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Hitchhiker's Movie is Bad, says Adams Biographer
Rollerbob writes "MJ Simpson, who has 'been studying and documenting the life and career of Douglas Adams for more than 20 years', has written a very in-depth review and plot analysis of the Hitchhiker's movie. As well as the full review that contains SPOILERS , he has also published a shortened spoiler-free version, as well as a list of things from the radio plays, records, books and TV series that have not been included in the movie. Hitchhiker's fans, prepare to be like Marvin ... very depressed."
"Really bad"
"vastly, staggeringly, jaw-droppingly bad"
"bad on a big scale"
"bad on a small scale"
"staggeringly unfunny"
"unfunny, pointless crap"
"an abomination"
"amazingly, mindbogglingly awful"
"a terrible, terrible film"
(And that's from the short review)
We all knew they couldnt fit the whole series in one movie. It should have been a trilogy at least.
But to remove Milliways, Disaster Area, and prehistoric Earth completely? Thats just horrible. It is not the same story. They have commited murder here. This movie should be renamed.
If this review is true, then I can't properly convey my disappointment.
Nostalgia is a powerful thing and I guess hoping that the movie could bring back some of the feeling I had from reading the first three books and playing the Infocom game was a little unrealistic.
I'm a big tall mofo.
As the review points out, the radio and play versions are two hours. There's no reason a movie couldn't be.
Sorry, but I guess I liked the Hitchhiker's series enough that I'll go see it anyway. Hell, I sat through the new Star Wars series thus far, and that was punishment enough.
As long as there's no JarJar, I guess I won't leave too pissed.
...I am not even interested in seeing it. The guide looks like it was pulled right out of ST:TNG (complete with LCARS), and the acting looks bad. Combined with the fact that it looks like they spent too much on the "whiz bang" CGI scenery, it's looking like I'm just not going to see this one.
It's a shame, really, to take such a good story and to make such a mess of it on the big screen. Of course, I suppose I should be used to that happening by now...
DBA? Software Engineer? My company is hiring! Click
It's only one person slamming the movie, a person I have never heard of.
When there is a general consensus among reviewers that it is bad then... I still won't listen because I want to watch the movie regardless.
Lord Of the Hitchhikers, Fellowship of the Galaxy
I remember similar discussions over plot removal in Lord of the Rings... I'll reserve judgement until I actually see the film, as opposed to reading someone's fanboy opinion.
Now only if Simpson had put his both heads together..
what else can you expect of a film? if you don't like what it's done to the novels, then don't go see it. simple. it happens with virtually all films that are made from literature.
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I personally, with no intention to troll, feel that this is what happens when you let an American write English humour. The writer clearly had no concept of what made that scene funny - in his mind, it was a joke about not being able to find something. The dialogue simpoly went over his head.
Really, was it realistic to expect them to include everything?
If you want something that follows the book exactly try the BBC series - or, *gasp*, reading the books.
The real question is - what they did include - did they do that well? Is it a good MOVIE. Personally, I am willing to pay $10 to find out.
-Em
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
42?
No, 42 is the Answer, not the Question. The question is what the Question was!
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I'm sorry but these types of reviews are simply the worst on account of the person being so terribly close/obsessed to the orginal source material. Why not ask my ex-wife to give my current girlfriend a review of me?
-_-
I see a lot of people in denial here
Let's face facts, just because the source material is good, doesn't mean the movie is good.
Now unless you trust Ain't It Cool News, you'll have to admit, this baby's looking like a stinker coming to smell up Douglas Adams' good name.
Those are the facts. That's reality.
Did you expect better from Disney? They make kids movies, and the Hitchhiker can't be made into a kids movie. Kids wouldn't appreciate it.
So we've got a movie. A piece of shit movie.That Douglas Adams lost is life over.
Deal with it, fanboyz!
Oh wait...
if a bad movie which became a bad series also became a bad movie.
word.
With early review / press like this, the movie is being set up to bomb. There are a lot of fan boy movies that were "ok" movies but bombed because of the press.
The write up understates it, I think. From TFA:
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie is bad. Really bad. You just won't believe how vastly, staggeringly, jaw-droppingly bad it is. I mean, you might think that The Phantom Menace was a hopelessly misguided attempt to reinvent a much-loved franchise by people who, though well-intentioned, completely failed to understand what made the original popular - but that's just peanuts to the Hitchhiker's movie.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Here is another review of the movie.
"One thing's for sure... Douglas Adams would be very proud. In the end, that's the greatest success that Robbie Stamp and Spyglass Entertainment and Jay Roach and Touchstone could have hoped for."
I haven't RTFA yet (wanted to get this posted immediately), but I wanted to say that I don't think it will be bad because it doesn't include everything from the books, the radio versions, etc. It may be bad because it's *bad*; but that's a completely different from being bad because it deviates from the source material. Deviation from source material isn't necessarily bad - though it often is - and may be a necessary evil. (Or, in the case of Battlefield Earth, might have been a necessary good.)
--Ender
Off to RTFA now.
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
Does anyone know which books this movie was based off of? Just the first? I have looked but I could not find an answer, thanks.
1. There is no 'story' in H2G2. I do not even think it was meant to be a story anyway.
2. In all of its form, only the theme was the same, not the presentation/execution. So, why can the movie not be different? It carries on with the tradition of H2G2 - no two versions were ever same.
But agree to the point that it should have been a triology.
BTW, who do you think could have been the best (or better) Zaphod?
HHGTTG is a Disney movie. The Walt Disney Company is notorious for screwing with the plot lines and leaving out theme-essential elements of stories that it adapts into films.
What's that? I've never noticed anything like that in any film recently.
If this movie is as bad as the review states... It will have a long life in the theaters ;-)
(But, don't you think, Marvin should look like Bender?)
That part of the review is, of course, a satire on the Guide entry concerning the size of the universe (in case you didn't know, it's big). While I agree that the review is extremely disappointing, that opening paragraph needs to be taken with tongue firmly planted in cheek.
Every little hint of what was coming in the film has filled me with terror, the people making it, the trailers and the rumours. Looks like it will indeed be pants.
However, don't despair. The tertiary phase of the radio series, first broadcast in the UK late last year, was very reasonable. While not perfect it did manage to remain quite true to the original radio series despite the huge time gap between them.
For more info see http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/newseries. shtml
or http://www.abovethetitle.com/content/programmes/hi tchhikers/hitchhikers_solong.html
A fourth series is planned.
I think the main reason why the book is so well loved (it's one of the few books I've actually re-read) is because of the writing style, not just the plot.
Most of the humor and entertainment is in the narrative, and that rarely translates into a good movie.
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
I though Marvin was starving?
Yet another staple of my childhood turned into a downward marketing graph. I'll be boycotting the movie, because there was absolutely not one reason to make it. It's doubly evil because the only reason the current incarnation of the movie treatment (there have been MANY) wasn't made earlier is because, sadly enough, Doulas Adams would only have let this happen over his dead body.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Well obviously it'll suck. I just finished the trilogy myself and have fell in love with HHGG. It was a shame to even finish it..
Adams said all along he wanted to do a movie but the studio wanted him to cut up his lifes work and make it "more to there liking". Well now he's dead they've done it. Nice to see we respect authors of geek memes..
I like muppets.
DNA himself knew that the book wouldn't work as a movie, so he wrote a completely new story-line. And if I remember the "interview" with the scriptwriter he tried to add a lot of stuff from the books that had to be cut.
So if you expect a re-telling of all the books you will be disappointed. It is the same way as the books are not a re-telling of the radio series (where are the bird people? or the robot disco?).
I'm not going to read any reviews, because I want to see the movie with an open mind. And I hope I remember to take my towel.
Captain Obvious arrives! You are a little late this morning. Did the Obviousmobile break down or something?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
So it becomes time then that the fans make a better version, right ?
...people who want to see a film that consists solely of material recylced word for word from something else.
A film should be different. There should be new things. It's suppossed to be a retelling of a story, not a carbon copy. I'd be pretty dissapointed if I went to see a film that consisted only of dialogue ripped from the existing novel. I don't see people up in arms when films are produced that transplant Jane Austen into Indian culture (Bride and Prejudice), or reinvent Shakespeare...
Anyone who goes to see a film adapation of a book expecting a word for word and scenario for scenario copy is, in my mind, slightly odd.
I've heard that this movie is so bad that the audience is urged to view it from the safe distance of thirty-seven miles from the screen in a well-built lightproof bunker, only after their eyes are gouged out. The director is now rumored to be serving eternity dead for "he really pissed off some geeks" reasons.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Now, we're all going to have to go see it just to se if it really is that bad.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
That the Hitchhiker's video game was good should not be trusted to review anything. I love Douglas Adams's work as much as the next person. Hell, I love it a whole hell of a lot more than the next person, but the Hitchhiker's video game was cleverly awful.
So many unsolvable puzzles. How the hell was I supposed to know that I needed the junk mail. If I had unlimited inventory, I would have picked up everything. It says fucking JUNK in the fucking name. Ha Ha. Really clever! Not fun to play though.
He calls Adams's dialogue "perfect." While it is teriffic, nothing is perfect. This review reeks of idolatry.
I don't know if this movie will be good. I will see it. I am encouraged that the producers appear to have put a great deal of care into the visuals judging by the trailers.
This isn't going to be Adams's work. I'm not expecting something as monumental as the radio series or the book. Even Adams himself lived in the shadow of that book. You don't make a masterpiece every time you paint a picture. I'm just looking for a good time.
The radio plays, books, albums, and miniseries have all been very different from one another thus far, and before he died, Adams said the movie would continue that trend. As someone who has experienced every incarnation of the story, I can say that I expected differences and can't understand why other people don't.
Most of this list is throw-away jokes, and things from the radio show that either a US audience wouldn't understand or would interrupt the pacing too much. It would be nice to see some of the guide entries re-inserted in some future DVD release, though.
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this is what happens when you let an American write English humour. The writer clearly had no concept of what made that scene funny - in his mind, it was a joke about not being able to find something. The dialogue simpoly went over his head.
:P
Or MAYBE, since it's a MOVIE, they don't have time to be true to the dialogue throughout the entire book. If they did that, the movie would be damn 10 hours long and un-released. You honestly think the joke you're quoting could really "go over someone's head"? It's not like it's a complicated or deep joke. It's funny for sure, I love the whole series of books, but you have to understand you just do NOT have time for that kind of dialogue throughout the entire movie. I'm sure there are plenty of scenes that are quite true to the original book. This just happens to be one that's not.
Joseph?
The original Hitchhikers was the radio series on BBC Radio 4. I still have the tapes taken from those series. Then came the books, which, when I read them, I found disapointing as they bore little resemblance to the original. Then came the BBC TV series, which was mind-numbingly bad.
To expect a movie made all this time later to bear any resemblance to the the original series, or in fact any of the future adapatations is unrealistic, to say the least.
I won't be watching it unless it gets rave reviews, which is unlikely.
I put off watching LOTR for 5 years as I didn't want to ruin a perfectly good mental image, but that was actually pretty well done. It doesn't sound as if the same can be said for this.
It seems to me the reviewer has some trouble distinguishing between bad films and badly written films.
I'm pretty sure the film is not "bad" bad. I doubt it's cinimatography is as bad as some of the stuff seen on MST3K. I'm sure the acting isn't as bad either.
Perhaps the script totally sucks. But consider this - would someone who had never read the books in their life enjoy this film? Probably. Would someone expecting the same as the books enjoy this film? Probably not.
But I don't think you can it "an abomination", especially when compared to the really bad films produced over the years. Seems to me the reviewer is a little bit stuck up trying to be a critic.
Do you think that your average American moviegoing audience would have appreciated the extremely wry and dry Brit humor of the Hitchhikers guide?
Thats the reason that britcoms are usually marginalized to public television stations here alongside Masterpiece Theater and the exciting History of Plywood.
TFA's writer admits that Adams was a dialogue writer and the book reflects that. Trying to bring it to the movies while appeasing the loyal readers/geeks and attracting enough normals to buy tickets to break even on it seems this side of impossible.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
I had a sinking feeling about the movie when I saw a trailer at the theater last month. It felt a bit off. The understated, humourous way in which the novels dealt with "big issues" was joyful to read as a child. The BBC series was low-budget and corny, with a late 70's Dr. Who feel to it, but the material was the star, not the actors or special effects.
I suppose I will drag myself over to the local video store and rent the old BBC series for kicks when the movie opens....
From the list of things that aren't in the film:
* The Guide entry on towels
Those bastards forgot their towel!
Which play? The one at the ICA in London in 1979 (of which I only saw the first few minutes, up to the destruction of the earth, after which everyone with tickets moved to the rotating auditorium - I had just had some exams and hadn't had time to book tickets in advance)
Or Ken Campbell's production at the Rainbow, Islington, which had very poor reviews, but did have an interesting recipie for the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster (I've still got half a bottle of Blue Curaço? somewhere).
Or the production by the Theatr Clwyd, with a remote controlled Tonka bulldozer?
Did anyone really expect this to work out well? I personally expected any future guide movies to be horrid as soon as I found out Adams had died. Why should anyone expected an American movie industry that has taken comedy into the bowels of sophomoric garbage to do anything good with a decades-old witty British novel?
Last year's big indie comedy based on a book fashioned after a teen road-trip sex comedy, with middle-aged actors and a lot of pretentious wine references, but there was nothing intellectual about it. Expecting Hollywood to risk releasing a big-budget movie targeted at the high-IQ crowd is moronic at this point.
On the upside, at least Hollywood can only keep up this trend a few more years before they have to come up a new trend - let's just hope that this time it isn't yet another lowering of standards. Going from disaster movies to an endless string of sexual and scatalogical jokes was pretty awful, so maybe we can expect redemption if the rest of Hollywood decides to follow the lead of Peter Jackson in doing movies that don't aim for idiocy.
for someone who says they spent 20 years studying DA, this person sure is oblivious.
/. crowd: how many of you have done anything other than read the book? {waits for the couple dozen people to raise their hands} So you that are still raising your hands...it was the radio show, right? How different was the radio show versus the books? Almost as different as it was from the TV show, the records, and the video game. How in the HELL is the screenplay, which DOUGLAS ADAMS HIMSELF WROTE, supposed to be exactly like the "radio plays, records, books and TV series" when the "radio plays, records, books and TV series" are very little like each other? Sure the screenplay has been changed a little - always happens. But not much, and it is from Douglas Adams himself you'll find that the screenplay (aka "movie script") is supposed to be different. Movies are a different medium than books, video games, tv shows, and radio shows. Of COURSE it's different.
Why compose a list of things from the "radio plays, records, books and TV series that have not been included in the movie?"
Quick - a show of hands from the
As soon as I heard Disney was involved with this project (especially after Adams' untimely death, so he'd be unable to do anything to save the integrity of the story), I knew it was doomed.
The British wit is what made the HHGG books so great-- but it would soar over the heads of the vast majority of Americans, who are too busy watching reality shows to have ever heard of, much less read, anything Douglas Adams ever put on paper. So it was a foregone conclusion that much of the essence of the book was going to be dumbed down or removed outright and replaced with poopy jokes or some such.
On a positive note, they are making a movie version of The Honeymooners with an all-black cast, and unnecessarily remaking The Bad News Bears this year, too (must they rape EVERY fond memory of my childhood for money???), so HHGG might not be the worst movie this year in terms of offending fans of a cherished American pop-culture institution.
Gigli got better reviews than this..
*commits seppuku*
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what's right." -Isaac Asimov
Thanks. Now I know why "Police Academy" was such a dismal flop, and no sequels were made.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
HHGTTG was a radio show before it became a book. The book was based on the transcript of the radio show.
Wow you are ignorant to assume that. Most "Americans" i know consider it to be classic literature even at its young age. It is read in many colleges already. Dont assume we wouldnt get it. Although i am sure many of the younger generation 18 might not, many older than that would.
Evidently, even the Guide entry on towels was removed from the film!! (See the link of "things not included" - warning: spoilers.)
I'm sorry, but if they couldn't even be bothered to keep that in, I can't be bothered to go see the film.
I know that a lot of the fans are going to be disappointed when they see the movie, but seriously, how many movie versions of anything end up being what you wanted them to be? Even LotR fans had stuff to complain about with the movies, and you see how popular they became. And if you want an even more drastic comparison of medias, just remember Super Mario Bros. You had to just like that movie for what it was, because if you were rating it based on its likeness to the games, you might as well go home.
So the same holds true with H2G2. I doubt they're gonna make a major mess out of it, but you know there's gonna be things that aren't perfect, for various reasons (intentional and otherwise), so the best you can do is just sit there and try to enjoy it for what it is. It's not like there's any other new H2G2 stuff to watch in place of it.
Much of Adams' genious lies in the narration, and not the actual plot itself. In addition, a great deal of humour stems from "cut-scenes" where Adams describes why things are like they are. Both of these are probably to cumbersome to include in the motion picture.
"A junior Disaster Area accountant, visiting the shipyard where this ship was being constructed, had demanded to know of the works foreman why the hell they were fitting an extremely expensive teleport into a ship which only had one important journey to make, and that unmanned. The foreman had explained that the teleport was available at a ten per cent discount and the accountant had explained that this was immaterial; the foreman had explained that it was the finest, most powerful and sophisticated teleport that money could buy and the accountant had explained that the money did not wish to buy it; the foreman had explained that people would still need to enter and leave the ship and the " accountant had explained that the ship sported a perfectly serviceable door; the foreman had explained that the accountant could go and boil his head and the accountant had explained to the foreman that the thing approaching him rapidly from his left was a knuckle sandwich. After the explanations had been concluded, work was discontinued on the teleport which subsequently passed unnoticed on the invoice as "Sund. explns." at five times the price."
In Soviet Norway, the møøse bites you.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The parent isn't a troll, although it may be flamebait. The mod who called it a troll may have proved its point though.
that was not exactly a mostly harmless review for the film. So long and thanks for the review.
long ago, scifi-icus (a muse, and son of the god of male puberty) offended olympus, and a curse was put on his lineage. he was to speak a language that only the tri-lambs could understand--a language that could never be accurately translated. and so it is to this day.
this DOES sound bad tho. no towels, no milliways??
A link that shows that "Police Academy" had sequels???? Captain Obvious, you are busy today! Thakn you SO much. I had no idea!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Maybe if films like that got some geek-cash, then they'd start creating sci-fi films of a similar caliber again (like Gattaca.)
Yes, please. See, I'm not only a sci-fi fan, I am cursed with this terrible insomnia. And anything approaching energy in a film frightens me. When I need entertainment, or sleep, I get out my Gattaca DVD. I'm pretty bored of it by now, though. I guess this is a good thing in a way, but I could sure use another movie or two to be bored by.
Gattaca. Mmm. So sleepy... ZZZZZZZZZZ
offending fans of a cherished American pop-culture institution.
Why I typed "American pop-culture" in there, I don't know, because it makes no sense when I'm lumping HHGG with The Honeymooners and The Bad News Bears. Please disregard the phrase. Thank you!
Or is this just an ironic piece of writing done in the same vein as Douglas Adams? -- Ok, probably not, but this kind of review makes me more ready to be suprised...
Let's face it the quality of the movie really has nothing to do with anything but how soon it gets released on DVD to recoup the production costs:
Good to Bad: Christmas '05
Bad to Worse: End of Summer/Back to school sales
Train-wreck: July 4th weekend free-with-the-purchase-of-a-happy-meal.
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
if a bad movie which became a bad series also became a bad movie.
+5, gibberish.
Yes, well, you see the movie itself is constrained to a finite amount of information and so they had to edit down the book quite a bit. I mean, they can't just go thowing every little bit of trivia in there can they? You have to include only the bits that are really vital to a hitchhiker's survial. Plus there are the editors to worry about. You put a little too much in and they just throw out the whole entry. We should be happy that Earth is even mentioned at all.
I always thought marvin as something very humanoide (like bender or c3po). In the review, they stated that douglass adams had some input on the major changes from the book. Anyone know if this was douglass adam's idea?
now all I have to hear is that the Fantastic Four movie sucks, and the War of the Worlds remake sucks, and I can go do something else with my summer.
According the the subject line, Adams Biographer says the Hitchhiker's movie is bad. Who is Adams Biographer? What part did he play in the movie?
Trust me, I know exactly one person besides my geek co-workers and people on /. who have read it-- and I know and discuss books with a lot of people!
This is hysterical, and probably the only proper reply to a post that unsuccessfully tries to infer generalizations where they do not exist.
If someone was making a movie about your life, it would most likely be a 40 minute TV special with the notoriously unfunny Bob Saget or Tori Spelling portraying you. Of course you'd be upset.
It's a movie based on a book fer cryin' out loud! They never turn out like the book unless you pump billions of dollars into the project and hire the bearded madman from NZ; and even then you don't get annoying characters like Tom Bombadil, so the purists will still have something to whine about.
I'm glad it has been at least 10 years since I read HHGTTG. I might even be able to enjoy the movie.
You cannot take the experience of reading LOTR - or any literary work of art - film it, and market it as some kind of equivalent or transmutation - it's dishonest and, due to the confusion deliberately created by marketing under the same name, ruinous to the reputation and value of the original work.
Most people - the sheeple - understand the movie named "LOTR" as some kind of replacement or upgrade to the original literary experience. That's utter nonsense. Artistic principle is involved - and the fat, dumb, TV-addicted mass could care less. Try explaining to them that Tolkien's book was never escapism, now that 12 hours of ultra-escapist pap is being marketed under the same title.
However, I realise that the process of selling "rights" means that one is opting in for the process of artistic destruction... and Tolkien sold the "rights" lock stock and barrel way back when, so the owners are able to appropriate the name of his work for commercial purposes. But that doesn't make it any less of a fallacy that the movie "is" or "is related to in any way except by name" to the book.
you had me at #!
...astronomers will leverage the release of Yet Another Destroy-the-Earth Movie to talk about the more scientifically likely ways of doing so. Woo!
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Maby they just need a towel.
If the radio drama, or the books is what you consider the ultimate perfect expression of the Hitchhiker's series, why in the world are you even considering watching the movie in the first place?
If you're so high strung that someone retelling a story you like in a manner you don't like drives you to this much insanity, you're really losing it. Do you actually think all the movie tie-in merchandise is going to be rewritten to conform to the book? No! When people go to Barnes & Noble, or Borders, or Amazon when they want the movie tie-in book, they're going to get the actual original book, and wonder of wonders, they're going to actually read what you like! Or buy a copy of the radio play and hear in their car on their way to work, or rip it to their iPod.
Jeepers creepers people, get your heads out of your asses.
I seem to recall that DA saw Marvin as a "golden man" with a depression the size of a planet.
Plus he is always described as a "paranoid android" NOT a robot. We can forgive the TV version as the voice was perfect. But the movie should have done better than a moving light fitting.
As a geek classicist, I feel compelled to point out that muses are female. Though I suppose the off-spring of Male Puberty personified would be somewhat confused.
I thought that Karey Kirkpatrick was a Brit? Anyway, I doubt the problem is the screenwriter: even this reviewer says that many of the stuff that was bad in this version appears to be the result of ruthless editing. If he's referring to film editing and not script editing, well, that's Disney's fault (and look at some of the missing bits: for instance, the reference to the disproof of God; the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster and Eccentrica Gallumbits. It's celar that Disney is aiming at a "family movie" here.
Hard to tell what you are saying, but is your meaning that "anyone knows that Americans do not love stupid humor like everyone else" must be an insecure foreigner from a lesser country?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The Guide is ALWAYS perfectly accurate. Reality might get things wrong sometimes. :)
... for raping my memories.
42
this might be unpopular, but really people.
here's my review of LOTR 1, for example:
1. taylor girl doesn't know how to play
2. jackson is NOT a first rate director
3. aragorn beats 9 nazgul with a torch? come on.
4. aragorn and elf women cuddle while frodo is dying in the background?!
5. elfs are 3 feet tall. this is not shown in the film. watch willow for crissake. a byproduct of this is that merry and pippin remain undifferentiated throught LOTR 1,2,3.
6. gandalf and elrond winking contest in the famous meeting: didn't people SEE THEM wink? is this some corporate drama??
7. boromir is a bad actor. and aragorn has no presence either, not a chirstopher walken type that's for sure
8. lagolas. come on. he almost doesn't speak, and when he does it's all classic yes-man phrases
9. moria chase before they get to the stairs is totally missed. great potential there.
10. final battle scene also totally screwed: where are people located? way too unclear and DON'T tell me that was the point
11. boromir/aragorn corridor conflict is downright pathetic. can't they communicate?
12. nazgul murdering blankets scene also coulda been shot much better. jackson sucks.
of course LOTR 1 is the best of the 3.
If you've read the book, you already know the story, so how can the movie be spoiled? Of course I'm sure there are many people that went to see The Passion of the Christ and said, "Don't tell me how it ends!"
"This is a terrible, terrible film and it makes me want to weep."
Ouch.
This really does break my heart, because I've been a fan of Hitchhiker's Guide since birth (I'm 15 and my parents read it to me, and I learned to read using these books!). Maybe since I'm open to differences due to the fact that no 'Guide' version is exactly alike, I'll enjoy this movie. Ohhh, I certainly hope so. : |
I hope that everyone realizes that a good book and a good movie are two different things. A story can be taken from a book and turned into a movie while preserving almost everything from the book. Does that mean it'll translate to screen and be at all entertaining? No. It's similar to fanboys complaining about dubbing vs. subtitles. If the dubbing translates the story and the spirit better than just reading a translation while characters babble incomprehinsibly, then I say go with the dubbing. Thus, if the spirit of the books (even with some of the most humorous parts of the Guide left out and a whole bunch of half-assed puns thrown in) is preserved and the movie is enjoyable and entertaining, then I say good job to those involved. Otherwise, they can shove off. That said, I rather liked the old BBC version that I borrowed from my municipal library. I didn't see any real reason to make another movie.
The biography of douglas adams is possibly the most worthless unintersting boring piece of paperwaste ever printed.
It does the best job of portraing as very interesting guy in the most braindead fasion.
It's a science how this man can make a person feel like jumping of a dam when reading about there favorite auther.
People should be given money if they buy this book. The biographer should be banned from all forms of writing utilities.
Do tell what that means. Is it what you look like after reading "The Raven" poem in one sitting? Here's Po, if you are referring to his face.
In truth, what are the odds that this movie was anywhere near as good as the book/radio series? I mean, this is a modern adaptation, not origial Adams humour. What'd Shakespeare think of "Shakespeare in Love"? Asimov of "I, Robot"?
I'm going to see the movie, and I am willing to bet that I'll enjoy it, even though I could probably quote you whole chapters of the books. This is because I am not expecting Douglas Adams' work of genius, but a nifty little "hollywood" film based on a story I like.
On an slightly different note, it'd be interesting to note if anyone knows of any books/stories/shows that are akin to Adams' style of humour. Any ideas?
This movie came about because one of Adams' heirs owned the rights to sell, and was not prevented from doing so by any terms laid out by the estate.
Copyright is, for all practical purposes today, perpetual. If authors and owners of content don't take advantage of that in order to keep their work from being exploited, who are we to complain about it?
http://pqrt.org/index.php?idx=details&id=86ea1fb1a d86b71001d1b10a2a024803f02113a5
If the reviewer is accurate, (and I have no reason to doubt it,) this movie is nothing like Mr. Adams would have wanted.
I believe Douglas Adams once made a comment about how good humor was a gift to the intelligent - those that weren't intelligent really didn't understand it. Judging from the long review, this movie isn't aimed at an intelligent audience.
I guess I'll wait for it to hit video (maybe late May,) and rent it on a day when I want to punish myself and feel bad.
Because for crying out loud - just compare the original radio play, the books, the new radio play, the tv series..
Douglas Adams was a sensible person, you don't go out and carbon copy what works sublimely as a radio play, and sell it as a book - you reinterpret, you cut bits you didn't like etc. etc.
From what I've seen, the movie looks sod all like the other interpretations, but it retains the spirit of the work - H2G2 doesn't work if you do a straight translation to film, just try and imagine it. You also have to deal with the largely chaotic nature of the original, the episodic framework, and the fact that in the play it's ok to stop a couple of times per episode to have the Guide explain what the hell is going on with Milliways for example.
Douglas Adams was barely faithful in transition.
The new radio series is totally disconnected from the first two, and that worked out great.
This guy knows so much about Douglas Adams? He should certainly know that. It was even a running gag - in cases where the Guide is innacurate, it is always reality that has it wrong.
So, Don't Panic, for crying out loud.
fortune -o
If this movie is as bad as Adams' biographer mourns, it's really an opportunity in Vogon clothing. The studio apparently just blew a bundle licensing the look & feel of the francise, some brand-name actors, and some special effects. But have dropped and changed the story, many of the jokes, and most of the Guide entries. That mishap creates a vacuum of a real H2G2 movie, while the marketing expands that vacuum to cover a vast audience beyond the fame of the previous renditions of the story in radio, book and TV.
At the same time, exactly the kind of tech Adams described in his stories - virtual/artificial reality, instantaneous travel, cheap powerful consumer computers, etc - is becoming available across the Internet, like an Earthbound galaxy. Something ought to get pulled into existence, a quantum foam crackling into life in the mediasphere. Personally, I'd love to see a distributed mechanimation web, with sets and characters from the books, running on servers around the Net. Each scene could run on its own, with preprogrammed tours showing chapters in the original sequence, or any other order. A HHG GUI could include the entries from the original stories, plus entries of the story elements themselves, and anything else as a Wiki. All linked together bistromathematically in a distributed catalog of the distributed space.
Adams completed a herculean task, getting his story produced in most 20th Century media before his untimely death (or unexpectedly long lunch at Milliways). The 21st Century has failed him so far, with this apparently bad, insanely bad, worse than that movie. But just like the Galaxy in the story, we don't have to let mere total failure stop the fun. We can get on with our lives, without depending on the marketing hacks at Sirius Cybernetics Corp who have finally merged with their Complaints division in releasing this film. Share and enjoy (TM).
--
make install -not war
the film also suffers by having an entirely nonsensical plot. It is driven by convenience and unexplained happenings.
Did the reviewer even read/hear the originals? I mean, surely this is a complaint with the original material as well.
God, now they're going to rape "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe". I can hear the "high concept" on this one: "Harry Potter meets that Hobbit movie, with Talking Animals! We've "sexed up" the magic and the fighting!"
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Judging by the website design, I think this reviewer suffers from a distinct lack of taste.
It's probably safe to say that he's just unsatisfied with the screen adaptation, and that no movie shorter than six hours in length could've satisfied him.
I'll hold out on judging the movie until I've actually seen it.
I don't trust most movie critics because honestly most wouldn't know a good movie if it bit them on the butt. And just because you're writing someone's biography it doesn't mean you understand them, or even -Like- them!
The proof will be in the pudding. We will all just have to see it and make up our own minds. Taking the word of someone who's life is so boring that he spends all of his time writing about other people's isn't what I would call a good bet.
And we would know the question if it wasn't for those damn Vogons!
He doesn't seem to realise that the HHG series is one of the most self-inconsistant in all of creation.
Did you know that not every Adams-created HHG even had towels?
There's only like, four or five things that are actually in every single version Adams created.
Saying one version is "not true" to another is just missing the point.b
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
Firstly, I do agree that while Americans can of course appreciate English humour, they're not very good at recreating it. Most Englishmen in Hollywood movies seem to be stereotyped versions of Lorded upper class types, although movies such as "Lock, Stock and two smoking barrels is changing that". Apart from that American humour, especially American Hollywood humour is usually based on extremely overdone gags, possibly because the producers feel they need to dumb the movie down enough so that vast audiences will understand it. Subtlety is not one of Hollywood's strengths.
In other words, this movie would probably never have worked out in the first place. Hollywood is not capable of subtlety, especially in humour, and good English humour involves subtlety.
I'm grateful for the review and all the spoilers. I won't be going to watch this film, although, to be honest, I knew that when I saw the trailer.
DNA himself knew that the book wouldn't work as a movie, so he wrote a completely new story-line. And if I remember the "interview" with the scriptwriter he tried to add a lot of stuff from the books that had to be cut. ...you manage to get it working, without changing the real story. See LotR. If you look at the extras (ok, so I love that triology), they had a lot of terrible ideas. Arwin as Xena the warrior princess, Sauron reappearing on the battlefield (the light of him appearing was redone as the eye pointing his attention there), Frodo running Gollum off the cliff like a murderer to name a few. Lots of tiny things that didn't work with the movie's script were redone, like Gandalf speaking of the Gray Havens instead of actually seeing it.
In the end, they made it all work despite "not working". Can HHGTTG be made into a movie, without really changing the story? I'm sure it can.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This is the ultimate fanboy. He was the biographer of DNA. You can't get more fanboyish than that!
Take it with a grain of salt people. Lots of people bitched about the LotR series leaving out Tom Bombadil (pointless to the entire plot) yet post-release no one seemed to care.
Watch, learn, then form your own opinions.
anyone who uses that ugly frickin light blue color as their homepage background LACKS EYES and has no business calling himself a film reviewer.
I can't believe I've seen this review linked on like every website I've been to today (well, not everyone, but fark, metafilter, and now slashdot).
The review is idiotc. He's basicaly complaning that everything in the book isn't also in the move, and that the movie isn't exactly the same as the book. Well, what the hell did he expect?
He claims that the script is horrible, and a travisty compared to what Adams would write, yet Adams wrote the screenplay himself before he died!
What a stupid review, and it's not done by a professional film reviewer, but a fanboy dissapointed that it's not letter-perfict with the book. Well, who would want to see a movie that was exactly the same as something they'd already read. I would have enjoyed Sin City a lot less if I'd read the stories word-for-word already.
Oh well, whatever.
naked? you need one of one of these
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Heh, actually I find that the two complement and fill each other out quite nicely...
The actor part of me gives me the social skills and charm that the techie side often can lack, whereas the techie side provides the logic and reason that most actors have no CLUE about.
Therefore I am comfortable talking/performing in front of thousands of people, and also equally comfortable sitting at home alone hacking my website on my linux boxen!
"Life is tough but we're tougher. You only get what you give, so give all that you've got." --Tony LaRussa
Those things wern't in the first book either, or so I've heard. Does that mean the first book sucks too?
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I sat through the 6-part TV series and got (at least some measureable amount of) enjoyment out of it. I'll be impressed if the movie is less entertaining.
Well, one would hope that these other "Americans" of whom you speak at least have a grasp of basic writing skills. Unlike, say, you.
The TV miniseries didn't have a guide entry on towels, and I'm ****ing shocked that some of you claim that this is a 'Disney-fied, CGI Trash, No humor-type film'. 1. Disney is only distrubiting the film, nothing more 2. The Directors, Writers, and producers are all fans of Douglas Adams. 3. This isn't the final version of the film, and the MJ is an asshole whose been against this production team since day one. Do some goddamn research before putting the film down
Seriously, this is Disney. We all know Disney. They replace the good stuff with 5-year-old humor so that little kiddies can go see the movie and pretend that they are having fun, and then produce a whole line of action figures, board games... to make money out of Douglas Adam's great work. Seriously, did you expect a 5-year-old to get the celler bit? I do, but that's not the Disney way! This sort of Disney's-copying-a-book-wow isn't worth the all this hype.
As much as I hate seeing it, it is considered proper grammer to use infer to mean imply.
http://www.answers.com/infer&r=67
Seriously, when I started seeing action packed advertisements with a real lack of british accents for a series of books I had always considered to be prime examples of that uniquely British brand of satrical absurdity, I knew something was probably very wrong.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Because it's not an opinion of a movie.
It is a detailed examination of the long-awaited film adaptation of a much-loved science-fiction book by an individual who knows the material, loves the material, and feels deeply that what made the story worth making into a movie has not been represented.
I know the story, and that's what I want to know. Did they fuck up.
That's all I want to know when I read any movie review. If I have an opinion, I want a review to match. If it's "New Movie Du Jour", I could care less, even go without a review - like Sin City.
From what I understand, Sin City is a triumph in regards to "telling the tale". HHG is exactly the opposite.
And it's actually funny and entertaining. I have heard the radio play, and read at least the first book. This is a case of someone WAY too familiar with something that has changed his brain chemistry and unwilling to see something new in the old. Look, if you write an 8 page diatribe on a movie, and feel that the movie is a crime against humanity, perhaps you are a little too emotionally invested. It's funny and quirky and the whole time I was watching it, I couldn't believe how similar it was to the radio play. Consider the source of this man's review, he is a FANATIC.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The movie may suck completely to those of us who have read and loved the original. But odds are people who haven't read the book will love it (some of Douglas Adams genius will shine through no matter what they do) and those people may read the books and get as much joy out of them as we all have.
Michael Jackson "Bad" or as in "not quite that bad!"?
According to the long version of the review, Vogon poetry isn't audible to the audience in this movie.
I guess whether that is a good thing or not could be debated.
No, I won't. I won't rent or buy a copy of it on home video either. The chief beneficiaries of my buying a ticket will be organizations that want to control how we use our computers, that promote extending the term of copyright, that want to turn our libraries into pay-per-view centers, that push for technological control laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and that export these and other horrible ideas around the world in trade treaties. We are being offered these ongoing restrictions on our freedoms in exchange for a couple of hours of entertainment. I don't see this as a beneficial exchange. Therefore, I will not help them hurt me.
Digital Citizen
A great book turned into a crappy movie.
Thats... Not news. Or even new.
In other news. Water is wet. And breathing is good.
I'm sure everyone has a favourite book, tv show or nostalgic memory from their past. The Guide is quite a high ranking one for me. I was always delighted by the BBC adaptation, despite it's flaws I think it holds up well against its age. I will reserve judgement on the film until I see it, there is editing time left according to another more positive review I have read. The thing that will upset me most is if this cult classic is delivered to a mass audience in a bad or misrepresented format and I will have to cope with people talking about it with a dim view without ever knowing of its existance until it appeared on film. I can already overhear the conversations down the pub. Ho hum, at least I had the pleasure of the original radio, tv series and books. All of which do the story justice in their own unique way.
I'd like to add a few things.
What exactly are we waiting for? Those of us who have read the book already know the story, why will we now subject ourselves to a condensed 2 hour version of mere pictures and sounds with no substance(and pay some $8+ as well)?
Movies are becoming the true tool of wasted-time and money, and most people blindly march to this weekend ritual as if their entire state-of-mind depended on the fulfillment of a few hours of a 'movie fix'.
Seriously folks, whats the point of us sitting unproductively for 2 hours at a time while we make some guy (Lucus, Speilberg, etc.) rich and fat?
I just don't get it anymore. Someone please explain it to me, because its no longer about art (as if it ever was), and all about convincing us that we should give up our money to be supremely satisfied in our social lives.
I guess I just don't get it. I read THGTHG years ago at the suggestion of friends and found it a bore.
I saw a quick trailer for the movie and found it more entertaining then the book was.
Any man who studies the life of another man for 20 frickin' years, will probably die alone!
vast majority of Americans, who are too busy watching reality shows
Um, hello? Pot, kettle here. You guys keep shipping crappy reality TV ideas over here. Big Brother comes to mind immediately (sorry, don't follow the genre), though I heard something about a show where they're masterbating farm animals. So I don't think you have much room to talk.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
If you've read the books, ask yourself why you want to see this movie. Most likely, it's for nostalgic reasons. You might want to bring back the feelings you got when you read it the first time. I never got excited when I heard they were making this movie. Having read the series, I don't feel the need to watch a condensed version where I'm required to check my imagination at the door.
One of the greatest things about books as a medium is that a lot of the audio/visual details are left up to the reader to figure out. Words can never completely describe someone's personality, what a landscape looks like, or the subtle tones and inflections used in speech. Words can get you in the general vicinity, but the reader's mind has to fill in the gaps.
In effect, each time someone reads a book, it's customized for that particular reader. It's tailored to a single imagination. Science fiction is read by people who tend to have great imaginations, and a well-written sci-fi novel lets its readers' imaginations play a major role in what they get out of the book.
HHGTTG is one of the best sci-fi books ever for this very reason. Adams didn't use pages of prose to describe things in minute detail. He left that up the reader.
(Side note: If you've read the Tolkien trilogy, you know how much work he put into description. This is one of the major reasons it translated so well to the big screen. This is also why the books were so long.)
Looks like my lowered expectations have avoided a major let-down.
They tried to make a movie that would appeal to Americans. Americans are really dumb so don't try to give them anything clever.
Not the case. It's just the studios think this is the case. No other country has such a low opinion of itself as the US.
Get a clue guys. Take the radio show and dub in the video. Never ever let Disney near anything clever! They don't get that clever might actually be funny.
Did you not see Pirates of the Carribean? Somehow that got away from the rewriters of doom.
He mentions in the Salmon that he could not influence the film in a good way if memory serves me.
I have a 35-hour road trip coming up in 4 weeks, and I've never heard the radio show. The only recordings I can seem to find of it are CDs full of MP3s. My truck doesn't have an MP3-capable CD player. Short of buying the MP3 CDs and burning them up to CDDA, is there a way to get audio CDs of the radio show?
Gattaca is slow paced like real life. I want laser beams and rockets and robots and ninja powers. OK, maybe some hacking and some dinosaurs too.
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
Look, we're geeks. If the movie turns out to be as bad as the reviewer says, why don't we do something about it? We have the books and the audio from the radio series. Why not combine them, make a Machinima (a game like Half-Life 2 or Unreal Tournament has most of the facial animation and posing tools we'd need), and release it on p2p?
/. recently highlighted.) It's definately do-able.
Legal issues, you say? I say they shall be smited with Thor's magic hammer. If you screw with the fans, they'll make what they want whether you like it or not. (Just think about all the Star Wars and Matrix fan films and parodies that have come out, some of which
Could it be as bad as the British TV series was. Wow was that terrible. Cheezy and bad. Still worth watching once for laughs. The books though, I could read over and over.
This makes my point exactly. I loved The Phantom Menace from the first time I saw it and it gets better every time I see it. I just watched it a month ago and it was a blast. I see that same sentiment all over various Star Wars discussion forums from people who claimed at first to have been disgusted with the film. The more they watch The Phantom Menace, the more they come to like it, to realize that their initial judgment against it was way off base. Fans (over)reacted negatively to it not because it was a bad film per se, but because it wasn't the film they expected.
I suspect that will be the case with Hitchhiker's Guide too--huge, fanatical fan following who won't accept anything short of the absolute perfect film they can see in their own mind. And that ain't gonna happen. I feel sorry for the less-uptight fans of the book who might actually enjoy the film and will have to defend their point of view.
NPR had this Tolkien fanatic on a few weeks after the release of Fellowship of the Ring film who was tearing the film apart for being a complete fuck-up. When pressed why, he would cite the most esoteric shit from the book that was left out of the film.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
But it sounds like, out of a sense of balance and fairness, they've added:
Try Empire, a British film magazine that has been panicking over the Hitchhiker's movie since it was first announced, and has now released their full review.
4 stars (out of 5) and the quickie write up says:
Mostly harmless. A very British, very funny sci-fi misadventure that's guaranteed to win converts. Want to go to The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe now, please.
They admit it's not perfect, but their review's a damn sight more positive than the linked one.
As we said, those hardcore Hitchhikers out there have little to worry about. Although they should be warned that the movie's faithfulness means all its best jokes will be very familiar. For them, it's more a case of basking comfortably in the nostalgia than laughing out loud. But if you're new to all this, and have no idea about the significance of towels, or what a whale and a bowl of petunias have in common, then, boy, are you in for a treat...
Mark
Liked this comment? Why not buy me something nice
(Disclaimer: I've been a hitchhiker fan for longer than I care to remember, and was lucky enough to work with Douglas for a few years at The Digital Village, and have been peripherally involved with some of the publicity material for the film, so you can deduce whatever bias you like from that.)
Today I saw the movie for the second time, and once again I find myself coming to the conclusion that I must have been shown a different movie to the one that MJ Simpson saw. Having twice been in a cinema full of people who were laughing all the way through at the movie (and these are British people, for crying out loud!), and then reading that the movie is "staggeringly unfunny" leaves me somewhat confused. Partly because I heard all those people laughing myself with my own ears, but mainly because I loved the film.
For any hitchhiker fan, there will be moments in the film that you feel are not what you expected, or that bits were left out that you wish weren't. This is inevitable, no matter how good the movie was. This is just a fact of life when adapting a book - you're never going to capture everyone's imaginings and commit them to film. It's just part of the compromise you go through when you adapt a verbal medium to a visual medium. Neither are you going to 'get everything in'.
For me, the clearest indication of this is Simpson's laundry list of stuff that isn't in the film, that presumably he feels should be. Suffice it to say that if all that stuff was in the film, I don't think it would be a film I would want to watch. Pointing out that the description of the Vogon ships hanging in the air "in exactly the same way that bricks don't" is not in the film shows a stunning lack of understanding of what makes a good film. I can find a lot of descriptive prose in the books that didn't make it into the film - and you can probably guess why.
I mean, how was that going to work? Was Arthur going to say something like "See that spaceship Ford? Have you noticed the way it hangs in the air in exactly the same way that bricks don't?" I'm sure that would have been the beginnings of a cracking screenplay.
The simple fact is, which most people seem not to grasp, is that, yes, you could have put, e.g. the full conversation between Arthur and Mr Prosser into the movie, and it might only have taken an extra 30 seconds, but in, say, a 90 minute movie, you only have a limited number of 30 second chunks. If you remained faithful to every piece of dialogue in the source material, you'd over-run by at least an hour. At least.
Also included in that list is a load of stuff from the 2nd book, when the film makers have repeatedly stated that this film is based on the first book only (and not on all the books as some posters seem to believe). I mean, if it was based on all the books, how much stuff would they have to have left out then?
I've seen moans that the Guide entry on towels is not in the movie, how could it be left out, etc. conveniently forgetting that this entry didn't even appear in the first radio series. Also, if you think towels don't feature in the movie, think again.
As for the movie that I actually watched - as I said, I loved it. The acting was great - far from finding Arthur to be 'an annoying little prat', I thought Martin Freeman's portrayal was very funny and accurate. Even when Martin changes the 'I never could get the hang of Thursdays' line, it still sounds natural - so natural that I didn't even notice the change until the second screening. Sam Rockwell's performance as the unceasingly presidential Zaphod is a joy to watch. The Vogons and their unflinching bureaucracy is captured perfectly via some new jokes and situations that I'm certainly not going to spoil here - I recommend seeing the movie yourself.
The design and aesthetics of the Heart of Gold are nothing short of fantastic, in the face of which the natural fan's reaction to observe that the HOG doesn
In other words, does Britsh humor (aka "intellectual" humor) have a smaller audience here simply because we have a much larger population, ergo more people without the faculties to appreciate more sublime humor (aka "dumb" people).
Or in still more other words, are the British fans just as likely to share the same attributes as their Amercian counter-parts? (people who are not exactly mainstream)
Pay no attention to the review.
The reviewer seemed to be warped.
...wow, this guy really plays his cards close to his chest.
You are right.
I didn't see Pirates of the Carribean. Thanks for the suggestion.
Can someone let me know how exactly one would go about making this movie and having it not end up absolutely dreadful? Most of the story exists as background asides that can't be translated into something fluid for a movie so you'd be left with a nearly incomprehensible plot that isn't even funny anymore.
For those of you disappointed, how could this have possibly ended up good?
You gotta find first gear in your giant robot car
You can't trust AICN at all. Harry Knowles gave positive reviews to Godzilla, Blue Crush, Blair Witch 2, Blade 3, Episode 1 (and yet later started repeating the "Lucas raped our childhoods" mantra to appease the Talkbacks) and several other godawful films.
And it just so happened that for all those films, he was given benefits by the studio, like set visits or prescreenings.
Here's a quote from the negative review by the Adams biographer:
[blockquote]You know, I really haven't enjoyed writing such an intensely negative review of this film, but unlike certain websites and certain publications (mentioning no names but I think we all know who I'm talking about) my critical views are not swayed by the generosity of film companies.[/blockquote]
It's pretty obvious he's referring to AICN, who is famous for taking what Harry once openly begged for on the site--"pwesents."
"It's because Americans prefer humor that doesn't involve rampant stupidity, which is what 90% of all British comedy involves, especially Monty Python"
Americans love stupid movies. Most American movies are stupid.
When discussing British humor such as Monty Python or Hitchhiker's Guide, I would not call it stupid. Instead, I would call it intelligent silliness.
Most American's don't like intelligent humor because it would require them to think.
Obviously, this does not apply to the Slashdot minority.
Douglass Adams wrote the script to the movie. He had moved to america, though. Is that what you meant?
offensive tshirts
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
How do you suppose they fit every little detail into under two hours of runtime? The books are filled with little stuff that's basically subclause slapstick.
"There were little sandpipers running along the margin of the shore which seemed to have this problem: they needed to find their food in the sand which a wave had just washed over, but they couldn't bear to get their feet wet. To deal with this problem they ran with an odd kind of movement as if they'd been constructed by somebody very clever in Switzerland."
"Ford still had his hand stuck out. Arthur looked at it with incomprehension. "Shake," prompted Ford. Arthur did, nervously at first, as if it might turn out to be a fish."
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
These parts of really clever writing are what really make up the book. Combined with the dozens of smaller but memorable happenings and the fact that the movie actually would kind of suck if it just ended where the first book ended and no sequel was being made, how do you propose a film is put together exactly?
You're not going to get the book(s) reenacted in one and a half hour, just like you didn't just get the radio action written down on a script and published with the books (although the radio scripts are available). Take it for what it is, an adaptation of the fuzzy set of core Hitchhiker story, not a strict reenactment of the book.
Not in any specific order but Star Trek has been going to hell and is nothing like what made the original or even the sequel so loved by its fans. I don't exactly know what it is about DS9 or Enterprise that makes me so totally unintrested in them but something is missing from them that made the originals worth watching.
George Lucas showed with The Phantom Menance that he did not understand what made the original Star Wars so well loved. You can say that new movies are still commercial successes but that is missing something vital. Star Wars: A New Hope has a place in film history, Phantom Menace does not. In 20 yrs time the childeren of today will not give a toss about the new movies. What was missing? Well no Han Solo, no chewbacca, no millenium falcon. Star Wars was a slightly dirty universe with pirates. The prequels are bright shiny places with big palaces.
We have other beloved "stories" wich "hollywood" just doesn't seem to get. Mario brothers movie. How could it be so wrong. Why do allmost all game movies suck? Why does the new Doom movie take the doom out of the movie?
Red Dwarf was adapted for the american market and the result was so amazingly bad that even americans realized it. Don't know if this is true but Valva was approached for a Half-life movie but lost intresest when "hollywood" wanted to a add a love interest for Gordon Freeman.
If the review of the HHGTG movie is accurate then it sounds like a typical case of hollywood just not getting the source material. Some people seem to excuse this in this case by pointing out that you can't do bookstuff in movies since it would be boring. These "americans" don't get that the guide has been a radio play, a book, an album, a computer game, a tv series and a stage play. All of them managed to be very guide like even if they had massive differences in them. The tv series and the stage play especially should proof that it isn't impossible to turn the guide into a movie.
I think that just as in the previous mentioned examples the people involved in making the movie just didn't get it OR are so convinced of their own capabilities that they think they can improve upon the source material.
Paramount, fire everyone involved with star trek and hire the writers for the originals series. George Lucas, let the remaining three movies be made by other people. Just do the production. Doom movie crew, doom is on mars with marines and a invasion from hell. That is it.
Will they listen? Of course not. This is hollywood trying to get "geek" culture.
And that is the real problem. Hollywood by definition is hip and happening and cool beautifull people being intresting. Star Trek, Star Wars, Doom, computer games, the guide are the domain of nerds. Silicon valley has proven that they can make excellent Star Trek and Star Wars and Hitchhiker guide games. Because game makers are nerds and so understand geek culture. Hollywood will not and cannot get "it".
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
See how movies are really made. Cry.
If you are adding the extraneous "u" after the "o", as you did to humor, shouldn't this term be spelled "pou-faced" ?
This is the guy who replaced Howard Hesseman on "Head of the Class", right? Howard was no comic dynamo, but Connolly was much worse than Hesseman was.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Why should I listen to the opinion of some sycophantic biographer who is probably so jealous that he didn't come up with whole the HHGTTG series that he became completely obsessed with Adams.
I'll know how good or bad it was once I'm done with my popcorn and soda, thank you very much.
GET FREE APPLE STUFF!
"Gandalf is a wizard, why doesn't he cast more spells?"
Gandalf is a lazy cunt... he gets other people to light his fires instead of using a level 1 fire spell.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
The most well known is Red Dwarf. A classic BBC sci-fi comedy that was well received all over the world. Well all over the world by geeks and nerds. For reasons unknown some americans wanted to make an american version of it but altered for american tastes. They made a pilot wich at times can be found on P2P networks. It is so bad that it never saw the light of day on american tv.
Why was it so bad? Somehow the american producers who obviously must have seen the original just didn't seem to get it. They changed all the characters that just clicked in the original into versions that just didn't work. The original crew is a bunch of loosers. Nobodies thrown together and never winning. The american version makes them more hollywood. Lister less of a slob. Rimmer likable. For some reason the american producers never seemed to have gotten what made the british original work and become so loved.
It is not on its own. The british comedy classic "doing porridge" was adapted for american tv as well and bombed. Where the original was a comedy set in prison where there was humor in a non-humorous setting, a classic ep has just the two actors talking during the night confinement in their cell, the american version came closer to a regular light hearted sitcom.
It is not all one way however. The american "who's the boss" has a british version as well but missing all the chemistry. It is cold, sensible british and misses the italian fire that tony danza and whats her name brought to the original.
The biggest problem I think in making an adoptation of something is in that you are making an adoptation. Red Dwarf, Doing porridge, Who's the boss ALL did well in their original country AND in other parts of the world. So why then try to chance it? Because you want to reach an even bigger market? How can you possibly achieve this? Only by making your version more bland and less likely to upset the tastes of your expanded audience. Remove the slobbness from lister, remove the harsh reality of doing time from a jail comedy, remove lenghty dialog from the guide.
Some saying goes something like this, the translator is a traitor. I think this is very true when trying to translate a story to a new audience. These people who made the guide movie did not try to make a movie for guide fans. They made on for the "hollywood" audience. In doing so they had to loose elements that were to "geeky" or to "nerdy" like the guide itself and replace it with slapstick.
This movie is simply not aimed at us guide fans. For every popular story there is a porn version. Complaining that these porn versions are not fatefull to the original is just as pointless as complaining these hollywood versions are not faithfull. They have an audience to please that does not know or care about the originals.
If there is going to be a guide movie then it can only really come from the BBC. Just take the tv eps and watch them in one sitting with stale popcorn and an overpriced coke.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
On one hand, I want to see the movie. On the other hand, I'm so very, very afraid that it will be this bad. And if it is, it will seriously affect me because I really care about DNA's stuff. I know I will see it eventually, as I've soaked up all the previous stuff made by DNA. One can only hope... Anyway, I'll bring my towel to the theater.
It appears that the original pages have suddenly turned into error pages, a rather confused-looking sperm whale, and a bowl of petunias. Anyone have a mirror?
Everythign Hollywood tried to remake from the BBC is crap. Because it's all about the money, not making something good. Complete crap.
Why should the guild be any different?
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
...that they've turned it into a slick, substanceless CGI trainwreck. It's supposed to be a comedy and a satire. Dammit, dammit, dammit.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Scouring of the shire would've been a really cool thing to put in the director's cut..
::::::::::::NEWS FLASH::::::::::::
This just in: British people also watch reality tv.
Why would you expect anything else from Hollywood?
...but I really have a hard time believing that by "rather different from the TV version" he meant "absent of the type of humour that is normally associated with the Hitchhiker series". I could be wrong, though, since I am not a clairvoyant.
I love these threads because it's always so amusing to see what mistakes are made in the pedantic responses.
"...although parentheses or dashes would have been made it clearer..."
Would have been made it clearer, indeed.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Here is a man, who for some reason or another, seems to have devoted a large proportion of the last twenty years of his life to the veneration of the works of Douglas Adams.
Look at his CV in the Google Cache (since the original site's down), the guy looks more like a fanboy than an objective biographer: one of those people who becomes the "guy everyone ends up interviewing" in the fan community, but who doesn't have any real connection to Adams beyond his fandom.
Of course the review is going to be bad. He's devoted far too much of his life to a belief in the genius of one man. To believe that anyone else could match that man's vision by bringing Adams' work to the screen in his absence would be far too much cognitive dissonance for him to handle.
Plenty of links to positive reviews have been posted in other threads - I'll wait for the Rotten Tomatoes verdict, I think.
Charles
The more I learn about the Internet, the more amazed I am that it works at all.
To be more clear, I was not implying that your response, in particular, was pedantic.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
I'd recommend that you read previous posts. H2G2 isn't about the story (as nice as it was), as much as it is about the wit and humor, the banter. It seems that they took out much of the funny bits, leaving it a hollow shell of what it could have been. I'm not being pedantic here either, I respected the LoTR movies, even if they removed much of the backstory and charater development that was present in the (masterful) books. The LoTR movie at least captured the epic scope and atmosphere of the books, whereas H2G2 does not seem, from this review, to even come close.
Also when you adapt a movie from a book with a semi-fanatical and cult-like fanbase, you must expect SEVERE critisism if you move to far away from the original source (or sources in this case).
For a moment I though that your constant typos and mispellings were done for some opaque (yet deep) reason. But now that I realize that they aren't, I'm very frightened. Please don't criticize things if you cannot do it in proper English, it's hard to take someone seriously who cannot type/spell/parse the language. No flame meant, just a helpful suggestion to up your credibility. The fact that you mangled the abortion that is "13375p34k" is even scarier, though.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
(Garth Jennings, mh? Relative of Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England, worst poet of the universe?)
A lot of comments here point out that no version of HHGG has been like the others, that this inconsistency is something like HHGG's only constant, that what works for a radio play might not work for a book or a movie. This is true, of course. (I guess it's also telling that the part I liked best about the TV show were the guide entries - longish stretches of "Douglas Adams text". Still - the TV show, for all its flaws, was flawed rather than wrong, even though Marvin, Trillian, Zaphod, Slartibartfast's "car" etc. etc. are nothing like I'd imagined them.)
The problem, IMHO, isn't that the movie won't be exactly like the radio play, or book, or TV show, or even the Infocom game. They already exist, no need to duplicate them. And I can certainly see HHGG doing well with lots of special effects and "polish". The problem is that it might be bad as a movie, and not "in the spirit" of HHGG.
It's too early to tell, and I've probably got my own individual idea of what's "in the spirit" of it -- but to me there's a sense of vastness and interconnectedness and paranoia and darkness to HHGG, and a sadness that makes it so much more "sensitive" than, say, Spaceballs or Galaxy Quest or, I suspect, this movie. The Vogons, Arthur's colleagues, Russell, Fenchurch, Wonko the Sane, the man in the hut who "rules" the universe, the gift of the dolphins. It's funny, sure... but wistful, too, and idealistic in an often-been-disappointed kinda way, and it makes a point.
HHGG feels big. And sometimes the jokes are almost as depressing as they're funny. Remember the Golgafrinchams - a jab at modern life, yes, but also a piece of the whole "42" puzzle in that they (i.e. we) derailed the program that was to find the question to the answer. That's why Arthur pulls "six by nine" out of his Scrabble bag: 54, not 42. Eventually, of course, the Vogons came and blew it up anyway - not so much for a hyperspace bypass but for a conspiracy of psychiatrists, afraid that The Question might put them out of business. That's very HHGG. Nose jokes and slapstick aren't necessarily.
I know most of what I just mentioned takes place "later", after whatever the movie tries to cover. But the whole Magrathea, Earth Mk.II, Deep Thought, Mice, 42 plot doesn't. And the review doesn't make it look like those responsible for the movie had made much of an effort to preserve it, or to come up with something else that makes some HHGG-ish sort of sense. That I care about, not the number of Zaphod-Heads or towel references or whether Marvin looks like a Pokémon or a stack of spraypainted cardboard boxes. That's just decoration.
Geez. I really hope it'll be more than just a sequence of throwaway gags.
Or that MJ Simpson is way off the mark and the movie's nothing like that at all.
I think I'll enjoy the eyecandy, at least.
As for the Nokia phone bits, dunno. Could be product placement, but then again, aren't cellphones simply something like today's digital watches?
"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
"This movie is bad. Really bad. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly bad it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down to [insert bad movie here], but that's just peanuts to this movie."
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Saw it this morning, actually, for the second time - first was a 95% complete cut similar to the one Simpson saw, the second was the final edit. I went along with my friends Tim Browse (his review) and Sean Sollé (his review) - all of us worked with Douglas at The Digital Village, a company we joined mainly because we were already massive Hitchhiker's fans. (If you need further credentials for me, look here.
We've been involved with the film at various stages. Thus, the disclaimer. However, please also be aware that none of us would be defending a film that crapped all over Douglas's work, especially since it was such a fundamental part of our youth.
Most (though not all) of the spoilers that Simpson reveals in his review are true. Yes, the lying-in-front-of-a-bulldozer dialogue has been cut short. Yes, several key Guide entries are missing. Yes, some of the dialogue isn't as funny as it could have been, and a couple of the gags are corny rather than sharp. (Note: I said a couple. It's nearly two hours of film, there are still tons of good lines in there.)
It's at this point that Simpson's opinion of the movie and mine diverge rather radically, because he seems to think that you can judge the film's merits almost purely on what's missing, in combination with things that don't appear as quite as he'd have liked them. Personally, I loved it to bits. It's not perfect, certainly, and I agree with a couple of his criticisms (though with about 5% of his severity). But I fundamentally feel that it's true to the spirit of Hitchhiker's in so many ways, not just through the storyline and script (which is far, far better than MJ would have you believe) but also through visuals and design that are utter genius, reimagining Douglas's creations in totally new ways that still seem completely in keeping with his intentions. It wears its Britishness in a far more open and interesting way than any previous version of the story - the Vogons, in particular, are a satire of traditional English bureaucracy that borders on Hogarthian.
I could go through MJ's review point-by-point and debunk all the stuff - and there's plenty of it - which he's blown wildly out of proportion, or which is based on utterly blinkered thinking, or which is just plain wrong. But then, that would be succumbing to exactly the kind of checklist mentality that he has, and god, how I hate that. He seems to just want the radio and TV series again, on a bigger budget, thus completely misunderstanding the demands that the different media have. His review reads like he went in with a notepad and took score through the film, subtracting ten points every time a line from the original went astray, and based his final opinion on that. As others have said in this thread, it's exactly the same kind of fanboy nonsense that had LoTR fans doomsaying before its release, and it's just bullshit.
If you're the kind of fan who works that way, who demands pure fidelity to the original and nothing but, then you won't like this movie. However, given that every incarnation of Hitchhiker's has been pretty different (and this movie is staunchly in the same tradition), I'd say that you're a fan who's utterly missing the point. Simpson, in loudly complaining that the film's plot veers wildly all over the place, makes me wonder which "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" he's a fan of, 'cos it certainly isn't one I've ever seen. His review is also the only negative one I've read from a major fan - contrast it with this review from Jens Kellenberg, who runs one of the biggest HHGTTG
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as 'a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes,' with a footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent."
"MJ Simpson defines the marketing division of Beuna Vista Pictures as 'a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.'"
If this movie sucks, I say we get 'em!
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
God, now they're going to rape "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe".
Raping a witch is evil (she might be a witch but she's still a person); raping a lion is perverse (even- or especially- one that talks and is a metaphor for the Christian deity).
But as for raping a wardrobe, I'm not sure I can visualise that at all. You have some damn strange fetishes.
Slashdotters are weird.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Because they cannot edit out the permanent rumble of Douglas Adams rolling in his grave. A grave, I might add, that stress over this bloody travesty put him in.
They should give the project to an untried British crew of film-makers, give them a ton of money (about half what this cost should do nicely), keep the script more or less intact from the radio series and let them run with it. It'd be a massive cult success, guaranteed.
Even with any bad reviews, though, I'll probably drop actual cash on a DVD. After all, the Beeb's TV version wasn't perfect, either.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
The first intelligent sentence for ages!
This guy spent the last two decades studying what some other guy did? Imagine he's a real blast at parties:-
"So what do you do then MJ?"
"Well, I watch what that guy over there does and write it down - it's my life's work"
"er.. well that's nice.."
He's kind of like a mirror service then? Kinda handy now the source server's offline I guess, but even so - come on "MJ", get your own life!!
but then again if I don't like the movie I suppose I can just buy the book, closer to the spirit of the work anyways
Mens et Manus
... of everyone who decides not to see his movie based on a review by an obsessive that they saw linked on Slashdot.
All those brain cells desperately signalling to each other, and yet the best that slashdot can come up with is an enormous echo chamber of uninformed opinions repeated from a single source.
This nonsense makes Vogon poetry look like Shakespeare.
I knew it would be bad as soon as I saw the trailer and heard "... A SAMUEL L. BRONKOWITZ FILM!"
The lowest common denominator is always a factor when it comes to *anything* media.
I have to automatically discount, rather prepare myself for 20-30% more tepid, weaker, more stupid movie, CD, or TV program than I, personally, expect.
That goes for anything, from the Scooby-Doo Movie to Spirited Away.
It's when the expectations of that grading curve are exceeded that I can go, "Yes - that was a good $medium_delivered_experience"
This is what makes it suck to live among so very, very many people who couldn't give any more of a shit about so very much.
You guys keep shipping crappy reality TV ideas over here. Big Brother comes to mind immediately (sorry, don't follow the genre)
Bzzt. Wrong. Sorry, Big Brother is Dutch originally.
Though you are right about the pot calling the kettle black; the British watch vast amounts of crap reality shows. In addition, I don't even think that many of them originated directly or indirectly from the US.
Actually, it's notable that in the US, Survivor was a hit and Big Brother flopped; in the UK, it was the opposite way round.
Boom! Slashdot! Does anyone have the review mirrored?
If the preview didn't convince you that this movie will totally suck, then you don't know Douglas Adams' books very well. Definitely not going to see this one, a movie made so badly it might ruin the enjoyment of the great book it is based on.
The worst example I can think of this so far is "The Postman". What an awful, awful, horrible butchering of a book.
I suspect the author may have spent too much time around Douglas Adams. This is so overdone that I strongly suspect he's having a laugh himself.
It's silly and funny and great for a chuckle. But think about it for a bit:
"With a torch."
First of all, "torch" would have been changed to "flashlight" for an american audience. Because that's what he meant by "torch." Sure, the sight of Arthur creeping through a government cellar with an actual torch would be quite silly, but not very believable. But "with a flashlight" doesn't have that same quick wit about it and would be wasting screen time without being very funny.
"So had the stairs."
So.. we're meant to believe he headed to the cellar, and there weren't stairs, and instead of complaining he went ahead went into the cellar anyway? Seems quite dangerous, and not very believable. Comes off as good for a chuckle, but still a bit silly for the sake of being silly.
Oh yes, they were 'on display' in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the leopard.
Everything up to but not including the leopard sign probably would have come across OK. The leopard sign, though, still comes across as being silly for the sake of silly. Sure, it was funny when I read the book in the 6th grade but is it really the kind of thing that's necessary for the spirit of the book to translate to the screen?
This seems on the same level as "no tom bombadil"-ism with the LoTR movies to me.
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
I have a strategy for dealing with movies that have the potential to deviate from their excellent source material in a bad way.
Simply don't come into the movie with any expectations at all. Rather than expecting it to live up to (in this case) the book or the radio series, think of it as just another comedy.
It might be a bit tough but it's worth it. I mean, it's how I survived the Star Wars prequels.
Just because it may be worse doesn't mean it'll be bad on an objective scale.
...but is it art?
In what way is it a veiled version of the gospel? Lewis was perfectly upfront about it.
That's probably the best post ever in this whole sort of general mishmash of debate over this movie. If I had karma I'd mod you up.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I actually thought that the 6 episode BBC television series, which was released shortly after the radio series, did a very good job of it. It wasn't slow-paced at all.
A movie wouldn't be exactly the same as television, but it seems a bit far-fetched to claim that it's so complicated to get it working in a visual medium. Maybe they just can't figure out how to do it well with such a high budget.
Really now? HHGTTG has been at various times, as sanctioned by Adams, a book, a stage play, a television show, and originally a radio series.
And all of these are amazingly inconsistent with each other. So if the movie doesn't match all or any of these, so what? It's all in the great tradition of the stories. As long as they stay on theme and there's some relation, I'm good.
Well, yeah, and it'll have to be entertaining too. But "it doesn't match the book" is about the silliest anti- argument ever for this.
vi sucks
I thought that Primer was great. However, I was the only one who even remotely knew what was going on--it's not a movie to see with a linguist, a social scientist and an airheaded music major. Before I could even start explaining it to them, I first had to explain the terms that I was using in the explanation and even that didn't work so well.
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines...
As a result, most of the people at my company are going to go see the movie so that they can learn where my last name came from.
It will be freaking embarressing if they all go and then come back saying that the movie sucked! I couldn't bring myself to read the article because I'm going to go see it no matter what (I'll be the one at the San Francisco Metreon wearing a bathrobe with a towel embroidered with "42" on it).
The only director who could, in a million years, have done this movie justice is Terry Gilliam. And it would have been even better if he could have made it with Douglas at his side.
There's something about the tone of Brazil that reminds me of Hitchikers. Sam Lowry is a sort of dark world Arthur Dent... and the poking fun at beaurocracy.
Ah well. A tear is wept for unrealized potential. This film will suck.
Cheers.
Dumbing down movies "for the Americans" is just a crock of shit. It's a crock of shit that "too smart for you" Hollywood types seem to, for the most part, sincerely believe in. It's not necessarily true. The Lord of The Rings movies by Peter Jackson did not recreate the books 100%, but did recreate a "faithful" version. It did pretty well in the box office last I heard. You can satisfy the geeks (the fans) and have your broad audience, too.
Boycott Sony
The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
Published after his death, The Salmon of Doubt includes unfinished chapters from the 3rd Dirk Gently book, articles he wrote for various magazines (starting about age 12), and tributes from some of his best friends, including Richard Dawkins and Stephen Fry.
Well worth a read, and if you listen to to the audiobook version, it is narrated by Simon Jones (Arthur Dent from the radio series) and the tributes are read by the authors themselves.
Touching and funny at the same time. A great encapsulation of a great man's thoughts.
Coming up next: Gigli III - Romeo Strikes Back :D
thanks
Several of the criticisms made in the review may be a bit extreme, but the reviewer made one important observation which unfortunately seems to be confirmed by your reply.
I'm talking about his opinion (which I share) that what truly made Hitchhiker's classic was Adams' use of language. Nothing else. Some of his imagery was a great bonus, the plots were interesting enough, and the character development wasn't too bad, but what really brought it home was his finely crafted use of language.
And the observation made by the reviewer was that the creator's of the movie just did not "get" this. His very very long (tediously so, to be honest) review gives many examples where this greatest aspect of Adams' work was expunged from the screenplay.
The reviewers complaints about the plot making no sense are minor compared to this. I could forgive almost anything as long as the hallmark use of language were still present. But in your reply you basically said that it would be impossible to squeeze the language into a motion picture.
You may be right, though I think the TV series did a nice enough job with its use of narration. I'm not sure why that approach couldn't work in a big budget movie as well. But who knows, if you are right, maybe Hitchhiker's just should never have been made into a movie. Maybe it just doesn't fit. Perhaps Adams just didn't have the sense to realize this himself.... but actually I think he could have found a way (perhaps through the use of narration).
I concur that in most adaptations of books, it really doesn't matter much if the exact words find their way into the screenplay. The imagery and plot and characters make the movie. But in this case the words really do matter. Its not the situations, its not the imagery, its not the characters. Its the words. And if you don't agree with that, then I side with the reviewer: you just don't get it.
That said, I'll almost certainly see the movie, and I'll probably enjoy it. Even if it doesn't match up to what I think it could have been, it'll probably still be funnier than most movies, and the eye candy you refer to may, at least, be interesting to watch.
You wern't paying attention. The Googlfrinchians corrupted the "program" when they crash landed on Earth, so the Question produced by Earth would have been wrong anyway.
if Monty Python did THHG?
It's easy to stand out when the general level of competence is so low.
And Douglas Adams always thought of Last Chance to See as his best and favourite work.
I have heard rumours of a proposed TV follow up with Stephen Fry joining Mark Carwardine, and after Stephen's "spectacled bears" adventures I think that would be a great idea.
Sadly though, Mark recently said that the baiji dolphin was believed extinct, and the northern white rhino is almost gone too.
The big kakapo parrot is doing OK though.
The acting did look awful. In the TV spot they don't show any acting at all just the cute visuals of earth being blown up, and other cool looking visuals. When you see the long 5ish minute trailer you get to see a lot of the acting and dear lord it was not good. This guy seems credible because my impression of the movie was that it sucked and I haven't even read the books hence I'm not close to the material at all.
Some of the worst dialog in the Dune movie was the dialog that came from the book. "We would have joined each other in death." at the end of Paul's training fight with Gurney still sticks out in my mind.
We are the 198 proof..
1) Much of Monty Python is totally slap-stick.
2) Jerry Lewis was amazing popular thoughout Europe.
3) Baywatch was also very popular in Europe.
Also, most American humor, especially sitcoms, are not slap-stick. They are completely lame, but they are not slap-stick.
So that's it then, we're all going to die?
I agree with you. I recently had the fortune to see Robbie Stamp (producer) in person at a presentation he did at Valhalla Cinema in Sydney, Australia, and I left feeling very confident about this film (I haven't seen it yet).
Robbie was a personal friend of Douglas and knows full well that his reputation is invested in this movie. They have tried to give fans of the previous works their dues whilst also incorporating new stuff, which fits in with Douglas Adams' view that the HHGG was a constantly evolving work in progress. The amount of care and attention to unseen details was amazing and I for one believe that it will be a huge success.
Robbie also explained why Zaphod's second head was done the way it was (MIB2 "stole" the idea from the original series so they wanted to remain fresh by doing it in a new way) and many other details that the true fans will appreciate.
Give the movie a chance guys and don't succumb to one shitty review.
Visceral Psyche Films
Sometimes the movie version improves on the book. Steven King's "The Shining" is a case in point. After seeing Kubrick's version, reading the book, then seeing the TV "S.K. approved" version I can definitely say that King's book was ridiculous in it's original form and the TV version was awful (including it's casting). Kubrick improved the story.
Lynch's Dune didn't communicate the story well but how do you communicate it's dense pseudo-religious mumbo-jumbo in 3 hours or less? Lynch's movie had a far superior look and feel than the Sci-Fi channel's awful Versacesque designs.
A lot of the time it seems to boil down to what your first experience of the story was. I first experienced THGTTG from watching the BBC TV version and in the process became enamored with the Dr Who-like budget effects that let your mind just enjoy the great story. The story and the actors have to carry the movie, special effects are just icing on the cake.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I know I am probably feeding a troll on this one, but...
1) at best only half of Monty Python is slap-stick, and even then not completely slap-stick, but very well thought out slap-stick (think Ministry of Silly Walks). Perhaps you should actually look up what slap-stick really means.
2) You mean, France, right?
3) David Hasselhoff (sp?) is popular in Germany, all anyone else cares about in that show are the bouncing boobies. That's practically universal.
"For an example, see Dragonball Z."
And coincidentally, what is one of the most popular Animes over in NORTH AMERICA? That's right, Dragon Ball Z.
Sad but true. So what do you expect.
I wouldn't hold my breath but if they plan on doing sequals perhaps they will also want to revise the movies so they live up to fans expectations. They did it with LOTR. They may just be condensing the script so it can attract people who don't want to stay for an extremely long movie they know nothing about.
Douglas Adams would be spinning around in his grave at Warp 9, except for the fact that he was cremated and his ashes scattered in the Thames, so that would probably kill a few fish in the process ...
... pointless, and without any context remaining to make it even slightly more scary than a dead spider that's been run over by a moped ...
Face it, letting a Hollywood studio try to do British humour is akin to watching an American remake of a Japanese horror film
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
God, this place sounds like my college reunion. Does everyone here always take themselves so seriously? Or everyone else's opinions? Here's a thought - go see the damn movie and decide for yourself whether or not you like it! For chrissake, you'll probably blow more than 8 bucks on your next techie toy.
I think American humor exports to Britain better than British humor exports to the US. What you say about Jerry Lewis may well be true but it's no surprise that H2G2 is being made for American tastes as that exports well to the rest of the world whereas the original didn't.
Is Baywatch comedy?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Finding Nemo isn't a Disney movie, it's a Pixar movie, that Disney distributed.
Even the Ghibli and Pixar works that Disney distributes still result in revenue for Disney that can be funneled toward lobbying for further changes to the U.S. copyright statute in favor of the six major American motion picture distributors.
Does Disney have any creative control whatsoever?
Yes. Because of an act of Congress whose lobbying was paid for through revenues from movies distributed by Disney, the vast majority of Americans are still forbidden to use the image of Mickey Mouse in new works. Therefore, Pixar revenue helps cement Disney's creative control of the American culture.
In fact it's a wonderful piece of art dealing with ethics and how to live in a discriminating society that expects perfection from you.
/. (whose population finds tinfoil hats extremely popular) would complain about a movie which deals with genetics, biometrics, and privacy.
Maybe you went to see that movie with a "cool, sci fi, let's go for the spaceships!". But if we define sci-fi as "startrek/starwars/anything with lasers", Gattaca isn't sci-fi at all.
I find it ironic that someone in
And most brits, too. The HHGG series probably hasn't been read by most of the "chav" culture.
That people insist movies must be direct adaptations of subject matter (aka books in this case) and nothing else will suffice, and anything that doesn't is just trash. The LOTR Trilogy was about as close as you're gonna get, and yet people were furious that they left out a lot of material (Tom Bombadil, purging of the Shire).
Quite frankly, I welcome the new material.
I've seen moans that the Guide entry on towels is not in the movie, how could it be left out, etc. conveniently forgetting that this entry didn't even appear in the first radio series.
:)
Excuse me?
I own the original Radio series... on audio tape no less, and I listen to it frequently. Let me tell you my friend, the Guide entry on towels is very much in the series. It's somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes into the second episode.
Come fly to philadelphia and I'll play it for you sometime
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Meanwhile, Michael Crichton exec- or co- produces nearly all the movies based on his books, and still manages to "fuck them up"... at least completely retool them for visual effect and speed rather than suspense, intrigue, or intellectual merit. Sometimes he even changes the name. Heaven forbid the movie version of H2G2 be called "Running Around Space With A Book".
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Surely someone, someday, will do a good remake of the movie. I can wait.