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New Cast Information For 'Hitchhiker's' Movie
Kathleen writes "I was listening to the old Hitchiker's radio plays, and feeling nostalgic, I decide to check out how the movie version was going along. Well, they've filled out some important parts, Zaphod and Marvin have been cast. Zaphod is played by Sam Rockwell who's most recently been in Matchstick Men and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. Marvin is being played by Warwick Davis (Who was Willow Ufgood in Willow). Slartibartfast will be played by Bill Nighy. This news is a little distressing, since I was under the impression that Stephen Moore would still be handling the voice of Marvin."
I can only hope they have a compotent narrator, a good percentage of the jokes in the book/radio show are from the narration of book passages and exposition.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
How far will they have to pare down the book to make a three hour (or so) movie?
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
Sam Rockwell seems like a particularly good choice for Mr. Beeblebrox. I just wonder who will get the tap to be Mr. Prefect.
another American atrocity this way comes
That was classic intercourse!
Alright, kiddies.. am I the only one who's kept their head here?
Kathleen, you cite NO sources in this - just links to the actors' pages on IMDB.com.
What gives? We're now posting news articles with no sources at all? Let me rummage around for my bullshit flag.
Not that you /.ers can be trusted to actually read a page BEFORE commenting on it, but IMDB.com does add this note to projects that are still in the planning stages (like HhGTTG):
Note: Since this project is categorized as being in production, the data is subject to change or could be removed completely.
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
I always pictured Marvin as looking something like Bender from Futurama, maybe a bit taller.
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Second, to the anti-Garth Jennings camp, could it possibly be any worse than a low budget 1980's BBC TV production?
Yes, it could easily be much, much, worse. I'm taking bets it will be an unwatchable disaster but hope to be amazed to the contrary. Jenning's moron value aside, most of the casting announced is already extremely dodgy. Add to that the film is being made in Hollywood and you've got an almost sure fire loser.
Not that I have anything against Hollywood per se, but they just don't seem to get British culture (witness the absolute travesty that is the upcoming Thunderbirds movie - did they even watch any of the TV series?).
I actually sorta liked the BBC TV series, believe it or not.
One of the reasons the BBC TV series really worked was because of the limited effects, though some of them were really complicated for the TV of the time. All the "computer" parts for the Guide were (apparently) done by hand...
Anyway, with the (comparative) lack of budget they had to rely more on (shock!) acting and (horror!) humour to make it work. And it did (Trillian perhaps excepted).
Putting an MTV director in charge of Guide style humour and class is like having Bill Clinton teach Japanese schoolgirls - you know damn well someone is going to get screwed, and there's going to be a hell of a mess!
Someone else on slashdot, during the last hitchiker thread, addressed the issue of changes quite well: the series has appeared in a variety of mediums, and each time it was different than it was in the other mediums. It's going to be no different with the movies. So try to just enjoy the ride instead of saying, prematurely, "This person isn't right for this party for reasons x, y and z."
I tend to think British productions are much higher in quality and presentation. Personally, I could watch hours of British programming as long as it's not DIY or gardening stuff. Dramas, Comedies and especially Mysteries tend to be the best programmes from the UK.
Un-news
"Since it's not a BBC production, it stands a chance of having production values above that of a 2nd grade art class."
Crack jokes about it if you like. But HGtGttG was and Dr. Who were far better than the scifi we have today. When you have '2nd grade art class' effects, you have to focus more on making the script interesting.
Frankly, I wouldn't complain a whole lot about the fx they had back then. I recently purchased the DVD for Hitchhiker and they actually stunned me with one of their effects. The guide had a full color animated screen. Today that'd be done with either a PocketPC (like in Nemesis) or by digitally adding the imagery later. What they did back then was they found a neat way to funnel light from a projector in that thing. Ingenius.
It's also worth mentioning that the animations they did for the guide won awards. Despite being hand-animated, they were quite effective in selling people on the idea that they were watching a computerized presentation of the information the Guide contained.
As an artist who does that kind of work, I found Hitchhiker to be surprisingly good, even today. I nitpicked it far less than I did Episode II.
"Derp de derp."
He's the title designer for "Da Ali G Show" for chrissake. I do not believe that the delicate sarchasm in Adams' work can be trusted to a music video director who designed the titles for a reasonably good TV show.
:/
In both the radio show and the BBC TV Series, what made the jokes work was the voice characterization and acting. Without a good director at the helm who has a letter perfect sense of comic timing and voice characterization necessary to pull off the sarchasm, this movie will fail. My vote would have been to use a Disney cartoon director taking on live action for the first time if they wanted to save money.
Of course, I was the one that poopoo'ed the idea of Peter Jackson doing LOTR, so who the Hell am I to comment?
- ravepunk
I'm enthrilled to see that the mods agree with this racist bullshit.
Just cause the guy is black doesn't mean it's going to be Men in Black nor that there will be Hip Hop. JC what a bunch of stereo-typical crap.
Maybe there IS going to be Hip Hop. So the fuck what?
I don't remember Douglas Adams ever pointing out the color of Ford's skin.
Man on the Moon is also brilliant.
I just don't think an American production can do the quirky English thing. They will target their audience with a wide net, and neuter this thing till the focus groups sing. It will be a pale vision of its original incarnations, homogenized and strip mall-ed for an American audience, and rasta-fied by 10%. It will no longer appeal to geeks and lose the only audience that may have embraced it.
Just cause the guy is black doesn't mean it's going to be Men in Black nor that there will be Hip Hop. JC what a bunch of stereo-typical crap.
Uh, somehow I don't think it's because he's black, but because he's a hip-hop musician.
I'm not familiar with his work, but usually when Hollywood hires a musician for a part, it's to cash in on the image they've already built up for themselves (e.g. David Bowie in Labyrinth, Sting in Dune, Henry Rollins in every film he's ever been in).
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Hmmmm... you folks are definitely out to lunch who think I'm racist. I mean, my cousin is considered black for god's sake (her father was black/native american). My point is that Hip-Hop and the HHGTTG don't mix any more than Masterpiece Theater and an Italian Gangster film do. I wouldn't mind if they picked say... Laurence Fishburne to play Ford, I think he'd do a good job with it. I mean... you're not going to pick Britney Spears to play Anne Frank, Marie Curie or even a Doctor Who companion and actually think it would work? As far as the other person who suggested that guy from RedDwarf (I'm assuming you mean the Lister character) I think he'd be an excellent choice.
Sorry, you can be an idiot and paint me with the racism brush, but it's not going to stick. The only problem I've got with the casting is that they didn't pick a more British type of hipster. Thank god they didn't cast that idiot Kidd Rock as Zaphod. Now that would have been a total tragedy.
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It really doesn't matter who plays whom. What's more worrying is that Adams' script is being rewritten. HHGTTG is probably the finest comedy written thus far in human history and the idea that somebody could do better than DNA is tantamount to heresy.
The main reason the film has never been made is that Adams was never happy with what Hollywod was offering. Do we really thing he'd be happy with some droid scriptwriter massacring his work?
If The Powers That Be didn't like DNA's script, they don't deserve to benefit from it.
Yeah, and they're still stilted.
I assume you're basing this on TV that's actually made it over to the US, right? In which case yeah, it probably sucks. There's good British TV and films, but hardly any of it is popular, so I doubt much of it makes it over the pond.
Enough with the period pieces and Hugh Grant already. And there's nothing funnier than a British "gangster" film.
Period pieces? You mean Pride And Prejudice or Shakespeare or something? It's great literature. Get over it. Just because it wasn't made in the last 20 minutes doesn't mean it's worthless.
As for Hugh Grant, believe me, we're all as sick of him as you are.
Gangster films? I assume you mean Guy Ritchie's films - Lock, Stock... and Snatch, right? You'll be referring to them as they're about the only British gangster films going, and certainly the only ones that will have made it as far as the states. I guess they're a bit of an acquired taste, but the truth is if you know anything about London, Cockney's, Pikey's etc they're fucking hilarious films.
We already know you guys have brown teeth, so that doesn't shock us. Trying to look tough and talking in a gay British accent is just too funny.
Brown teeth? Whatever. Go tell Vinnie Jones he's got a "gay" accent... see how far that gets you.
Like that nerd Dizzy Rascal. WTF is up with that loser ?
That's Dizzee Rascal. And yes, loser. Won the Mercury Music Prize, though goodness knows how.
Anyway. Please refrain from sweeping generalisations about our country. Believe me, we could all come up with some pretty brutal generalisations about yours given what we see of it on TV.
Before you criticize, it might be worthwhile to know what you're talking about. I can't believe you just equated Mos Def with Nelly. That's a lot like equating the Beatles with N'sync.
In case you cared, Mos Def, unlike many self-styled "MCs," is a real artist, a poet who started off in spoken word venues like the Brooklyn Moon. Unlike the commercialized hip-hop spewed by Clear Channel radio stations targeted at white suburbanites to reinforce their stereotypes of people of color, Mos Def actually has a positive message for the urban counterculture, rooted in the Civil Rights Movement, and the struggle of people of color everywhere to attain equality.
I have a feeling that Mos Def and Douglas Adams would have had a lot to talk about. After all tHHGttG saga talks a lot about the disgusting excesses of capitalism and the rampant insanity of corporate culture (see Magrathea and the collapse of the Galactic Stock Market, the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation, Hotblack Desiato being dead for "tax purposes," the awesome satire in the sequence involving the Golgafrinchans, and the fact that the enemy in the final book is an evil corporation), the way the powers-that-be and the media manipulate the masses (remember, anyone you actually meet is the product of a deranged imagination, the fact that most everything is "somebody else's problem" makes it possible to create a good stealth device, and there's the irony when the tourism industry's campaign in Ursa Minor Beta backfires when they state that "when you are tired of Ursa Minor Beta, you are tired of life," and then there's the message in front of tHHttG which advises "Don't Panic!") and then there's the whole idea of revisionist history and the desecration of ancient sites all in the name of progress and profit (as in the story of the Cathedral of Chalesm, the poet who was bought out by the pen company and who had to plagiarize his own work in order to get them written, and more obviously the destruction of Earth in order to make way for a hyperspace bypass), the pointless destruction wrought by war (see the Silastic Armor fiends of Striterax, and the Krikkiters after them, and then those guys who fought wars just because they saw strange things in the sky, and ended up killing mostly the peaceful forest people in the middle), the evil of racism (again, the Krikkiters) and the fact that the people who want to have power shouldn't be allowed to have power (wonderfully lampooned by the description of the guy who actually runs the universe)
I think Mos Def would make a great Ford Prefect.
Maybe I'm a little too close to this particular issue . . . but isn't it a little unfair to hate on Warwick Davis because of Jedi? I mean, until Jar Jar^H^H^H^H The Pod Race^H^H^H^H^H Episode One came along, I hated the Ewoks more than any other part of Star Wars, (even though I was in the target demographic) but it's not his fault the Ewoks were so lame.
I'm all for hating on Lucas, but Warwick Davis was playing a role that, at the time, would have been a very big deal. Remember how aniticipated Jedi was?
I'm sure even the most patriotic of American slashdot readers will agree with me that the Englishness of the piece should be retained, and Arthur Dent not moved to New York state etc. etc. That said, I am mindful of the fact I said similar things about High Fidelity and was shown to be completely wrong.
No wonder we just continously get bloody awful films all the time. It seems obvious just from the choice of the main two actors that the characters will not be the same. If you change the characters then basically everything has to change, the dialogue, what people do, how people react. you can't just bolt in entirely different people and expect it to work. but they do. and that's why so many films are pants. and tv shows that cross either way across the atlantic and are remade tend not to work, somebody tampers with what makes it work - the characters. no wonder they waited till after he died....
It's obvious - if you come from near Betelgeuse - a red giant - your planet's going to have lost a lot of atmosphere in the expansion phase - so it's logical that you'll be black, to minimise the effects of UV exposure.
As a white Brit, I have absolutely no exception to a black guy playing Ford, just so long as he makes him seem like the same sort of shallow arse he was originally.
In fact, so long as the guy can act the part, it doesn't matter what colour he is, so long as he's humanoid.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
He was in The Truman Show, dammit. And, say what you will, I liked The Mask. He's not a bad actor--he just does things you don't like. At all.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Ford Prefect doesn't have to be white--it's not essential to his character. He does have to be an alien and more than a little odd however--that is essential to his character.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
"I don't see what Douglas Adams's problem with digital watches was. They are slightly cheaper, easier to read, and capable of having alarms in them."
... or maybe a handful of years back, it'd be cell phones.
Think about the early 80's/late 70's when digital watches were the newest fad. In the early/mid 90's it would have been pagers, and today
"Derp de derp."
Bruce Campbell as...Zaphod.
Man on the moon is a stanard cinematic biopic of an eccentric comedian. If there was ever a a man who needed a gonzo off the wall biopic, it was Andy Kaufman, but Man on the Moon stuck to the facts, aside from the opening.
Carrey did a good job, but it was like watching a really good Elvis impersonator. Like Andy Kaufman...
Makes you wonder about the quality of the casting data, doesn't it ...
When casting the narrator for the Radio Series, Douglas Adams said he wanted someone with a "Peter Jones-y" voice. (As I understand, Peter Jones is/was a rather well known anchor on the BBC news -- think Tom Brokaw). They tried lots of people and weren't happy with any... until they got Peter Jones himself. Can't do much better than that.
Matt Slot / Bitwise Operator / Ambrosia Software, Inc.
And what exactly do you mean by underground hip-hop? Do you even listen to hip-hop? Do you have any friends who are hip-hop artists (obviously, not necessarily signed by a record label or anything like that)? While granted, Mos Def is more recognizable than many other talented underground artists, are you seriously spitting out the line that since an artist is popular, he must have sold out? Have you even listened to the lyrics on his last album "Black on Both Sides"? He isn't exactly pandering to the white suburbanites, nor is he glorifying the essentialized violence and materialism that defines commercial hip-hop. Seriously, when's the last time you saw Mos Def make a rap video? When's the last time you even heard him played on the radio? Frankly, I think you're just dissin' on hip-hop, and whether it's a racial thing or a cultural thing doesn't matter. But, to paraphrase Robert Heinlein, never attribute to malice what can be attributed to ignorance and stupidity, I suppose.
On the other hand, you're probably right about the studios gutting the book. Such is life.
Brian Blessed would make a good Vogon. In fact I suspect he might actually be a Vogon.
That's very perceptive of you Mr Stapleton and rather unexpected in a G Major