Every film fan has certain shadings, leanings or genre affections, but what most guys won't tell you is that there's also a six-year window or so in their formative years (OK... maybe much longer) during which they'll rent any old piece of crap starring an actress with whom they are passingly smitten. It doesn't matter, really, if the film is a PG-rated story about paraplegic girl's relationship with her dying grandmother. The entire straight-to-video market of the 1980s was predicated upon this phenomenon, and even today this reality is the shoals into which a countless number of would-be auteurs and foolhardy film financiers grandly sail their aspirations.

For me, this has led to sitting through a lot of forgettable indie flicks costarring erstwhile frying pan smasher Rachael Leigh Cook, including Stateside, 29 Palms, Tangled and Greg Marcks' 11:14, opposite Hilary Swank — who I swear does not look like my sister. Such fixations, let's call them, have nothing to do with talent, of course, or even innate sexual heat. There's just something guys frequently latch onto — a sort of cute, buoyant relatability. Or maybe that's just me. It's worth pointing out in my own defense, though, that I was on paid assignment for three of the four flicks above. And I drew the line at Scorched.

This switch in my mind was flipped just now with the recent DVD arrival of The Virgin of Juarez, costarring the lovely Ana Claudia Talancón (above). Talancón burst onto the scene, of course, in 2002's Oscar-nominated foreign language film El Crimen del Padre Amaro, opposite Gael Garcia Bernal. I interviewed her at the time, and though sick with a cold, she was still radiant and charming — just a real pleasure. So of course I dutifully caught the little-seen Sueño, opposite John Leguizamo, making it the background accompaniment for an evening of laundry earlier this year.

With roles in Richard Linklater's highly anticipated Fast Food Nation and Mike Newell's Love in the Time of Cholera on the horizon, though, Talancón may not have to live only in my DVD player. And that's great. Still, you can expect my review of The Virgin of Juarez fairly soon.