I’m not, I have to say, loving David Strathairn’s take on the Belter accent. It’s...distractingly Spanish, is the best way I have of describing it.

I believe it was Vin Diesel got her into it on the set of this very film.

I think the current deal with warp drive in Trek is that it’s more or less supposed to be a working Alcubierre Drive.

Oh, come now, she has made sufficient bank, I think. And if her agent just put out an APB saying ‘Judi Dench is ready to be in something now’ a solid fifty scripts would pop out of the woodwork - she’s not lacking for work. Apparently she looked at one of those scripts and thought ‘So...they need me to play a…

I’ve seen chunks of this more times than I’d care to admit. At about the time I was stuck in a dull job with a lengthy commute attached to it, one of the mid-range basic cable channels we have in the UK (ITV2) used to throw it on at least once a month in its midweek 9pm ‘fuck it, I’m tired and this’ll do’ slot. And,…

I sort of blame Joss Whedon a bit, as well. With hindsight it’s very, very clear that he was trying to turn the thing into a dry run for ‘Firefly’. It knackered the tone.

This is the thing - up until the Alien vs Predator nonsense, you got the sense that the whole concept was a sort of prestige playpen - a chance for people to take a simple pop-cinema concept and do something stylistically interesting with it. That’s why they got Jeunet in for the fourth one.

Absolutely agreeing with this.

I take them for what they are - a stream of images and quasi-poetic mutterings that occasionally carry some insight. On that level, I’d say I live about half of his more recent non-narrative output and find the other half utterly tedious.

I believe the deal with ‘Dr Buck’s Letter’ is that Smith is reading out an actual interview with Pete Tong in some DJ magazine. The laughter is more a sort of incredulous reaction to the ridiculous consumerist banality, I think, than anything else.

I read an absolutely heartbreaking interview with him recently. I don’t think he’s enjoying being that old very much.

Fun fact - I believe that Amis’ novel ‘Money’ was loosely inspired by what he went through while involved with writing this script. I don’t think he had much to do with the end product.

I hope he’s a bit less harsh on the Anarchists than Ken Loach was in ‘Land and Freedom’.

The really wierd thing is that given how it’s described, I definitely get that response, but not remotely from whispering. Me, I need a low rumble. My personal jam is this guy:

The Eurythmics need way more love than they get. The wierd creative tension between their electro art-pop sensibility Annie Lennox’s soul diva inclinations and made for something incredibly interesting.

Maybe he could film it in Czechosolvakia with actors in silly hats who can only just speak English!

The problem is that sexual politics is generally iffy (albeit in an understandable pre-woke 1960s white guy sort of a way).

Be careful what you wish for - go back and read the book and ask yourself what actually, you know, happens. It’s...less than you think, and a lot of it is lengthy arguments about determinism.

Big wierd ancient artefact type elaborate. Lots of zero-g mucking about in eerie elder environments. And it’s all set offworld.

They also got...those other two guys - who, I like to imagine, Cage insists on bringing with him to interviews (or possibly everywhere) and who he has never named and neither speaks to nor acknowledges.