Subtitles

This weekend I saw 12, which is apparently a remake of the American movie Twelve Angry Men, which I guess I've heard of but knew nothing about. The movie was really good but the subtitles were shit. Well, I don't know Russian so I can't say if the subtitles were bad translations, but they were white, on a very lightly shot movie. This made it so reading the subtitles was almost imposible at times. I missed an entire punchline because of it. It pissed me off. I left the theater with a headache from strained eyes.
For a girl who has every Spice Girls album and most of the N'Sync albums, I think I watch a lot of subtitled movies and have some knowledge of what can be done. The simplest way to fix the problem is to make the subtitles yellow instead of white. Easy, right? How can it not be? I have a feeling that certain countries or movie producers or whoever make the subtitles hard to read on purpose. Like, learn Russian you American spoiled jerks! For movies that also have a dubbed option the subtitles are easy to read (Miyazaki movies), which surprises me because the dubbing is an artform in itself so I would think they'd want to encourage viewers to use that option.
Ever since I saw Night Watch, where the Subtitles are artistically done and move with the action and are blood red in places, I thought subtitles had finally advanced to the next level and we would no longer feel like our language differences were a barrier. But no, I have yet to see a movie that uses subtitles the way they did. And new movies are still using horrible white subtitles, which proves that they are being mean on purpose.
Furthermore, I read about how Let the Right One In came out on DVD with subtitles, and even though the theater subtitles were perfect, they made the DVD subtitles all wrong. They used a different translator or something? How does that even work? Did they have to pay the original translator royalites and he asked too much so they used someone else? wtf? but enough people complained about the watery/wrong subtitles that they agreed to stop selling those DVDs and fix it for the new ones sold. Thank g dash someone knows Swedish and alerted us to this because I want to see that movie!