Our one Thanksgiving extravagance, aside from enough food to feed a West African tribe’s tapeworm ridden children for a month, was renting three movies and buying another. The rentals were Ice Age, Powerpuff Girls, and that really, really long version of The Lord of the Rings. Er, the more recent really, really long one. We bought Men in Black II.

We’re DVD people now, because things look good on it. A movie theatre is where I go if I want to make out with my girlfriend semi-discreetly for two and a half hours. Otherwise I like to just rent them and watch at home, assuming I can wait that long. I do not buy DVD’s for the special features. I am, as a rule, disappointed by any movie released without them, as per The Truman Show, but this does not mean that I actually watch or enjoy them. It is simply nice to know that if I ever become a really big loser, they will be there.

My little brothers do not share this philosophy. They think it is essential to watch every featurette, vignette, cartoon short, feature trailer, and magic 8-ball the DVD people feel it is necessary to package with their movie. So they were watching Ice Age, which isn’t much of anything for those of you who have doubted your decision to avoid it, and then they decided it was time to go special feature hunting. After exhausting all the other obnoxious reminders of the movie I had just let swallow whole an hour and a half of my life, they got to the “Ice Age International” bit. Which is one of those hysterical features they put on DVD’s where they show you a scene from the movie, and show you parts of that scene in different languages. I’m not sure what the point of this is. There’s this initial moment where you’re vaguely amused by seeing the ridiculous dialogue you’ve already suffered through once, and noticing that though you can’t understand a word the characters are saying, it adds and detracts precisely nothing from your viewing experience.

After that, the best you can do is making a bigoted comment about how dumb Cantonese sounds. Cantonese does sound dumb, but I’m just not sure why the DVD people needed to do this to make me admit that.