The guy who gives Bond his gun is Q. He is called Major Boothroyd in the film, but the character is called Q for the first time in Goldfinger. He is again referred to as Major Boothroyd in The Spy Who Loved Me.

A boomerang IS a weapon, but the returning kind is just a toy. Hunting boomerangs are shaped differently and don’t return.

An “ornithopter” is an aircraft that flaps its wings like a bird. The gyro captain flies an autogyro (a.k.a. gyrocopter).

They don’t know who Connie Both and Carole Cleveland are, and sometimes aren’t even sure which Python is which (but they do cop to it).

The music all came from the DeWolfe music library (the same place they got Sousa’s “Liberty Bell March” for the TV show).

I didn’t say they were “inherently” bad or that every bit of tech is evil in the film. Of course the tech is awesome. But it can also malfunction or be used for evil ends because we flawed humans make and use them; just as the bone is a neutral object but we made it into a tool that could be used for defensive or offensive means (but which still “kills” other apes). The satellite in the beginning was supposed to be a nuclear satellite, so it is showing one weapon essentially evolving into another. I happen to think it was necessary to create and maintain nuclear weapons (and still is); but that is because others would use that same “bone” to enslave us. It’s all about application. That is why I said it was “ONE” of the points of the bone.
In a way, the film is asking us how we will choose to use our “bones”.

I love when geeks latch on to a false idea and get irritated when their wrong idea isn’t fulfilled in a movie adaptation. My favorite was when a guy went off about Arwen saving Frodo in the film instead of Legolas. It was actually an Elf named Glorfindel who saved Frodo in the book. The guy even said it was one of his favorite parts in the book and was an important introduction to Legolas.

I found the question about why Logan was still on the mission after his crystal was sped up to be a little naive. What else was he going do? File a grievance with the Labor Board?

I always thought that was ONE of the points of the bone in the opening. Our tools advanced from bones used as weapons to kill our own kind, to psycho computers “made in our image” that turn on us. HAL could also represent human intellect gone wrong.

Did notice the poster for A Boy and His Dog in his room in Carnegie’s place.

A few little things they miss:
– The man in the ambulance is the bank security guard who was always so kind to Lola.
– The final car accident kills the man who stole Lola’s scooter.
– The mysterious painting in the casino is Kim Novak from Vertigo; the spirals are also a Vertigo reference.

The Hughes brothers’ mother is specifically Iranian-Armenian, who are a christian minority in Iran.
They were raised christian but Albert is an atheist and Allen is “spiritual” (whatever that means).
Here is an interesting interview where they talk about their religious views. http://tinyurl.com/3fa4rv8

PS. Nice to hear that Duncan is a Christian.

I am not watching the movie. I do not have time to just sit down and watch the movie, and if I did, I would want to be listening to my friends’ comments, and not yours. I listen to commentaries to hear something additional on the movie’s themes or production that one of my friends might not say. That you love Summer Glau’s jacket, or that you knew Mal was in love with Inara from the way he looked at her picture is not worth my time.

I listened to this one longer than I did to “It’s a Wonderful Life” at least. Sigh. C-

The bit about Guccione and Hefner and presumably Flynt funding Polanski’s movies is a great observation. The idea of Roman Polanski’s Barely Legal is hilarious.

Some reasonably good Heston imitations, but also some gratuitous singing, altho that’s not as annoying as the numerous attempts to identify the actors playing each ape.

The talking doll doesn’t use batteries. It operates by gravity causing a weighted piece to fall thru a tube.

The Chevy Nova/”no va” story is bunk.

Bond doesn’t have much of an arc, but enduring the tests Dr. No puts him thru allows him to demonstrate what he’s really made of, which we haven’t seen up to that point. However, since that’s practically the only thing we ever see Bond do in any of the movies, he remains a very two-dimensional character.

They differ on the definition of “process shot”. It’s essentially the same thing as a rear projection shot. Shooting action in a car being towed is just a tow-rig shot.

The structure of the film is that the protagonist is humanity, and each of the three sections (prolog, act 1, acts 2 & 3 & epilog) follows the next step in alien-assisted evolution. Each act starts out with the mundane way of life of a character (bone-ape, Floyd, Bowman), he finds a monolith, and humanity moves up the ladder to the next level of evolution.

HAL’s dilemma is that the humans are planning to turn him off, which would jeopardize the mission, so HAL decides to get rid of the humans and carry out the mission himself. The problem is that that is actually entirely incidental to the story Kubrick is telling (the ascent of mankind) and merely serves as an entertaining complication. After all, we are not introduced to computers or tools earlier in the film as a kind of villain-of-our-own-making. But it ends up being so entertaining, that it takes over the movie.

Gold medal Super-win! for Trey for mentioning Space Food Sticks, the greatest chocolate rubber compound invented by mankind.

Teague is right in that there is no particular reason for Kubrick to “do” films the way he did them. But the same can be said for Tarantino’s time-shifting and Fellini’s dream sequences.

Trey is right that HAL has become a crutch for screenwriters. It has survived right up to I, Robot, in which a single central computer controls all the robots in the world.