Hey, I'm Andrew Limbong, Arts Reporter at NPR, and this is NPR's Life Kit.

I used to be a certain kind of teenager. That slightly annoying kind who would ditch class

in high school and take the money I'd saved and would usually spend on magic the gathering

cards in my younger years, and instead use it to buy tickets at the Angelica Theater in Manhattan

to see some foreign movie or the latest in indie art house. Like as I'd kind of annoying, but

I miss that person sometimes. Lately, I've just been passively watching the latest Marvel

thing or stuff I've got to watch for work, but I've been really interested in going back to

high school and being intentional about broadening my movie watching habits.

So I hit up my colleague Bob Mandela. I'm Bob Mandela, I'm the movie critic for All Things

Incited. Needless to say, he watches a lot of movies. I see about 300 movies a year. Today alone,

he's on his third movie. Of those I review maybe 50 or 55. Those are the ones that for one reason

and others strike me as worth talking about. Not necessarily because they're great, but because they

have some aspect of them that's really interesting. We're at an AMC in Washington DC to see a screening

of Babylon, the Damien-Schizell movie about 1920's Hollywood. I think what we have here in Hollywood

is high art. I've got like medium interest in seeing it. I really like Schizell's other movies,

Whiplash and Lalla Land, but I have a strong distaste for movie nerds making movies about movies

for other movie nerds. But as you'll hear in a bit, one of the overarching bits of advice is to

go into these movies wanting to like them. I want to be surprised by it. I want the film to be

unique and special. It sounds like you go into every movie sort of like rooting for it.

Well for sure. I mean listen, I have to see 300 of these things every year. It's like, yes,

I hope they're all wonderful. I love that. They aren't.

It's that time of year when all the big Oscar-Bady movies come out and the hot indie movies get

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