I saw The Golden Compass yesterday and enjoyed it for the most part.  One scene was very good, very creepy.  Little kids are being kidnapped for unknown (but nefarious) purposes by a totalitarian regime called The Magisterium.  The scene takes place where the children are being held, in a Jules Vernish fortress in the middle of freezing fucking nowhere.  The kids are shown in a room writing letters to their parents and a very creepy nurse is instructing one of the boys to write something or his parents won’t get a letter (which the watchers know they are never going to get anyway).  It’s effective, chilling, and doesn’t treat viewers as stupid, showing the nature of the place and the regime holding the kids in an oblique but powerful way. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up until…until I saw the chairs. 

This is supposed to be an alternate Earth (yes, the standard sci fi interpretation of the “many dimensions” aspect of physics, but I like it so don’t care if it’s been used before).  Apparently on this alternate Earth where people’s souls live outside their bodies as animal manifestations that talk, they also have a Design within Reach.  Must be right next door to the Magisterium HQ!  The creepy kid torture factory was filled with Eames plastic molded chairs.  If you’re going to make a fantasy film, DON’T use a well known design object in it, it’s destracting!  For God’s sake people didn’t you have 60 million dollars or something–design your own friggin chairs!  I know you’re busy and all but I didn’t see any Globus chairs in Lord of the Rings.