kayne West – an egotistical rapper who thinks the world is his playground and also his punching bag. West was arrested today at LAX after he and a bodyguard attack TMZ photographers and smashed their cameras (Although unrelated to the story at hand, got here to watch the video of Kayne in attack mode).

But did I expect to hear that New York Post film critic Lou Lumenick would attack his physically crippled peer Roger Ebert at a screening yesterday during the Toronto International Film Festival? No, not until I read the following story in the Chicago Sun-Times. Personally, I find the incident in question, as I hope you do, completely absurd and hilarious, even despite the fact that Ebert followed up the original story (wherever it was first published) with this post on his blog, saying, “a fellow critic whacked me with a rolled-up program or a festival binder or something. It has been blown out of proportion. It is of little interest.” Read the following article and let me know what you think.

Ebert confirms fellow critic hit him at Toronto Film Festival
By Phil Rosenthal | Tribune media columnist
4:56 PM CDT, September 11, 2008
Though Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert no longer spars over movies with fellow critics on TV, it turns out the 66-year-old reviewer whose speaking voice has been lost to the effects of cancer treatment still has to defend himself from other reviewers — physically, if not verbally.
By e-mail Thursdsay, Ebert corroborated a New York Daily News report that New York Post film reviewer Lou Lumenick whacked the venerated Chicago critic with a binder during a screening last week at the Toronto Film Festival.
Lumenick reportedly was annoyed by being tapped on the shoulder by whomever was sitting behind him, so he got up, turned around and took a swing. Only afterward did Lumenick apparently realize he had hit Ebert, who had simply been trying to silently request Lumenick shift in his seat so as to not to block his view.
“[Lumenick] hit him so hard everybody could hear it,” a source told the Daily News. “Everyone freaked out and turned around.”
Lumenick did not respond to an e-mailed Tribune request for additional details.
Ebert wrote in a story posted to suntimes.com that the incident “has been blown out of proportion [and] is of little interest.” But he also noted his wife, Chaz, who did not witness what happened, was taken aback when she learned of it.
“Her reaction when she heard: ‘I’ll get a no-neck guy from the West Side to break his knees,’” he recalled. “Just rhetorical, I trust.”

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