It's either this or shopping

I've never been one to make friends all that quickly. Despite a fairly contrived bravado, I'm both very shy and a devoted loner. The close friends that I do have are basically people who have not been put off by the fact that, once I've targeted them as having friendship potential, I want to know all their most intimate details... and likewise, dump all of mine upon them--in rapid succession. And then I incorporate, like so much flour into the batter, that little handful of people into my life-long menagerie. If one happens to get away for some reason or other, I mourn them terribly. From what I understand, the enneagram essays on the internet all tell me this is pretty much textbook behavior for 5s with a sexual variant. That said, it means that developing a circle in a new city is slow-going. And, really, I can't say I terribly mind having some time every weekend to not having other people's voices barging into my head space.

But all of that is just to say that, I've been trying very hard to head off the enormous temptation to drive into Georgetown and wear myself out shopping up and down M Street. The shoes...the clothes...the cosmetics...the spas...the houseware stores... I'm not really all that discriminating, am I? And so, I've rented more movies than I can really properly process.

First up is Between Your Legs (Entre Las Piernas), starring the very handsome Javier Bardem and Victoria Abril (the same chick who was in Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, the movie with which I attempted to torture the most freakish of all my college roommates (alas, she did not leave)). This is basically a stylish little thriller and some of the characters are incidentally sex addicts. The back cover threatened far more sex than was actually in this movie-- and I think whoever wrote it for American release got a little confused because it attributes some actions to one guy... when, in actuality, a completely incidental character in the movie acted out those moments. An easy mistake perhaps, as there are several men in this movie who all have the most typically Spanish--handsome--faces. In other words, everyone looks so much alike, it's easy to mix people up. All in all, the compulsive behavior of the characters-- which is a rich mine to plumb, generally-- is kinda neglected as subject matter from the halfway point on. And up until that halfway point, I wasn't aware that there was a murder mystery patiently awaiting to be addressed! All in all, the look was interesting. The actors were sexy in their European imperfections. Bardem's shirts were beautifully colored, beautifully tailored and beautifully worn. And stylistically, the director (Manuel Gomex Pereira) gave it the college try, but the script was so Swiss-cheesy that it didn't really stand a chance.

'Tis going to be a very long post if I talk about all the movies I've been watching lately so I'm going to split it up a little. Perhaps shorter posts won't overwhelm the readers that exist in my little blogofantasy.