It took New York Post film critic Lou Lumenick all of 6 hours to respond in kind to a sentence in my post yesterday about Benjamin Button where I snarkily took a swipe at him. In a blog post titled "Throwing the Baby Out with Ben Lyons: Guilt by Association", Lumenick writes:By far the silliest blog post I've read this season -- and there have been many -- is at stopbenlyons.com. Because the widely dissed TV reviewer chose The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as his best film of 2008, this site offers up a "Pro-Button Critical Hall of Shame." It's a list of other critics the author thinks were foolish enough to list Button on their top 10 lists despite Lyons' endorsement. The offenders include my junior colleague Kyle Smith, Pulitizer[sic] Prize-winner Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal, Richard Corliss of Time, three reviewers for the Hollywood Reporter and, oh yeah, yours truly. Our crime? Listing a movie that went on to receive 13 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. The post, which I'm not going to dignify with a link, says the HR gang "have clearly spent too much of the last year smoking out Michael Phelps in their office,'' while my review is blamed on "pent-up emotional issues."
Invoking the finite wisdom of the Academy is always a decisive debating strategy when defending a movie. "It got, like, 13 Oscar nominations. And it totally deserved them! I mean, NO movie has EVER been nominated for an Oscar unless it was, like, totally AWESOME!" Seriously, if you are going to appeal to authority, you might want to appeal to a real authority on film, like Roger Ebert. Oops, did I say Ebert again? Mentioning Roger's name around Lou can make him angry. You wouldn't like him when he's angry. Ask Roger.
I don't have anything against Lou, not even his agreement with Ben on this issue. After all, my Button-free top ten list is otherwise embarrassingly close to Ben Lyons' list. Mrs. StopBenLyons said that Lou sounded pissed and that I got him to stoop to my level--I'm not sure if that is exactly a compliment to me. Actually, I think he sounds more amused with my post than pissed, which I respect. I am surprised, though, that Lou both noticed and responded to my post. Either he is a devoted reader of my blog or he has a "Lou Lumenick" Google Alert. You can take your own guess as to which of these is true.
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