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Hitchhikers Movie Update
DaViking writes "Over at Yahoo Movies there are a few more pictures, including one of the Heart of Gold, and an updated trailer for up coming Hitchhikers movie." I'm hoping this film will inspire some sequels, too!
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how bout burt reynolds in smokey and the restaurant at the end of the universe?
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
They're going to make Heart of Gold into a spaceball.
Just too bad that Mr. Adams died too early! He had a lot of satiric writing left to do! Or as a friend of mine that I lent a book of Adams to stated; "I wonder what he smoked..."
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I like that!!
Sorry, but that rendering of the Heart of Gold looks wrong. It's supposed to be shaped like a running shoe. Hmm, perhaps it is supposed to be a running shoe shaped for the foot of a superintelligent shade of the color blue.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Am I the only one who gets an image of Charlie Brown when looking at art of Marving looking down at a barren landscape? Weird :)
Whatever happened to a "space age running shoe sleekness"?
:D
However, on a positive note, that spacecraft does look like it's from a Douglas Adams novel
-- n
It seems that spheres are going to be a very common shape in this movie, With Planets, The Hart of Gold that looks like a big sphere, and Marvins head which is a huge sphere on a little body. I don't know about everyone else all those sphears seem more of a nineties thing. The 2000 seem to prefer more edges in the style.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"Marvin the depressed robot"? WTF? He's Marvin the Paranoid Android. I know he is a robot who is depressed, but sheesh he is, was, and always will be the paranoid android.
If they can't even get that right... let's hope its just the phone sanitizers at Yahoo who made the mistake and not the movie's writer(s).
Sailing over the event horizon
Burt Reynolds in " So Long and Thanks for the Deliverance "
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Because we all know that if it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing.
Besides, sequels are usually just as good if not better than the original.
Sorry. I'll shut up now.
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there's very little to be said for artistic license. I, for one, am just happy that this is making its way into the visual realm, and relish the thought of getting to see what the disney artists concepts of adams' work end up looking like. perhaps holding one's tongue and putting judgement by the wayside until it's been released would be a pragmatic thing to do?
;)
nevermind...that's not a shoe!
"How like you to drag your keyboard to a gun fight." - Aaron Bedard (BANE)
>it was never designed to be a film
the fact Douglas Adams himself worked on a version of the script seems to suggest otherwise.
...that's a space station!
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy [1981]
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For those who don't want to scroll through countless popups: wget http://mp3content01.bcst.yahoo.com/bus01root6/Bus0 1Share24/yahoomovies/6/8768235.mov
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I love HHGTTG and probably will go see it just for that, but it looks like Disney is tring to make it into a kids movie. Just look at Marvin. (Mod me down if you want) but it saddens me that Disney is making this movie. I fear that they might try to "clean" up the movie.
Douglas Adams himself spend the last years of his life writing the script and trying to get it done. Heck, he's been trying to get it made into a movie for a long time now. It's his vision, he wants it to be a movie, so he thinks it should be made.
Of course it's going to be a huge disappointment. Name one book to movie conversion that wasn't a disappointment to someone who read the book previously. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be a bad film, just not the one you envisioned. But what the movie will definitely do is give the book a ton more readership.
The problem I see with the film concepts so far is that it seems like it's taking itself too seriously. Those concepts for the Heart of Gold and Marvin are too mainstream and contemporary. They don't scream "HHGTTG!" and look as if they could be placed in any sci-fi movie coming out today. If they actually took a chance and *GASP* took ideas from the book and made the Heart of Gold look like a "sleek running shoe" then perhaps people would be able to recognize the design as a part of the film.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
It wasn't designed to be a book, either. It wasn't even designed to be a radio series. The first episode of it was designed to be an episode of a radio series about the world ending in different ways. Fortunately, Douglas Adams wasn't good at designing things; he was good at coming up with brilliant material. The thing about Douglas Adams is that he would turn out a lot of stuff that didn't fit together at all, and have a good editor make it into something that worked.
That's not to say that the movie will actually be done well. But HHGTTG is just about ideal for doing in different media, because it's really a set of characters and situations, not a story.
(Oh, and it's already a TV miniseries)
Marvin looks like a small little stormtrooper drone. Yuck! And the Heart of Gold ... like a flying airport. All drawings and photos so far look way to clean and 2001 like.
...
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And I miss a bit more englishness so far
Very different to the first pictures and stuff Peter Jackson released about Lord of the Rings (which had just the right 'feeling'about them).
I am afraid Hitchhikers will be a flop
The film finished filming in August of 2004.
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Chunky Bacon
I think Dent Arthur Dent was played really well and the jokes well timed. I still prefer the books (and to my shame, have never heard the radio version).
Of course, Hollywood appears to know about as much about what a blog is as what the Heart of Gold is really supposed to look like. Just because you take your standard production news site run by some faceless intern with no community feedback features and CALL it a blog, doesn't make it a blog...
Wasn't the Heart of Gold supposed to be shaped like a giant sneaker?
Am I the only one who has a problem with this being called a new trailer? There was actually a /. story when this teaser trailer came out about 6 months ago.
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
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Ok, repeat after me. It is a mass media oriented movie adaptation of a non visual original that appealed only to a niche market.
Changes will have to be made in order to make it marketable and profitable. Kids will want to see it, and they will not understand the humour, so they will need cutesy characters. Many non intelectual types will expect more explosions and COOL effects than required so they will be there. The ships will be of a more recognizable shape so that the average moviegoer doen't say "A sneaker! This is lame". And so on...
If I don't get another Battlefield Earth I will be more than happy with the movie. And only if it makes a profit we will get a sequel.
Cheers, Adolfo
I was hoping they would make one movie per novel, sort of like lord of the rings. There is so much material in the books that there shouldn't be a problem to make several movies, one per novel.
Harald
If they were to also include the Question in the trailer, the universe would end. It has therefore been omitted as a safety precaution.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The series is already one of the more genre-busting SF stories out there. It started out as a radio play, was done as a series of books, a TV miniseries, a text adventure game, and finally another radio play. Making a movie hardly seems worse than any of the other transitions.
In case you're stuck with the idea that Doug Adams wrote the books and everything else was just trying to make a buck with cheap work, it started as a radio play, and Adams has had a hand in every adaptation to date, including this new movie. (Yes, he's dead, but that doesn't seem to stop him.)
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
It's six episodes of a BBC adaptation, actually. Not a bad one, either, in parts -- the 'CGI' for the guide iteself is actually meticulously hand-drawn, and the game sequence with the fleet being eaten by a dog is spot-on.
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
Name one book to movie conversion that wasn't a disappointment to someone who read the book previously.
Stand By Me and Shawshank Redemption were both based on Stephen King novellas. Stand By Me is an almost letter perfect adaptation of "The Body". There were some deviations in Shawshank Redemption but they were tolerable and weren't total "re-imaginings" of the essential story. The mere mention of Harry Potter does seem to shut some minds down but those movies are faithful to their source material. Come to think of it, The Andromeda Strain was also a good adaptation and a rare example of good cinematic sci-fi.
Nonethess, I agree with you. Most book to movie adaptations go beyond what is necessary to bring a detailed novel to a two hour movie. 9 times out 10, the story will be cheapened so that all the tired Hollywood cliches can be crammed into what could have been a good movie. Even worse, you have things like I Robot which have almost nothing to do with the books they come from. I Robot was originally to be called Livewire and had some character names from I Robot grafted onto it so they could rape Asimov's corpse for a few extra bucks.
I'm sure this film is going to be a HUGE disappointment, but then, perhaps I'm just being pessimistic.
How oddly appropriate.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
For those who hadn't noticed yet: try reloading the http://hitchhikers.movies.go.com site a few times. (Hm... Would that be considered a Serial-Slashdotting?) There are a number of different fashions in which the earth gets obliterated -- Not sure how many there are total, but I've seen at least 7 different ones.
Having admired the videos of Hammer & Tongs and see that they were suggested to direct by Spike Jones when Jay "Austin Powers" Roach couldn't commit, I am not too worried. Even if this is under the Disney banner, I don't think it is doomed. Just like Pixar films, don't suck (yet).
[boostventilator]
Before any US /.-ers mod me down for that remark on patriotic grounds (I'm not a Brit, but Aussie, btw), consider this:
The original Arthur Dent was very, very, very English - meaning that, no matter what happened, he approached it with the traditional (and much stereotyped) British "stiff upper lip".
Case in point: refer to the tale he told Fenchurch in "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish" about the biscuits in the railway station.
Adams' delightfully dry humour will only translate well if Arthur maintains the original Dent nature.
And let's face it, the dialogue is the best part about HHGTTG, in all it's forms - radio program, book, TV series, LP series, stage show and (hopefully) this movie! I doesn't need to be about great special effects as long as it's funny :)
Adams himself said the TV series was his least favourite adaption, but he was happy enough at the time to keep a heap of the main actors (Jones, Jones, Wing-Davey and Moore) and my guess it was he wanted the TV show (and presumably the movie) to have the same feel.
I know that's not possible right now, but I'm sure he intended it to keep its original look and feel.
I'm really looking forward to seeing if this movie version measures up to the dream :)
I devised my sig. going around Hyde Park corner on a moped
That is truly sad!
I was in a job interview before, and the interviewer-would-be-boss said to me:
"I'd like to ask you some questions.."
So I responded: "Go ahead, ask me anything.. life, the universe, everything" (or something similiar)..
He laughed.. I laughed, we shared some stories.. and then he warned me that the job would probably be eliminated in 2-3 months, and I'd probably be on my ass if I took it. It was great.
Another time I was interviewing for a contract and the person wanted to "test my personality".. he was obviously unimpressed with the corporate template questions. He asked me what my favorite color was. A super-intelligent shade of blue, of course. He laughed. He knew.
No, I fret. Everyone and their lame-ass over the hill friends are going to be walking around spouting how 42 is the answer. Fark.