SOME people renounce liquor or sweets. My New Year’s resolution for 2011 was to give up meta: no panels on the State or Future or Death of Criticism; no trolling the Internet looking for fights over first principles; no thumb suckers for the Sunday paper on the history or the essence of the critical profession. Enough of all that! Instead, a renewed commitment to the basics. For 12 months or more phrases like “politique des auteurs,” “Pauline Kael,” “received wisdom,” “reflexively contrarian” and “formalist hack” would not pass my lips or issue from my keyboard, no matter how much I was provoked.

My vows endured about as long as such things usually do, but I tried. I swear I did! The year is barely two weeks old and already the temptations for commentary have proliferated as never before, or maybe just the way they always do. January began with the annual klatch of critics gathered for the Slate Movie Club, four chipper scribblers being smart and politely argumentative and, now and then, horrendously wrong. The rest of the Internet was aswarm with the usual flurry of straggling end-of-the-year lists, anti-lists and counter-lists, and, of course, breathless reports of the awards bestowed by sundry circles, societies and associations (New York throws its weight behind “The Social Network”! Central Ohio goes for “Inception”!) There was also the announcement that Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, a young film blogger in Chicago, would join Christy Lemire of The Associated Press as co-hosts of the revived “At the Movies” television show, overseen by Roger Ebert and broadcast, starting this weekend, on public television, where Mr. Ebert started out with Gene Siskel so many years ago. A rich vein of meta to be opened right there.

Not a peep did I utter! Nor did I respond, even under my breath, to the stack of letters awaiting me in the office after the holidays, nearly all of them hostile  how dare I praise “Black Swan” or slight “The King’s Speech”?  and one of them, around 800 words of fulminating block capitals on the letterhead of a prominent New York real estate brokerage, assaulting not only my specific lapse in admiring Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere” but also the very integrity and utility of the critical enterprise itself.