Yes, I'm starting to like the kind of movies that critics like. The other day I watched a movie starring Juliette Binoche, and was not disgusted.

Partly it was that the Juliette Binoche character was busy actually doing something worthy and virtuous, in this case being a good wife (as it used to be called) to the man she loved. But the best thing about watching the movie was that I had no idea what exactly was going to happen next, and this I found enjoyable. It used to be that what mattered to me was agreeing with what was happening. Whether what was happening was predictable was less important, so long as I approved of the message. But now, I find, predictable virtue, however virtuous, is predictable.

Or take another art type movie, which I'm now in the middle of, on account of the copy of it that I hired from Blockbuster disintegrated into digitally random rectangles and eventually ground to a complete halt. (Someone had been performing experiments on it to see how much sandpapering a DVD can take, before it grinds to a halt.) This is Eyes Wide Shut, with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. The Cruise character is boring, and the Kidman character's only virtue is the flawlessly excellent appearance of her naked body, the nakeder the better. Everything else about her is appalling. But, what are they going to do next? And who with? And what will these people say to them? The last thing that happened was a bereaved woman saying that she didn't want to marry her fiancé Carl and go and live in a different part of the USA, because she was in love with Doctor Tom Cruise. Silly woman. But, my God, I didn't see that coming. And I have no idea what the rest of it will consist of. It's like "Reality TV" only much, much more interesting.

Talking of Reality TV, the thing that used to annoy me about art movies was that the events described in them tend to be utterly irrational and senseless and pointless, in a word, European. But the great virtue of irrational and senseless and European is that you can't crack the code and see what's coming next. American movies are purposive, on the side of virtue, against vice, inspiring, and they tend embody the proposition that virtue can and should triumph over vice, which they do by duly displaying said triumph. And the problem is you can see it coming a mile away. (The scary movies follow different rules, but they are still rules, as the Scary Movie movies have gone to great lengths to explain. Scary movies scare me, and I never watch them, apart from An American Werewolf in London because it has Jenny Agutter in it.)

And I think another reason why I am starting to prefer art movies is that, like the movie critics, I have seen enough American type movies thank you and don't want to see any more per month than I now do. Time was when I saw about one per month, and that was fine. But with the coming of Blockbuster DVDs I am liable to see more like one a week, or one every few days, and one American type movie every few days is too much. In short, my intake of movies is starting to be like that of the movie critics. They, poor things, have always had to watch about six American type movies every day, and they got fed up with this years ago and have for decades been yelling: please, no, stop with the virtuously happy endings and give us insane movies about mad women played by Jennifer Jason Leigh having sex in smashed up cars in car crashes. That's obviously an extreme manifestation of the syndrome, but I'm beginning to feel the same early symptoms, which involve not despising Juliette Binoche as much as I used to, and reading the opinions of critics quoted on movie posters as an actual guide to my future DVD hiring decisions.

Blockbuster have very sportingly provided me with another copy of Eyes Wide Shut, and another week to watch it. This second one looks as if experiments have been conducted with jam rather than sandpaper, but so did the Juliette Binoche one, and that played fine. Come to think of it, there is an extra dimension of edge-of-seat-excitement with all this in the sense that not only do you not, with Blockbuster DVDs, know how it will end, but whether it will end at all. Although, I suppose that some would regard that as a drawback.

There may be all kinds of reasons why I find I like these foreign movies, but the thing that triggered all this was simple economics. Blockbuster have a deal where you can rent three DVDs for an entire week, for only a fiver. Good deal! But the bad news is there are very few decent American movies, by the time all those other damn people have rented them out. Which left only the foreign language crap, i.e. stuff with subtitles, and other stuff which might as well have subtitles for all the sense it makes. So, I decided to give the foreign crap and pseudo-foreign crap a try. And, it's not completely crap.