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?”

…Read more