This is rather stunning news.

ABC movie critic and entertainment editor Joel Siegel has died at the age of 63. He had been battling colon cancer for a very long time, since discovering he had it at age 57. His family and friends were with him when he died.

Siegel started at WABC-TV and then reviewed movies on Good Morning America He also authored the book Lessons For Dylan, a guidebook for his unborn son on how to live life. He was also one of the cofounders of Gilda's Club, along with Gene Wilder, who lost wife Gilda Radner to cancer.

The other day Joel mentioned a recent outburst from movie critic Joel Siegel. The fuzzy-lipped critic stood up to denounce the movie Clerks II before storming out of a screening. Kevin Smith went on the defensive, arguing that it was unprofessional for Siegel to make such a scene, and that he should have saved his vitriol for his actual review. But here's the thing: this isn't the first time the Good Morning America film critic has announced his disdain for a movie for everyone to hear. According to Scott Brown on EW's Popwatch blog, Siegel stood up at the end of a screening of the film adaptation of Starsky and Hutch, calling it "the most anti-Semitic movie I've ever seen." Brown writes that Siegel gave no explanation for his outburst, and since I didn't see the movie I can't prove nor disprove his claim. Was the whole movie just two cops sucker punching rabbis for two hours? I suppose that could be construed as somewhat anti-Semitic.

When I read the story, published yesterday by the NY Post's Page Six, that Good Morning America film critic Joel Siegel vocally walked out of a screening of Clerks II after 40 minutes, I thought it was quite a strange one. He apparently couldn't deal with repeated references to hiring a woman to perform certain acts with a donkey. It left me and the rest of America wondering: It's a Kevin Smith movie! What the hell was he expecting? I mean, I've seen just about every one of his movies, and the references Siegel walked out on seem mild compared to ... well, the first Clerks (a movie Siegel loved), which had, among other things, one of the characters having sex with a dead guy (off-camera, of course).

Smith, who admits to obsessing over reviews, ripped Siegel on his MySpace blog, then confronted him on the "Opie & Anthony" radio show yesterday, calling what he did "unprofessional". TMZ has the audio of the shouting match, where Siegel doesn't realize he's even talking to Smith until a few minutes into the argument.

[via Pop Candy]