Yeah, who needs actual walls, airlocks, seals and doors, when you have force fields? Those will certainly hold up in case the power goes out.

Of all the bridges in the series, I can't say this is the most succesful. In broad strokes it's pretty great. It has a nice space, but these detailed shots don't do it any favours. First of all it's very cluttered, with all those little desk lamps and bar code scanners, secondly it just looks very non functional. The…

Add to that the amount of home brewers and chances are any glass of left out applejuice would turn into hard cider pretty much overnight from the amount of glorious micro organisms wafting through Portland's air.

If you think that's bad, go to the IMDB message boards for Elysium, and you'll find whole threads on the necessity of letting the poor starve to death, so the deserving, productive few won't have to share their resources. You might ask, why this is necessary? Obviously, because the world is being threatened by…

Regarding the movie: it's realistic and plausible in the sense that we're not dealing with alien overlords here, but rather an abstraction based on the kind of stratified society that Blomkamp experienced in Johannesburg.

Aren't all utopias?

Granted, but even there they had plenty of rubber foreheads, blue face paint, etc.

I'm not sure how having aliens portrayed by people of colour with some rubber glued to them would be much of an improvement.
Non humanoid aliens are simply too difficult to depict as regular characters on a tv show, which means you automatically wind up with people you have to make look sufficiently alien.
And I'm just…

And for a look at the swankier technology of Elysium, there's the Armadyne company website where you can glimpse some of the technology they produce as well as a look at William Fichtner as the company's CEO http://armadyne.net/

That missing scene was originally supposed to have a big monster in it too. Moebius did some concept art for it. He actually did a lot of design work for the film, though I don't think they ended up using a lot of it. You can see some of it here: http://tellforward.blogspot.com/2010/05/willow…

This sounds fascinating and it reminds me a lot of the documentary 'All watched over by machines of loving grace'. It also deals with the idea of society being helped by computer systems and the way that doesn't generally work out as planned. Though Morozof is more interested with the way that open source can be used…

That is what I meant. When you look at the way the change was handled, it's obvious that a more careful transition could have prevented a lot of the problems of the nineties. Which very much lead to a lot of te current situation in the country. Part three of Adam Curtis' documentary The Trap deals very eloquently with…

You mean, that giant corporations with shitty products won the cold war? if so, you are correct.

I'd say that part of the problems in modern Russia are a direct result of Americans running in and thinking they very much did win the Cold war. Whereas in reality the west won, simply by virtue of the Soviet union collapsing in on itself.

Here's a good bit from an excellent documentary which does a good job at showing what that strange period was like and what happened next. Start at 4.30.

There's something strange in seeing these pictures, knowing that despite the end of a system of government that nobody believed in anymore and which was oppresive, corrupt and totally out of options, that what lay ahead for most Russians was not much better. As joyous as it must have been to see the state topple, I…

The Golden Compass had more problems than just the neutered ending. Chris Weitz has said that he wasn't in charge of the editing towards the end anymore. The studio got a few new people to recut the film, leading to the rushed mess that was released.

Yep, it's a pretty bleak ending. Rather Freudian too, since the boy isn't real and can never grow up, he'll never outgrow his oedipal issues. So letting him have his perfect day with his mommy, is a rather disturbing happy ending. At least if you want to go down the Freudian route.

Well, you have to pay those. And generally people who selfpublish their own children's books are not that forthcoming in the financial department is my experience. Not to mention that this project is about TEACHING AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE, rather than telling a story, the actual quality of the book is perhaps more of a…

What a surprise that a Disney film for kids with a ludicrously high budget is also a bland and toothless piece of entertainment without any weird or subversive edges!