We haven't told you much about the movies here. But what's there been to tell, really? When we first arrived and lived out in the burbs, in José's brother's apartment, we had a TV. New TVs here have a little button you can push to make some shows, dubbed into Spanish, broadcast in English, and we used it liberally for a nightly vacation from utter confusion and incompetence.

In this manner we were treated to the best of the whatever we call movies that are 6-10 times worse than "straight to video." We saw whoever the dumbest Baldwin is fight off a team of sexy vampires with James Woods at his side. We watched Bridget Fonda shake off the effects of a rotten childhood with some therapeutic murdering in "La Femme Nikita." We watched that guy who plays all those tough guys beat up a biker gang, then go undercover for the local cops, beat up some cops to maintain his cover and then, surprisingly, cross the thin blue line. We even caught a BBC special on ruins in Ethiopia that featured more footage than we would have hoped of a shirtless Henry Louis Gates, Jr., yelling at crowds of people who wanted to be on TV, "I'm Dr. Gates. Henry. HENRY, from Harvard. HARVARD."

It was not inspiring, but it beat CSI dubbed into Spanish.

The rest of the movies we have seen have been the same ones you have, except six months later. The only exception here, in which you got to see something later than we did, was "L'Auberge Espagnole," or, as it was called here, "Una Casa de Locos." This was a pretty funny movie, generally plotless but with nice scenes of Barcelona. It also served the purpose of letting us think we had seen a movie that was sort of in Spanish, since maybe twenty percent of it was. Unfortunately, most of our practice had to come during the French-with-Spanish-subtitles scenes, since more people in the movie spoke English than Spanish, and so there was a lot of English with Spanish subtitles, too. But we were proud to read them ably.

But now we embark on a new adventure. Yesterday, I went to see a movie entirely in Spanish, my first. I had watched a tape of one of the Nets-Spurs games the night before and, even though half of the vocabulary was along the lines of "Teem Doonkin," I missed a lot of it. And not really all that much happened in those games, you may recall. I was nervous.

It didn't help that the schedule at the theater was different from the one on the web, which led me to miss the first ten minutes of the only movie playing, and miss the one I had planned to see altogether. I decided to take my chances with "Estrella del Sur," already in progress.

The first thing I noticed was that the movie was not set in Spain. It was set in….well, I couldn't really figure that out for a while. South America somewhere. This wouldn't have been too significant, except that South American Spanish sounds a lot different from Barcelona Spanish, insofar as they leave the endings off of a lot of words. As they say here, they "eat their letters."

It so happens, of course, that the ends of Spanish words tell you a few important things:

• whether something has happened or not,
  
• if so, when,
  
• and by whom
  
• and if it’s a noun, how many,
  
• and also what gender, though I tend to make a mess of this anyhow.
  

Sentences can go from:

"If I told him about what they did, would he be angry?"

to

"Tell him, they do. He was angry."

without your noticing that you missed much at all.

What I'm thinking is that I'm going to try to see the movie as many times as I can. It’s a shame, really, that I picked the one I did, because it was pretty stupid. I think. Here's my version of what happened, after Viewing I:

• Man moves his family from Spain to somewhere where they had come from before. Kids and wife are ok with this. There is no telltale airplane-landing-with-hazy-sunrise-behind-it to illustrate that the moving is complete, a fact that confused me for a long time. They may be headed for their grandmother's house, or she may be buying them a house, or, owing to a scene or two with the mother hunched over blueprints, they may be building a house.
  
  
• Kids seem to immediately have a ton of friends. Son takes up with some gun-toting revolution types who are too skinny and sweat a lot. Daughter sings a lot of Manu Chau and seems to have a friend who lives in the apartment – clearly not the grandmother's house – with them. Conveniently, the friend falls for the brother. Inconveniently, he has a girlfriend. Conveniently, the girlfriend falls for the head gun-toter. Inconveniently, the son is anguished by this and almost blows them all up with a homemade grenade.
  
  
• Son and his friends hatch a plot to kidnap a guy who drives a sweet yellow Mercedes. Watches are synchronized, guns are made to do that "click-click-my-gun-works-and-now-I-will-stuff-it-in-my-pants" thing that means that people are ready to get going. Son needs to leave for kidnapping, but (uh oh!) Dad catches him in the hallway. "Son," he says, "I found drugs in your room." Son yells. "You don't own me," that sort of thing. Angst, here, when you're about to commit a violent felony?
  
  
• Rich man is kidnapped and put in cell. Kidnappers begin to fall in love, drift home, fight with their parents. Son puts in a little time cultivating new romance with a potter. Makes many references to a good luck charm, which apparently she had made for him, that he wears around his neck.
  
  
• Audience member (one of two) notices "Uruguay" license plate, pats self on back.
  
  
• Kidnappers need to either move victim or body of victim. Son leaves abruptly again. Body is handed off between three or four cars, a stolen cab, and one horse-drawn carriage. Father is following son, but loses him. Police chase father – or is it son? – this was a very confusing scene, and there was not even any dialogue.
  
  
• Son, for no good reason, tosses grenade into trunk of car as police approach, cremating victim and burning self badly. Winds up in hospital. Police come for father, who – oops, forgot to mention this – left Uruguay because he was being investigated for revolutionary violent stuff himself. They quickly decide, after some grouchy speechifying, that he isn't involved, just the son. Many scenes ensue of kidnappers being shot and arrested.
  
  
• Family sits on beach in front of new shiny house. Son and father are nowhere to be seen? Jail? Dead? No, they're in the car, up above, talking about how the son might now go to Chile where it is colder. The grandmother appears in the driver's side window with some advice. Then, in the passenger window, the daughter appears. Then the mom, driver's side. Doctor, passenger side. Cop, driver's side. This was a very weird device for wrapping things up. No mention of jail for the son, who was, after all, seen by about ten cops tossing a grenade at a person he helped kidnap. He is, though, in a wheelchair. It is an old one, and maybe the authorities thought this was punishment enough. The family retreats to a long table with a lot of fried fish and bottles of soda for a welcome-home party. Fade to black.
  

I'll let you know if it makes more sense the next time. At least it didn't include a Baldwin. The sequel probably will.