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Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trailer
Rakkis writes "A new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trailer is available on the frontpage of Amazon.com. From IMDb: "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy follows the travels of Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman), who is saved from the demolition of the Earth by his pal Ford Prefect (Mos Def). Ford is really an alien doing research for an updated edition of the universe's ultimate travel companion, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy opens April 29th.""
Opening on April 1 would have been more appropriate.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed...
Phil
I sure hope not. Generally trying to force even one novel into a movie results in lots being cut (See also: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), trying to fit a whole series would be disastrous.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
...That they appear to be running around a quarry. This has not yet proven successful for British SF ;-)
Ford is really an alien doing research for an updated edition of the universe's ultimate travel companion, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."
Belgium, my cover's blown. That's it, I'm off home. Your planet sucked anyway, monkeymen!
Except for the ale, of course. And the cheese biscuits, you know those octagonal ones with the sesame seeds on, they were quite nice too. Still, anyway, I'm back to Betelgeuse...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
I'd hate to have our inside geek joke be revealed to the world. It's always been sort of a secret code, if you knew what it meant, then you belonged to the tribe. Now every avid moviegoer in the world will know what it means.
There are 2 kinds of people in this world. Those that can keep their train of thought,
It's a little hard to believe, but the movie is actually one of Douglous Adam's last works.
One thing the movie wont be is an adaption of the books and radio play all over again, it's something fresh new and different in the Hitchhiker universe. I'm looking forward to it very much.
If you're curious about what the plans for the movie were, and the process heading up to it you might want to check out "A Salmon of Doubt" which compiles Adam's final works, along with several letters and coorespondencies leading up to this movie amoung other things
I'm going to be forever wondering what the story behind half a cat and the rhino will be though...
Douglas Adams, on a number of occasions, said that he never intended the film to be a direct adaptation of the book. And, in the introduction of at least one of the books, he talked about how the books were different from the TV show which was different from the radio play. I wasn't all that impressed with the trailer. It looks like the story, which was always for me very cerebral, has been dumbed down into an action flick. I like action flicks as much as the next guy, but not every movie has to be one. The trailer does make it come across as very, MIBish. A fun movie, but nothing to write home about. Right now, I'm thinking that Sideways is going to turn out to be a lot funnier than Hitchhiker.
That's funny, I plan to punch in the face anybody I see carrying a towel. God help me if I see anybody with a gold fish stuck in their ear.
Treat me like a marketing stat, and I'll treat your movie like a series of ones and zeros
Adams himself wrote the screenplay. [..]
/. article about this movie has one of you out-of-the-loop guys repeating this and getting modded up.
Everything in the movie has Adams' sanction,
NO HE DIDN'T! NO IT DOESN'T!
Every fucking
He wrote A screenplay, not this screenplay. He wrote what HE considered the final draft. And then, he died.
He had been fighting the studio for years to have a screenplay that he liked, and he managed to finally write one that had compromises from both parties, then, he died. And THEN the studio had "changes" made. We can't know what those are, but wanna bet that their compromises suddenly went away?
I'm so fucking tired of seeing your delusion about this being his words modded up. I used to reply with links to the statements of the parties invilved detailing the chronology of the rewrites, but my rebuttals went unnoticed and your wishfull thinking stays modded up. Shit!
You can't take the sky from me...
Definitely a must see, the Artur Dent choice of actor couldn't have been better.
It is still a bit disappointing that Zaphod does not have his 2nd head on the movie. It was the source of much humour. And Marvin looks like just a guy in a robot suit, Teletubbie-style. I thought the whole "brain the size of a planet" thing was more like a metaphor for his immense intellect, not just a huge head...
Friend of the Wise, Brother of the Brave.
Actually, Adams wrote an earlier draft of the screenplay a couple of years before his death. The final shooting script was completed by another screenwriter, Karey Kirkpatrick (best known for his work on Chicken Run). Kirkpatrick has said on the official movie site that he mostly embroidered on Adams' draft, adding a bit here and subtracting a bit there while leaving the bulk of the script intact. Apparently, he even added a few things directly from the books that Adams had left out of the script. So really the screenplay is more of a collaboration between Adams (the text) and Kirkpatrick (the tweaking of said text). I'm curious to see how it turns out.
-- StrangeInterlude
....Go back and rewatch the trailer. Zaphod distinctly sports not only a third arm, but what appears to be a second head -- although the glimpse of the head is so brief that I almost thought I imagined it the first couple of times through.
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
He wrote A screenplay, not this screenplay. He wrote what HE considered the final draft. And then, he died.
You should read the rather funny self-interview conducted by the guy who wrote the final screenplay. It's apparent from that interview--without being explicitly stated--that Adams's final draft was never going to be filmed without further modification. That's just the way the movie business works. Even the "final" approved script gets changed during filming because of (A) inspiration of the director to expand a scene, add a new scene, etc., or (B) the discovery that a scene that reads brilliantly on the page just doesn't work when filmed.
Douglas Adams wrote a lot of great stuff, but he couldn't figure out how to structure it to make it work as brilliantly in movie form as it had in book and radio play form. The eventual screenplay consisted largely of reorganizing Adams's own material into a shootable script. Where changes deviating from Adams's own writings had to be made, they deferred to his intentions as much as possible, by referring to his notes, unfinished musings, half-written scenes, etc.
Is there some stuff in the script that wasn't written by Douglas Adams himself? Definitely. Did they likely cut out stuff Adams would have kept? Probably. Did they put back in stuff that Adams had cut? Definitely.
Unfortunately, due to his untimely death, we'll never know what Douglas Adams himself would have thought of this movie. If you'd asked me five years ago if a movie of HHGG could ever be anything other than horrible, I'd have answered with an unequivocal NO. But Peter Jackson's version of The Lord of the Rings has made me change my mind. I think it can be good. Will it? I don't know, but I'll withhold my judgement until I actually see it.
It's not Ford's thumb.
Because of the crappy quality of the trailer, you can hardly see the electronic thumb he's wearing. Looks like a ring with an antenna.
To see it clearly, look here: http://www.h2g2movie.com/pages/february04.html and scroll down to the picture of the survival kit (with Towel, Babel Fish and Thumb).
same beard, same color of hair....2 heads, 3 arms, yep!...the same
I always thought that although HHGTTG was a damned good series of books, the two Dirk Gently books were slightly more intelligent and more fun for grown-ups.
It seems to me that "Dirk Gently's holistic detective agency" and "The long dark tea time of the soul" would be more suitable for a movie. More dialogue, less need for a narrator, better developed characters. Not a MIB-type Hollywood action movie, but a nice film nonetheless.
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati