Tense times

When I was writing my 200 word review of I Am Legend yesterday, I had a quandary. I wanted to say that the film didn't quite reach its potential and my plan was to conclude by suggesting that the tense in the movie's title might have been more accurate if it had read 'I Should Have Been Legendary'. Thus, my draft sentence was something like, "A good effort, but I'd switch the film's title to the perfect conditional." However, verb tenses have never been my strong point - I am far more instinctive about syntax than my poncey style might suggest - and even after a fair bit of research, I couldn't find the correct tense for 'I should have been'. So I went onto my beloved Facebook group, I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar, and asked the panel, using the noun 'ballerina' instead of 'legend' for no clear reason. Today, I received this reply from a gentleman, previously unknown to me, called Barrie:

"Jane, strictly speaking, ‘I should have been’ isn’t a tense at all, but an example of aspect. Aspect tells us about the way the speaker views an action or state in terms of the passing of time. However, forms such as ‘I have been’ are frequently known, particularly in books for foreign learners, as the present perfect tense. The sentence also includes ‘should’, a modal verb (an extra verb that tells us something about the speaker’s attitude towards the meaning contained in the main verb). ‘Should’ most frequently expresses obligation, but in your sentence it expresses an ‘unreal’ situation. The speaker wasn’t a ballerina, but she wishes she had been. So, ‘I should have been’ is the first person singular perfect aspect of ‘be’, modified by the modal verb ‘should’ to express an ‘unreal’ situation."

I mean, really. That paragraph makes me glow with happiness, encapsulating so much of what I love about the world. I adore computer geeks and the internet, the English language and grammar pedants, precision in general and random acts of kindness by strangers. And even though I didn't take Barrie's answer on board on this occasion, I hope we can all agree that the final phrase I chose for my review is a fair bit catchier than, "A good effort, but I'd switch the film's title to the third person singular aspect of 'be', with the addition of the modifier 'should' to express an 'unreal' situation (rather than an obligation)."