One of the hardest things about being a young film critic is that it’s impossible to catch up to the older guys in terms of how many films I’ve seen. To think Roger Ebert was already reviewing films at the Sun-Times for ten years before I was born. And gee whiz, Andrew Sarris has been doing this forever. I mean, it’s hard enough seeing every significant film released in a year, let alone every significant film released in the 8 decades before my lifetime. But while it’s certainly in my best interest to see all those Ingmar Berman films I’ve avoided, and see everything else on all those “all time best” lists, and maybe watch Turner Classic Movies 24-7 for the rest of my life, there’s just no way I’ll ever be complete in the eyes of some of my peers or, more importantly, of my readers.

Last Sunday, SF Chronicle critic Mick LaSalle confessed to having never previously seen some “classics”, including 2001: A Space Odyssey. But he had finally just watched them and proceeded to review them. Some bloggers have responded, including Kevin Lee, who is disappointed in LaSalle’s low-level insight, and Jeff Wells, who admitted to his own unseen, none of which seemed too embarrassing. But then LaSalle ponied up a response to the responses:

“Of course, since I’ve written that article I’ve heard from people telling me that I’m an illiterate for not seeing the movies they’ve seen (although I’ve seen them NOW). Needless to say, I could name hundreds of worthy and significant films that probably none of them have seen. But hey, people need something to make them feel good about themselves, and they’ll find any excuse.

But that’s neither important nor interesting. However, the larger point this brings up, though, does interest me. Movies have been around now for about a century. Fifty years ago, we might have reasonably assumed (it wouldn’t have been true, but it would have been a reasonable assumption) that every film critic of significance had seen all the major movies.

But after a hundred years, do we really want our film critics to be generalists, all familiar with the same batch of pre-digested movies that everyone agrees are good? By now, you really can’t see everything, so do we want critics all to have seen the same narrow basic repertory?”

Obviously, I agree with that part, and I’d like most of my readers to become acquainted with it. I’d also like other bloggers and critics to, as he suggests, bravely confess to their own lists. As I said, mine includes most Bergman (I think I’ve only seen The Seventh Seal, Autumn Sonata and most of Riten – I fell asleep in class), Ikiru, Modern Times and literally too many others to choose from. How about you just ask me if I’ve seen something, and if I haven’t I’ll say so, and then you can recommend it, and then I’ll go check it out?

But while I agree with most of LaSalle’s rebuttal, this part is rather pretentious and annoying:

“Right now, I’m over here watching “Un baiser s’il vous plait” (2007), one of the latest from Virginie Ledoyen. This is what I do for fun. The movie will probably never be released in the United States, but I will have seen it.”

I guess part of me thinks it would have better for him to champion the film and recommend it, rather than saying he got to see it and none of us ever will. But hey, people need something to make them feel good about themselves, right?

More importantly, I had appreciated his original point not because of it’s superiority factor. I appreciated it mainly because I find it more important for a film critic to be familiar with contemporary filmmaking (the widely and barely seen) more so than the “classic” cinema, of which I think it’s okay to have a somewhat general understanding — yes, it’s possible to be generally familiar without being a generalist. After all, the films of today are what we are primarily looking at, writing about and recommending, and it’s more appropriate to have a sense of what’s going on now than what went on then.

That isn’t to say a critic should be ignorant of film history, of course. And I’m not necessarily meaning to diss or dismiss “classic” cinema. I would actually enjoy watching TCM 24-7 for life, and I have my Netflix queue partially filled with old films I know I need to see, or at least have always wanted to see. But my queue is also partially filled with films of the past year that I missed in theaters, some of them being, like Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, merely blockbusters that are necessary viewing for the kind of work I do and for the kind of unpretentious readers I mean to communicate to and with.

So, I guess the list for me to really make my confession off of would be the all-time box office champs. So here goes: I haven’t seen Shrek 2 or the Third, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Happy Feet, Bruce Almighty, The Da Vinci Code, 300, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, Alvin and the Chipmunks and of course the latest Harry Potter.

Please forgive me, and I will try not to let it affect my ability to write about mainstream movies.