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Hitchhiker's Guide Film Reports
wakaranai writes "The BBC reports that the new "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" movie will star Martin Freeman (Tim from The Office) as Arthur Dent. According to the Internet Movie Database filming starts early 2004, and Marvin's voice will be Stephen Moore, reviving his role from the classic 1981 BBC TV version." If you haven't seen The Office, it takes the subject matter Dilbert has bored us with, and makes it utterly hysterical. This is a good bit of casting. I'm still available to play Zaphod.
A film version of Hitchhiker's may be interesting, but I think it's safe to say that a film simply cannot pick up on the wordplay of Douglas Adams. Adams is simply a master of twisting words that can make the reader laugh out loud.
Unless the director chooses to use lots of narration, which could ruin a film.
What about the other 4 books in the trilogy???
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
He'll probably be quite pleased. Marvin, on the all.
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The Office puts a more realistic spin on Dilbert. It really is one of the more original and best shows out there. They're still showing episodes on BBC America or you can pick up the first season on DVD. David Brent is truly a classic character.
here's a pic of him.3 8281639_office300.jpg
http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/38281000/jpg/_
looks like he could pull it off. never seen that movie though.
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The key part is how to get a decent neck on him so that the two heads work. You could get twins or a pair of similar looking actors to play each part separately, then CGI them into one. Kinda like by tying them together before shooting and stuff. Way too many cool ways to do it, but don't make him 100% CGI!
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To see how well this does here in the States. ;)
It might gain a crossover audience for special effects (they do go to many weird places, after all), but I don't think it'll get good critical reviews. The Hitchiker's Guide doesn't have a three-act movie structure, it bounces around from episode to episode. It's really more suited to be a TV series.
It's also peculiarly British. Think about it: Arthur Dent's home is destroyed (twice) by bureaucrats. (Here it would have to be corporations.) They spend time looking for a cup of tea. The end of the universe comes, *and it's no big deal*: people go to a restaurant to watch it happen. (As they say, in England, death is imminent, in Canada, death is inevitable, and in California, death is optional.) The frat-boy Zaphod is a figure of fun and the hero is the mild-mannered Arthur Dent.
I'm also disappointed that they're probably going to make Trillian into a bimbo again; she was supposed to be an astrophysicist. Nobody seems to like nerd women, except for Slashdot, Harvey Pekar, and Howard Dean
And I wonder how well the nerd community is going to rally around it: THHGTTG has been out for a while, and some younger nerds have never heard of it. Hey, I never knew about the Goon Show until I read they were part of the inspiration for Python (I'm 24).
Oh well, I hope it's good...
The beauty of The Office is in the fact that the people are barely acting at all. The humour is in the fact that these characters are only very slight exaggerations of the reality of office life. We all know somebody who's a bit like David Brent, or Gareth, or Finchy, or Keith. Especially Keith. Every office has a Keith. The humour's in a glance, or a facial expression, or a moment of dead silence, rather than some familiar character running onto the set and uttering their catchphrase for the three thousandth time like you get in most sitcoms.
...it takes the subject matter Dilbert has bored us with.
You keep using that word, us. I do not think it means what you think it means. I've never seen The Office, but I think Dilbert is one of the most consistently funny cartoons out there.
I'd like to see some of the Monty Python crew in this. I think John Cleese is a shoe-in for the role of the starship captain always in a bath tub that crashes into pre-historic Earth in RATEOTU.
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Blade Runner-style, g.
Instead of a narrator, you just have the Guide chip in with an internal monologue every once and awhile. That's what Fight Club did to keep all their clever wordplay in. Admittedly, they had it easier since FC's first-person to start with, but most of the good stuff in H2G2 is cleverly-worded exposition, so it's no problem to just have the Guide say most of it.
It's always amusing to compare the people in American soap operas to the people in English ones like, say, EastEnders...
That's because American soaps are aspirational, while English ones are cautionary. Dallas: you, too, can be a millionaire with hot chicks if you work hard. East Enders: if you don't work hard, you'll end up as one of these drunk, ugly, poor peasants.
Australian soaps sit in the middle: the people are poor but beuatiful. Not sure what the message is, but it sure looks nice...
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All the film's creators should keep Oscar Wilde's words in mind: In an absurd play, no character can acknowledge the absurdity, or it all breaks down. Thus, the new screenplay should omit lines like the "these guys are ridiculous!" parts in the Shooty and Bang-Bang scene (where the heroes are trapped behind a computer bank on Magrathea).
As for the bit parts, there are dozens of chances for cameos. For example, Bill Murray and Steve Martin should play Magikthies and Vroomfondel.
Back in the day when the radio series was first broadcast the most exciting aspect of the experience was the groundbreaking music and sound from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
(I have it all on hissing cassette tape recorded off air, complete with fake links at the end of the show announcing availability of the guide from the Megadodo Corporation of Sirius Minor... )
As a story with the premise that nothing is what it seems and that the unexpected should be expected the sound was correspondingly imaginative for the time.
For example the noises used to show that the Hitch Hikers Guide book was being accessed have become part of our world - predating windows startup sound by a decade. Marvin the Paranoid Androids voice is a classic along with the squeaky mouse voices and the mournfull bleeps in the background when all seems lost.
I expect a good sound track for the movie. In fact I now expect that pressing the lift buttons makes a windows startup sound before the talking Sirius Cybernetics corporation lift suggests the basement of the Hitch Hikers office as a good destination before the Frogstar fighter blasts them all into oblivion.
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Bloody hell, I remember when that series was first shown on the Beeb, we were gobsmacked at the quality of the computer graphics!
Of course it turned out that the computer graphics weren't computer generated at all 'cos the kit to do them didn't exist then (or if it did was way out of the Beeb's pricerange).
Ah, those were the days.
This young lady would be ideal for trillian...
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The radio show *WAS* the Hitch Hiker's Guide. The books, TV series, LPs on Megadodo Records, superlarge towels, stage play, computer game and so forth were mere spin-offs.
And there's no trouble incorporating the expositions, after all, it was always announced as "The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, By Douglas Adams, starring Peter Jones as The Book" (cue 'Journey Of The Sorcerer' by The Eagles).
Never 'starring Simon Jones as Arthur Dent' or 'starring Geoffrey McGivern as Ford Prefect' or 'starring Mark Wing-Davey as Zaphod Beeblebrox'.
Or, to quote Adams: "This is the story of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to The Galaxy, perhaps the most remarkable, certainly the most successful book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor".
Exposition's not an issue.
In the stage show they had two actors playing Zaphod, at the same time in the same costume.
One actor was behind the other - the clothes went round both actors so 'zaphod' had two double thickness legs, one double thickness arm and two normal arms (and two heads of course). The shoes were two paris of normal shoes on plates fixed heel to toe. Obviously the actors need to be of the same height and twins would be ideal.
The two actors on stage split the lines and did some nice business with both arms on the same side doing a task together,like feeding the 'opposite' head while the near head spoke. It was very effective.
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
Of course, in the radio series, it's entirely possible that the entire scrabble scene with the cavemen takes place in the artificial electronic universe in the Hitchhiker's offices.
Consider: Arthur and Ford are trapped on prehistoric Earth. Zaphod finds himself at the Hitchhiker's offices, which proceed to get bombed by Frogstar Fighters, and Zaphod gets hauled off to the Frogstar to be plugged into the Total Perspective Vortex, supposedly lethal to all sentient life. He survives, but it is later revealed that he only did so by being inside the artificial universe at the Hitchhiker's offices, which isn't dismantled until much later in the series.
Before the artificial universe is deactivated, Zaphod picks up Ford and Arthur from prehistoric Earth. They are quite definitely inside the artificial universe when it is deactivated, too. So, either Zaphod jumped out of the fake universe to get Ford and Arthur, and then back in to find Zarniwoop, or the whole business with the Gulgafrinchams happened in the artificial universe, in which case it could have been one of the minor differences between the fake and real universes.
Now that's offtopic!
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