Sit and spin: what to do with a useless thumb

The New York Times is reporting that Roger Ebert gave The Longest Yard a thumbs up on TV, but then, after visiting Cannes, realized - surprise, surprise - that what he really wanted to do his thumb was tell Sandler and co. to shove it.

In a review last month that offered an unusual glimpse of how sausage is made, Mr. Ebert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for The Chicago Sun-Times who also has been reviewing on television for more than two decades, explained how "The Longest Yard" had forced a professional crisis. He had already taped his review of the film for "Ebert & Roeper," giving it a thumbs up, before he attended the Cannes Film Festival.

There he saw 25 films with much higher aspirations. He writes: "I sit here staring at the computer screen and realizing with dread that the time has come for me to write a review justifying that vertical thumb."

After entertaining the idea of magically flipping that thumb, he concludes that he was right all along, that the movie "more or less achieves what most of the people attending it will expect."

Well, we're all fortunate that bad judgement and pandering, populist crticism shows up to save the day. I could go on about how this is representative of all those nasty trends in film criticism that place the untrained, repetitive demands of some hypothetical average viewer above the sense of the critic, but instead, I'm going to get back my Monday night crack marathon, er... The West Wing.