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The esteemed critic David Bordwell has written a hilarious piece on the preening and posing of film lovers called "Games Cinephiles Play." Especially rich is his section on "Upsmanship," in which two fictional cinephiles, Jules and Jim, face off using the breadth strategy ("The DVD from Austria fills in the missing scenes with stills. Oh, you didn't know there were missing scenes...?"), the longevity strategy ("I liked it when I saw it in 1971. In fact, I liked it so much I wrote about it for Sight & Sound."), the depth strategy ("I especially liked the scene where the camera tracked sideways, picking up the back of the guy who'll turn out to be so important in the end."), and the insider strategy ("The director sent me a rough cut on DVD a few months ago.").
I think Jules and Jim is the title of a film, but I'll need to check on that and get back to you.
Of course women by and large do not care about this shit. That's one of the reasons I admire them. It's the same kind of hetero male stats-obsessed one upmanship of any singular point of interest for certain groups of men.
Didn't Liz Phair kinda sorta take the piss out of the indie rock scene with her first album in the same way?
The fact that this article resonated with me means of course that I can identify to some extent. It's rare to have tension free conversations about film with other film fans.
However, like Quentin Tarantino's video store co-worker who allegedly committed suicide after feeling so hopeless beacuse of Tarantino's superior knowledge of film I would say that it's probably best to realize that you're never gonna see as many films and understand as much about film as Rosenbaum unless you are willing to do without a lot of things in your life that you probably enjoy too much to give up.
Personally I am happy to let the "experts" go on with their expertise. I'm just happy that I've found movies as good as Written on the Wind and Bad Day at Black Rock. That's enough for me. I love going to movies on Saturday mornings at the Music Box when I'm in Chicago but it should be a pleasure not a pathological sweaty problem in my life.
And, if the other strategies fail, there's always the reverse psychology defense. =-)
I like Scorseses's own kind of cinephilia. He likes to share his enthusiasm and extensive knowledge of film history without hitting you over the head with it.
Also, I would say that video stores with a wide variety of titles and Netflix are a great thing. There's a lot of stuff released on Criterion that I would never had heard of without their reissuing it.