“We (and you) were none too pleased when Ben Lyons joined Ben Mankiewicz as the host for At the Movies earlier this year, particularly when we considered Lyons’ track record as something of a half-wit Richard Roeper to Mankiewicz’s low-rent Roger Ebert. And while Mankiewicz has settled in relatively well in the last six weeks, we continue to cringe at the sight and sound of Lyons fluffing away at Hollywood loins in his blurb-fertile reviews.

“Still, we knew he was a hack; what we didn’t know (at least to the extent we do today) was the garish, staggering extent of his starfucking.” — from Stu Van Airsdale‘s completely justified slice-and-dice of a posturing showbiz toady.

Early Monday afternoon Defamer‘s Kyle Buchanan rapped the knuckles of Owen Gleiberman, Anthony Lane and yours truly for bringing up — mentioning! — the racially-diverse-couple aspect of Rachel Getting Married. The piece is/was called “How Older, White Critics Have Missed the Boat on Rachel Getting Married.”
Buchanan’s view is that the only acceptably enlightened way to approach the above-described aspect of Jonathan Demme‘s latest is to ignore the undercurrents, as the film pretty much does. Right!
But how come Buchanan waited nine days to get into this? I ran my original Rachel piece on 10.4. Shouldn’t counterpunch pieces run within 72 hours of the original post? That’s my rule, at least. And why does it take up to a day for a reader comment to pop up on a Defamer post? That doesn’t happen on this site. You can be Count Vronsky writing from an internet cafe in Albania and your reply to one of my posts will show up like that.