"Post" traumatic stress disorder

Because we make a living sitting in dark rooms and writing about it, people think film critics are sissies. Not so, as Lou Lumenick, he-man critic for the New York Post, never tires of proving. Back in 2006,  he was one of the few critics with the guts to squash  “Ant Buddy” , an animated children’s film, calling it out as commie propaganda. Last year he struck a blow for all-American heterosexual horniness by saying he wished that Diablo Cody had won the New York Critics Circle screenplay award so she could demonstrate her stripper talents at the ceremony.

But Lou’s tough guy act isn’t just talk, as he demonstrated the other day at a press screening at the Toronto Film Festival. When some jerk sitting behind him touched him on the back, Lou told him off. “Don’t touch me!” he said. Again and again! Finally, Lou turned around and smacked the guy on the knee with a festival binder!

Turns out that his assailant was none other than renowned "Chicago Sun-Times" film critic Roger Ebert. The cancer survivor and Pulitzer-Prize-winner can’t talk and is partially immobilized as a result of his cancer treatments and was trying to get Lumenick’s attention because he was blocking the subtitles for the film they were watching. No wuss himself, Ebert remained to the end of the screening. Luckily, his famed digits were unharmed during the fracas and he gave the film, Danny Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire," a thumbs up.

He also wrote about the incident on his blog,  noting that his wife, Chaz, offered to “get a no-neck guy from the West Side to break his [Lumenick’s] knees.”

Watch your back, Lou. Remember what Sean Connery in “The Untouchables” said about "the Chicago way."