When I first saw the trailer for "300," I knew I was in trouble.

I had no idea the same shot of shouting half-naked men recut from a dozen different angles could be so gripping, but the listless grandeur got me every time. At one particularly vulnerable moment I even tried to find the metal soundtrack on iTunes. (No luck, thank God.)

That wasn't the problem. "300" is totally enthralling as a three-minute clip, but from the first time I saw that preview, I suspected I would hate the movie. It's not customarily a good sign when a trailer doesn't see fit to include dialogue from the movie it's created to advertise, and I have seen enough digital filmmaking to know that pretty pictures can only get you so far.

But a trailer this electric as this was going to make this the fanboy event of the year. "300" was going to be huge, and every time I would try to talk about it, I would get the same sigh, the same exasperated scold reminding me that I am a purist toad and that the American moviegoer had overruled me with his pocketbook.

As you might imagine, then, I met with some reluctance a request from this paper's film editor that I write a dueling review with him on "300" to contrast with his hyper-excited response. I agreed, though I predicted that like our fabled Spartans, I was fighting a losing battle.

He went on to call the movie "gorgeously surreal" and a "visual masterpiece." I was thinking more along the lines of "exuberantly stupid." This wasn't going to end well.

The reviews, appropriately titled "There will be blood," got linked somewhere on the Web and suddenly got thousands of hits, and sure enough, most readers were not exactly appreciative of my take. To be fair, most of the responses were civil and reasoned. (My favorite: "I know Sparta. And you sir are no Spartan.") People loved this movie and were unhappy I didn't.

Yet there was one point buried in the debate that I totally resent. It's an argument against criticism that is always brought up when a critic slams a popular work, and this time it was even echoed in my colleague's review: "300" was not made for critics, my detractors reasoned. It was made for the fans. Critics were never going to like it, so why can't they just let audiences have their fun and stop trying to criticize a movie for something it was never going to be?

This response comes up constantly, and it spans mediums - we're not just talking about film here but also popular music and escapist television. Last July A.O. Scott, the co-chief film critic for the New York Times, wrote on the backlash to his negative review of "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" that at the end of the day, professional film critics are in this business for viewers like you. I think he was right, but he didn't go quite far enough.

Too often when I try to discuss a movie, people tell me they "don't look at movies that way." What way, I ask. "You know, I don't look for them to be deep." These days it's a chore to get people to watch anything other than "Office Space" and "Fight Club" with me because they're afraid I'm going to have an opinion.

Guess what? I don't have superior training to you. I just grew up on movies and love to talk about them. There is nothing better than going to a movie Friday night, and I'm not just talking about "The Queen" and "The Lives of Others." I lined up for "300" and "Night at the Museum" like everyone else, and whatever my opinion of the movies, I was just happy to be part of the experience

Why do I write reviews, then? It's true that criticism of all entertainments in inherently intended to guide public perception of them; a star rating, for example, exists to give you a relative scale of how much we think you should seek out whatever is in review. But that's not why I write them.

For me reviews are, or should be, the beginning of a discussion. They do exist to inform your experience, but they also serve to provide an alternate perspective. When I write a negative review, I'm not trying to keep you from forming your own. I invite response and argument - that's why I write. Working at a newspaper gives some people a more prominent soapbox to offer opinions than a living room on a Saturday night, but that hardly means you can't respond. If no one else is listening, I am.

This is why critics like Roger Ebert are so popular - he has a column he devotes entirely to talking with his readers. A.O. Scott has tried to curb his distance with his readers by reviewing films that weren't screened for critics on Saturdays, a task normally reserved for third-tier critics. His review of "Epic Movie" earlier this year was generous and unpretentious; he regarded the movie with the indifferent, muted amusement as he imagined an average reader might. Elsewhere on the Internet there are countless "critics," many self-appointed fans, who approach entertainment from all different angles.