Tumšais bruņinieks: Betmens pret Džokeru

Or, БЭТМЕН v. ДЖОКЕР! (For those not up on their cyrillic, that's roughly Batman v Joker. (And: No, you're not missing anything. The picture has nothing to do with the text; it's just more fun Song Festival hats. -ed.))

So your correspondent went to the movies here, and darn but they don't do it right.

First of all, huge theater, huge screen, balcony(!) all in a pretty new facility.

Second, you can get a beer at the snack bar, which now that I think of it, should have been first of all. And while it was in a paper cup, the large is still like a half gallon of beer. Good times.

Third, assigned seats, like at a concert. I recall hearing about this at a movie theater in L.A., and I'm honestly baffled as to why this hasn't swept our nation. I can only figure lots of theater owners are too cheap to attach numbers to the seats. The only other events I can think of that have tickets but are still General Admission are: rock shows where they don't even have seats and you wouldn't want to sit down anyway because you would stick to the floor; and the horseshoe freshmen- and sophomores-section bleachers at Folsom Field (Go Buffs!). Why shouldn't you be able to buy movie tickets in advance and go have dinner instead of lining up for the show to get a decent seat? Well, in Latvia, you can. End of rant.

Lastly, it is no end of fun to study your Latvian and Russian from the subtitles. This may be put to the test in any future movies with more straightforward vocabulary. But this time around, any sentence that features the Latvian phonetic approximation "Betmens" is ok by this correspondent. They don't even attempt something like the Spider-Man-in-Spanish "Hombre Araña." Of course, Batman in Latvian would be something like "Sikspārņa virietis," which would be a mouthful, and would mean "Man of Bat" or something. So, maybe they're right. But still, "Betmens."