"I feel like a jerk" -- Roger Ebert

It's definitely been the media kerfuffle of the week: Roger Ebert's admission that he wrote an entire review of a new film after only watching eight minutes of the picture has inspired a storm of outrage. It turns out that everybody's a critic, especially when it comes to judging movie critics. Now a clearly chastened Ebert has acknowledged that he was wrong, posting a follow-up post to his original explanation admitting that he wishes he had never published the review (of a small indie film called "Tru Loved") in the first place. As he puts it:

"It sent the wrong message. If I had seen the entire film, a review, however negative, would have been appropriate. But in reviewing the first eight minutes, I was guilty of too much affection for my prose. I have learned a great deal from the intelligent, opinionated, useful comments from all those readers.... I will never, ever, again review a film I have not seen in its entirety. Never. Ever." He adds: "I must apologize to writer-director Stewart Wade, his actors and his crew. They did nothing to deserve this. For them, it must have been like a drive-by shooting.... I feel like a jerk. In even my negative reviews, I try to give some sense of why you might want to see a film even if I didn't admire it. Here, I failed