One thing that is very wrong about the local film industry is that we have an abundance of film critics who know next to nothing about movies. While the right to free speech guarantees that even the most doltish person can write about anything (and many of them do in this country), the problem is that there are still many people who can be led to believe in idiocy.

Unfortunately, although there are laws that prevent people who have not studied the course and passed the requisite government examination from practicing medicine, law, or engineering (just to name a few), no such legislation prevents the ordinary "tambay sa kanto" from passing judgment on movies based on nothing more than baseless opinions.

As a film critic for another major broadsheet, I once attended a film symposium. One kid bewailed what he said was the penchant of our movie makers for the happy ending (no, not the one that you get in shady massage parlors). He particularly zeroed in on the classic Hihintayin Kita Sa Langit.

The poseur critic questioned why, after both lead characters died, the last sequence was a fantasy scene wherein they were both "resurrected," which he opined was "a case of pandering to the masses." I pointed out to him that that was because the movie was a close adaptation of the 1936 Hollywood classic Wuthering Heights, starring the legends Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier and David Niven, which had the exact same ending (and which I had already seen, not once, but twice).

Red-faced, he made some rambling oratory about the Filipinos' slavish imitation of Hollywood, before shutting up.

And therein lies the rub, to use one of my favorite Shakespearian paraphrases. In this country, anyone who has a laptop and can construct a half-decent sentence, can style himself a movie critic, never mind if all the movies he has seen are those of Tito, Vic and Joey and Vice Ganda.

Real film critics work hard at their craft, and know the ins and outs of making a movie. The great Joe Morgenstern is a Pulitzer Prize winner, his film reviews erudite because he was close to many acclaimed producers and had a ringside view of movie making owing to his being the former husband of actress Piper Laurie.

The late Andrew Sarris was a professor of film at Columbia University. He was married to Molly Haskell, a fellow film critic who wrote scholarly theses on movies. Francois Truffaut was not only a critic, but a director, screenwriter, actor and producer, and as an auteur, was one of the founders of the French New Wave.

Leonard Maltin, famous for the book, Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide (updated yearly), was a journalism graduate of the prestigious New York University and a film lover. Roger Ebert had a master's degree in writing and was mentored by the best film critics; he eventually received the Pulitzer Prize.

I became a film critic because of my unremitting love for movies, which I no doubt got from my late father, Atty. Arturo Topacio Jr., who not only brought me to cinemas weekly since as far as I can remember, but being a film lover himself would patiently explain to me how movies were made, and why he thought a particular scene, or acting, or script, was good or bad.

On my own, I have seen thousands of films of all genres, local and international. I own literally thousands of movies on DVD: primitives, silents, contemporary, most of them critical successes. And through Borracho Films, I have produced two critically acclaimed films (Deception and Mamasapano).

In the Philippines, I am the only film critic who is a film maker. And while there are many excellent critics around (Butch Francisco being a prime example), there are just as many who are, when it comes to film education, critically ill.