Excellent. All I’ve got it this.

Yeah, subtitles can take a little getting used to, but they’re not that hard. Plus a lot of foreign movies now have an optional English soundtrack! I usually prefer the subtitles, but c’mon . . . I think it really is sort of an obdurate resistance to trying anything new and unfamiliar, as if you’re trying to convince a kid to eat something he’s never had before.

I think much of the problem lies in moviegoers’ resistance to subtitles. Which is silly, really, unless your reading speed is ridiculously slow… in which case you should probably stick with Adam Sandler and Medea anyhow.

Funny thing about subtitles, though—after a few minutes, you really don’t even notice that they exist, as if the dialog really was in English. I’ve tried to explain that to the foreign-film resistant, but they think I’m nuts.

My younger brother is the biggest Clint Eastwood/Sergio Leone fan imaginable… but I’ve never been able to get him to take in Kurosawa’s Yojimbo... which, after all, Leone copped nearly shot for shot for A Fistful of Dollars. Doesn’t want to have to read while he watches, y’know. Sigh.

You’re preaching to the choir. I think most Americans’ taste in movies is like the restaurant landscape in the 1950s: everyone raised on bland, meat-and-potatoes fare, and as for "foreign"—"Hey, I love Italian food," by which they meant pizza and spaghetti.

"Foreign movie" doesn’t automatically have to mean dour Bergmanesque twilight—not that there’s anything wrong with that. But I am regularly amazed at the resistance I get from some people when I suggest any foreign movie, or any movie so old that—heavens!—it might not be in color. Oh noes! There was one person I couldn’t get to even try taking a look at Amélie, which has got to be one of the most approachable, endearing movies ever. But, yes, it is different from the standard Hollywooden fare.

These days, at least eighty percent of the films I watch are foreign… and my classic-to-shit ratio is remarkably good. (I see about one bad film for every ten, tops.) The fact that even educated American filmgoers are far more familiar with the output of the Farrelly Brothers and M. Night Shagnasty, films based on television shows, anything featuring Meg Ryan or Adam Sandler and the Scary Movie series than the work of such cinematic visionaries as Yasujiro Ozu, Andrei Tarkovsky, Robert Bresson and Abbas Kiarostami is cause for collective shame. Sure, there’s a need and purpose for mindless entertainment, but you don’t need to rent it – just switch on the goddamn television, kick back and drink in the lowbrow.

Yes, I am a film snob. And if I can get just one of you good people to check out a heartrending masterpiece like Ozu’s Tokyo Story or guffaw through a comedy gem like Marion Monicelli’s Big Deal on Madonna Street... well, my time here will have been well spent.

One could easily turn any of the Harry Potter books into a drinking game. Any time Rowling uses the phrase "Harry, Ron and Hermione," take a drink. Any time she varies the order of the three names, take two drinks. I’d add in a third rule – any time she doesn’t refer to the trio by name, finish your bottle – but those first two rules alone should have your liver begging for mercy long before the end of any of the books.

(Granted, this is coming from somebody who uses words like ‘dunno’ in her writing.)

And Twilight is misogynist crap. Forget the sparklies, or the baseball…it glamorizes women being hurt by their men and says it’s okay because the men are really, really sorry afterwards and just couldn’t help themselves. Gack.

A vegetarian vampire who can go out in daylight and sparkles like the sun protecting an independent, gorgeous, clumsy, oh-so-speshul Mary Sue (minus about 50 pounds) from a pack of OMG mean vampires who are decided more on the meatetarian side of the aisle.

Oh, and apparently there’s also a love triangle between those two twits and a teenage werewolf.

Stephen King said it best: “Both [J.K.] Rowling and [Stephanie] Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people… The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good."

I have no desire to borrow my 12-year old daughter’s Twilight books, but I can’t get too het up about The Fate of Our Youth. [. . . What] I was reading at age 12 should have warped me a lot more. We survived; they will too.

No argument there. My father didn’t care what I was reading, as long as I was reading something. He felt that my taste would inevitably improve. For the same reason, I’m certainly not complaining about young girls reading the Twilight books. I just think it’s funny that Cole got blindsided by a wretchedly bad movie.

I heard Twilight was worse than Van Helsing.

Dang, that must be bad. Van Helsing is the worst movie I have ever seen (when I wasn’t going in beforehand expecting something awful like Ghost Ship).

John, did you not see ads for Twilight?

Also, why aren’t you doing Netflix? Even with the El Cheapo one-at-a-time limit, I can still get a movie about when I want it. And you can also view "unlimited" movies online or via Xbox Live (though only a handful of 2nd tier titles are available for that). If you watch just 3 or 4 movies a month you more than make up the difference in renting.