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If Hitler had his way, that diagram would be whole lot simpler. Just "Germany" from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Geography class would be a breeze.

I also endorse the MPAA intermission discussion. Why has censorship become more prudish when it comes to nudity but less when it comes to violence? Kiss a breast and it's R, but run it through with a sword and it's only PG13. WTF?

Hard science movies:

You mentioned that 'Contact' is one of the few examples of 'hard science' done well in the movies. I'd agree and also nominate 'Gattaca' that does 'hard science' well without resorting to technobabble or fantasy elements.

Great commentary guys - heard it today.
Did you know George Miller (Mad Max, Babe Pig in the City) was the first director on this before Zemeckis took over. Also, WETA Digital did some of the wormhole effects shots (around the time they did Frighteners).
Jodie Foster's character is based on an amalgam of two real people: Jill Tarter from SETI and Carolyn Porco (Cassini mission).

Dune - the novel, was divided up into several parts i.e. 'books' and the 1984 movie really needed the 3 x 3 hour LOTR treatment to convey all the richness of Frank Herbert's vision.

The other political issue with DUNE today is that it makes the Fremen proxies for the Taliban/insurgents i.e. religious desert people fighting a foreign invader that wants to exploit them for their resources (used for transport).

As for the intended remake, which studio is going to greenlight a big budget for a movie that romanticises fundamentalist freedom fighters? Last one was Rambo III.

Yes, Dune is okay as a flawed work, but to critique it properly as an adaptation, you'd need to knew the book(s) well.

Thanks for the info on the Fountain - queuing it up now.

Just realized that there's something that Heat, Barry Lyndon, The Fountain, Gladiator, and The Road have in common - evocative atmospheric soundtracks and great cinematography. The narrative is.... almost incidental.

I’ve just listened to Professor Sir Christopher Frayling’s commentary on The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and out of the dozens of OFFICIAL commentary tracks I’ve heard, it’s got to be one of the best. Have you heard it?
As the biographer of Sergio Leone, he relates hundreds of interesting behind-the-scenes info on the making of all those great Spaghetti Westerns. I’d hold that up as THE template by which informative film commentaries should look up to.
But it’s not as fun as what you guys do. And I hope that one day, a studio picks up DIF for an additional commentary track to stick on a DVD or Blu-Ray, either for a new release or an old restored classic.

So the idea of an Intermission episode relating to what you guys do… commentary tracks, struck me as worth listening to.

1.    What are the best commentary tracks you guys have heard?
2.    Who are the directors you like to hear speak (Fincher, Scott, Cameron, Jackson?)
3.    Who are the directors you WOULD LIKE to hear speak but won’t (Spielberg?) or can’t (because they’re dead e.g. Kubrick).
4.    Any other non-director commentaries you like (actors, crew, film critics, historians, etc)
5.    What are your favourite fan commentaries (Rifftrax, Red Letter Media, etc?)
6.    What are some waste-of-time commentary tracks?

I haven’t heard all your commentaries but of the 30-40 I have heard, I would nominate The Abyss as one of DIF’s best due to the insider knowledge and highlighting the enormous effort that went into that oft-overlooked film.

So there you go – just an idea – an INTERMISSION on audio commentaries.

Cheers from London

Silence of the Lambs, it can be argued, was the first of the 1990s' wave of serial-killer movies, and got a lot of praise, Oscar recognition (the rare trifecta of all the top awards), box office, etc. It preceded Se7en by a couple of years.

Still, Se7en is brilliant for all the reasons you guys mentioned and has more atmosphere than Lambs, and doesn't resort to the 'boss fight' cliché at the end, which even Lambs succumbed to.

Great commentary dudes - would like to hear more commentaries on Fincher and Ridley Scott films if you ever get the time.

Just a quick addendum - The Insider (Michael Mann) is another "recent period" movie made just after the actual events portrayed in the movie. In fact, the time period between the events depicted in The Insider and the movie is even shorter than The Social Network.

If not Lord of the Rings, then Heat (best crime movie) and Dark Knight (best superhero movie)

From what I've read about Cameron, I doubt he'd resort to 'magic'. I'm sure he subscribes to the basic assumption of science: that the laws of physics are the same in all places, in all times.

No, we don't know what the properties of unobtanium are. I assumed it was just a room-temperature superconductor. But we do know how much energy it would take to send a mass of, say, 10,000 tonnes over 4 light years to Alpha Centuri. That's a relatively straightforward physics calculation and the result is staggering.

Yes, it could be that Earth is suffering environmentally. But I maintain that if we've solved the gargantuan engineering problem of interstellar travel, then we'd already have the know-how to solve just about any other technological problem.

It's a MacGuffin. Some device to bring two cultures into conflict, even if it is just recreates 16th century geopolitics. In that sense, Avatar is not science fiction, but a period piece.

Interstellar travel is orders of magnitude more difficult that simply sailing or flying across the ocean. Surely you've seen those scaling demonstrations that highlight the vast distances between stars. Then you factor in the speed of light limit, and no one is going anywhere.

To land a man on nearby Mars for a few months by 2050 would cost $1 trillion, and no country is even thinking about it. Imagine the cost of sending mining equipment and sending back ore. It'd cost more than the combined GDP of Earth. Far simpler just to make it ourselves. All stuff is just atoms. Each proton is the same as any other proton.

And that's just the local neighborhood, let alone another star system which would take hundreds of years to get to and back from.