Timothy Noah has a great, overdue idea in Slate, today.

Virtually every paper in America added an "op-ed" page over the past 30 years, short for "opposite the editorial page." Noah suggests it should have replaced the editorial page. No one reads those stupid things, and for good reason:

. . . editorials typically lack sufficient length to marshal evidence and lay out a satisfactory argument. Instead, they tend toward either timidity, at one extreme, or posturing, at the other. Almost every editorial I've ever read in my life has fallen into one of two categories: boring or irresponsible.

So just let the stupid things go, and run special editorials a few times a year when they're really needed, like recommendations for school board no one really wants to research themselves.

Two months ago, I had never walked out on a movie. Ever. Once I know I really hate a film, I begin compiling mental notes, gathering its most glaring flaws and developing my case against it. Usually I've got an hour to kill, and it can be fun analyzing just precisely how and why it fails, what it's attempting and how it's failing so miserably. Or sometimes how the conception has proven so flawed to begin with.

Then Sin City appeared on a screen before me. Just too vile to sit through. Not to mention idiotic. Yeah, I know the dialogue was supposed to be hackneyed to mimic comic books. Sorry. Doesn't translate. May work in the comics, but on screen, it just sounds ridiculous.

Of course I'll grant that it was visually stunning, beautiful beyond compare. But how to appreciate that beauty through the thick layer of slime?

Tonight's film was just iditoic. It was called Yes. It was a sneak preview of an art film that will prolly never get near you, so who cares. Nice experiment, I guess. They can't all work.

The most psuedo intellectual nonsense I've heard in a long time. Like a halfwit impersonating the sounds she had overheard intellectuals making. And delivered in iambic pentameter. Seriously. Like it didn't have enough problems already.

Oh, and it was sort of a sex farce that never generaged an ounce of heat. A love triangle with no love, no chemistry, stone cold. Joan Allen is one of my favorite actresses, but I don't know if love scenes are really her bag.

It tried really hard to be funny, too, and the jokes rang flat.

So I sat with it an hour, and then decided it wasn't worth any more of my time.

The writer/director was even on her way to discuss it, but what did I care what she had to say? I was curious, actually, to see who was behind such a collosal failure, though I actually spent more of the movie wondering about the people who financed it. I've seen plenty of pretentious writers awed by their own inane work, but who were the people buying her crap?

Didn't realize till the ride home that it was suddenly a pattern. Two months ago, leaving would have been unthinkable. Suddenly it feels like the nuns' admonitions against pot: try it once and you're an addict immediately.

Wow. Will I ever sit through an entire movie again?