I need to start seeing more movies. I swear, everybody has seen so many more movies than I have. Whenever a conversation turns to movies, it normally goes through eight or ten different flicks before we get to one I've seen. I've got to do something about this.

I mean, I feel like a total dork in any movie conversation. "Mmm." "Uh-huh." "Right." "Actually, I haven't seen that one. To be more specific, I've never heard of that one." "Uh, I read the book. Didn't know they'd ever made a movie."

Anyway, from now on I'm going to follow Stanley Kaufman's weekly recommendations in the New Republic. My taste tends to agree with Kaufman's: he likes a well-done Hollywood movie even though it's obviously commercial, he enjoys movies from a long way away about very different places, he likes European stuff but only if it's interesting, not that "deep" boring boring boring psychological crap. He is especially good about keeping track of "small" American films. I can't count the number of times I've looked at a Kaufman review, thought, "Hmm, interesting," and then the movie shows up here in a couple of weeks and I miss it.

So from now on I'll be trying to see at least one good movie a week. I have the advantage of living ten minutes' walk from the Verdi / Verdi Park nineplex, which is where the more artsy-fartsy movies go, and I'm forty-five minutes or so away by metro from the Icaria fifteenplex, which shows more commercial movies in their original version. (That's V.O. in the local movie listings.) The Verdi nineplex is a major attraction for people from all over the Barcelona area, and those folks also tend to have dinner and/or a few drinks in the area as well. It helps make the 'hood very, oh, I don't know, highbrow, with all the cafes and left-wing bookstores and off-off-Paralelo theaters and restaurants and other artsy-fartsy shit.