difdi

When this movie was made, it was a comedy. It couldn't really happen, right? Well, as of 2008, 21 years later, it's happened to five US citizens, as far as anyone knows, since 2007 alone. There's no way of knowing how many people have actually been detained and/or deported because the government refused to believe their documentation -- Or they lacked it; Citizens don't have green cards, after all, so an immigration officer who is determined to deport anyone without one will deport a lot of citizens.

I just read an Associated Press article about a man by the name of Jose Ledesma who was jailed for two months, because the feds refused to accept his 100% real birth certificate as legitimate. The government has become so absurd, that a parody of 1987 has become the reality of 2008.

The opening scenes depict the Space Needle in Seattle cracking, crumbling, and collapsing. Too bad the real Space Needle is made of steel, not concrete, and steel generally doesn't crumble to dust in an earthquake. More to the point, while the technology that built it is 1960s era, it *was* designed to remain standing during a Richter 9.0 earthquake, and the one in the opening of the movie was "only" a 7.9!

In the unlikely event that an earthquake *did* topple the Needle (unlikely, given it's made of steel and bolted, using 8 inch wide bolts, into a concrete pad, the overall structure being shaped much like a type of spinning top), the first part to go would be the smaller structure one third of the way up, rather than remaining intact as the entire tower topples, as in the movie.

While the scene is very dramatic, it's also so unlikely as to ruin my overall enjoyment of the movie.