No kidding. I think of all movies as experiences, and there have been times in my life when I wanted to have as many experiences as possible, just to get them under my belt, to understand what they were like. Does that mean I want to have all experiences, without choosing (when possible) which to embrace and which to forego? No. I certainly have seen things in waking life (and in dreams) that I wish I hadn't seen -- and I have had the feeling that seeing certain films has diminished me as a human being (I'm talking to you, "Porky's 3: The Revenge.")
Likewise, it is quite probable that I will go the rest of my life without discovering what monkey brains taste like, or how it feels to be waterboarded, or to act in a porno movie, or to ride in a rodeo. Sure, I'm curious, and chances are I would survive each of these things, but I can't say I will regret not having them. One's identity is formed as much by the experiences one does not have -- whether by choice or by circumstance -- as by the things one does.
This exercise of free will has become a favorite topic of mine over the last nearly two decades since I stopped reviewing movies on a daily basis after seeing, if not necessarily reviewing, the bulk of what was released between about 1977 and 1993. What eventually got to me was not that so many movies were poorly made or misconceived (at least 80 percent, I'd estimate), but that they were uniformly bad. I didn't feel I was learning much from watching filmmakers repeat the same stupid mistakes -- most of which had to do with slavish, unimaginative notions about "story structure" that they'd had drilled into them by screenwriting manuals or development executives.
We have to face a few realities here: 1) Nobody can see, much less write about, every movie, even every "new" movie; 2) Time, availability, scheduling, spending money and other factors make it unlikely you will ever catch up with all the important, worthwhile movies you should see from the past (which keeps getting longer) or in the future (which keeps getting shorter). When I started writing about movies, I could only see them when they were made available to me in a particular time and place -- determined, almost always, by someone else. That is, somebody had to obtain a print and schedule a screening somewhere. Even movies that were shown on TV played on a certain channel at a specified hour and if you weren't in front of the set, tuned to that station when it was shown, you didn't see it.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmrJuRo7umvtJooKuqlauys7%2FIm6OeZaeeua15x55krJ2VYra1ec6rZLChnKF6qbGMqZisqw%3D%3D