All Roger Ebert, in town for the Toronto International Film Festival, wanted to do was watch a movie. (Whether or not the movie, Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, was worth watching or not is still a matter of some debate, but advance word is pretty good. Sure, that's what they told me about Trainspotting.) Unfortunately, because of the way the man sitting in front of him was sitting, he wasn't able to see the subtitles, and, because recent bouts with cancer, he was also unable to speak. So he simply tapped the guy on the shoulder and gestured for him to move over a bit. In a perfect world, that would be the end of the story, and you certainly wouldn't be reading about it here.
Of course, in a perfect world, there would be no such thing as a the New York Post. It so happened that the slouching dimwit in front of Ebert was their witless film critic, Lou Lumenick. Lumenick responded to Ebert's requests first by yelling "Don't touch me!" at him, as if he were a bristly hobo taking up two seats on the LIRR, and then by spinning around and whacking the beloved Chicago critic with something (a rolled-up program, say some; a festival binder, say others). Happily, the room was filled with hundreds of international journalists, and Lumenick was duly shamed as the story spread all over the internet, marking the first time since 1872 that a New York Post employee experienced the feeling of shame.
To Ebert's credit, displaying far more class than Lumenick, he's dismissed the entire incident as no big deal, and rightly pointed out that if it hadn't been him Lumenick was lurching in front of, no one would ever have even heard the story. But we say, what's bad for the Post is good for America. You stay class, Lou Lumenick!.
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