Behold, Roger’s Little Rule Book, Ebert’s lengthy, biting, and hilarious list of dos and don’ts for professional film critics.

All of Ebert’s suggestions are good, although I especially like the one about “No posing for photos” with famous people (”No movie star ever wants to do this. They may smile, but they’re gritting their teeth”), with the exception made for “real photos of you really with a movie star…taken at a real event by a real other person unknown to you who didn’t ask anyone if he could take it.”  But also, as Gary Susman notes at PopWatch, most of the Rules seem to directly reference Ebert’s At the Movies replacement, Ben Lyons.

It goes beyond the fact that Lyons is the undisputed king of posing for photos with stars. Ebert suggests that it’s probably neither a good idea to engage in “verbal parallelism” along the lines of “I like women in real life, but I didn’t like The Women,” nor to make unsupportable predictions like “I challenge anyone who goes to see [Hamlet 2] not to sing the words to ‘Rock Me, Sexy Jesus’ for years to come.” Both of those examples are things that Lyons actually said on the revamped version of Ebert’s old show. Etc.

Such jabs at his successor must come from a place of bitterness, but it’s to Ebert’s credit that he doesn’t make it a personal attack (well, beyond quoting Lyons inane statements virtually word-for-word — but at least he doesn’t name names, right?) The Rule Book started as damage control over that whole Tru Loved debacle (in which Ebert gave the film a negative review, only admitting at the end of the write-up that he turned the screener off after 8 minutes) . It’s sort of ingenious that Ebert managed to turn a perceived lapse in his own critical integrity into an opportunity to devise a manifesto in support of maintaining the standards of his profession in a time of crisis. What’s devastating about it, is that no matter how right on the Rules seem to the five of us who care about these things, reiterating The Way Things Should Be won’t be enough to change the way things are — there seems to be no stopping the rise of blurb-whoring advertorial and the slide of real criticism into obscurity.