I swear you can actually see him rubbing his hands

As has been observed, there are few things more joyful than reading Roger Ebert (continued good health, Roger) when he's performing his sad duty of reviewing a film that falls flat.

This joy may have reached a kind of zenith when, at a roast, Rob Reiner was forced to read aloud from Ebert's review of Reiner's film, North.

That's the review from which Ebert took the title of his first collection of cutting reviews, I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie.

So perhaps you can imagine how much I liked reading his review of the new film, The Hottest State.

He opens with this wise and instructive statement:

As a topic of fiction, the only things I have against young love are youth and romance. There has to be something more. Who would care about Romeo and Juliet if it hadn't been for their unfortunate misunderstanding? There has to be comedy, or tragedy, or suspense, or personality quirks or something more than the fact that Young Person A loves Young Person B.

(Yes...there does, doesn't there, Ben thought smugly, before chewing on his juicy-trag gum)

Ebert continues:

When [the] hero stands in the street reciting beneath her window from "Romeo and Juliet," (and he does), surely the point is not his gauche behavior but her failure to pour water on him.

My schadenfreude in this was compounded by the knowledge that The Hottest State was written, directed by and co-stars Ethan Hawke. Based on his "semi-autobiographical" novel, yet.

Oy.

While I'm sure he's very pretty, Ethan Hawke has always seemed to me to epitomize what I mean when I make this oft-repeated comment:

Actors...shouldn't...talk.

And his attempts to become the voice of his generation, I've always thought, should be greeted only with indifference if not outright scorn.

Admittedly Hawke didn't exactly help himself with me when, pimping his movie in some magazine or other recently, he equated it with All That Jazz.

This is what you call a red flag to a bull.

All That Jazz is one of my favorite movies; one of the most interesting and memorable ever made. If you're equating your work with that...boy, you better bring it.

If Ebert (and his compiled colleagues at RT) is anything to go by...Hawke has a lot of nerve.

Then again, I kind of knew that when he co-wrote an 80-minute rationale for having cheated on his wife.