He had an eye on the edge of wink that hinted we were almost sharing some unspoken sentiment

I'm all for smart kids exercising their grown-up brains, but this diminutive Roger Ebert really rubs me the wrong way. He's a regular on Ebert Presents At the Movies.

Sample from the CBS Early Show...

Click here to watch 11-Year-Old Lights-Camera-Jackson Talk about "Salt" and "Inception" (embedding was disabled)

I got a lot of criticism when I was a college film critic, mostly because everyone who watches movies thinks they're a critic, but sometimes because the Calvin College Chimes had a budget that paid for the movies (or books or music) we reviewed, so I was entertained for "free" (meaning hours of rewrites and peer review and late nights doing paste-ups in the Chimes office didn't count as work; not that it matters, but I never did review a book or record at Chimes's expense, just movies).

Now this was the days before the Internet. After I was done writing my review, I would get a copy of Time or Newsweek to verify the director, actors, runtime, etc. One fellow writer who was insufferably smarmy (and probably wouldn't recall any of this) questioned my practice of looking at another review before filing my own.

(Of course, the insinuation was plagiarism, and any writer that suggest that to another knows exactly what he's doing, including the fact that by not explicitly stating it he retains plausible deniability.)

I suppose he was especially wary of being influenced by other writers, and assumed I was too. Who knows. He had a toothpick in his mouth much of the time, and an eye on the edge of wink that hinted we were almost sharing some unspoken sentiment. I think I saw something in the Calvin Alumni Spark about him being rather successful now. Winking and chewing toothpicks will take you places.

Anyway, this Jackson kid's got chutzpah and if he doesn't overdose on precociousness he probably has a career:

http://lights-camera-jackson.com/➚