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BBC Reviews Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
An anonymous reader writes "Now that the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has made its debut in London, reviews are now beginning to trickle in. The BBC's review can be summed up in one sentence: '... somewhere in the production process the crew has lost sight of the fundamental aspect of the books - they were immensely funny."
The "immensely funny" thing is curious. To be honest, completely honest... I didnt find douglas adams' work to be all that genuinely funny
Interesting to read, and written with an easy style that said "come back and read more!" sure, but not funny.
Not to me, personally, and not speaking for anyone else.
Well, he also called it a "mess."
Personally, I plan on seeing it, but I also plan on going out of my way to read every last negative review and whiny Aint-It-Cool-News tirade which warns of how bad it is before seeing it.
The more I lower my expectations going in, the better the chances that I might extract a little pleasure out of watching what is bound to be a very flawed adaptation of my absolute favorite childhood novel.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Fight Club was a phenomenal book that survived the transition to a movie, and then some.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Why not just watch the BBC miniseries?
I'm sick of all the FUD floating around... i'm officially not reading anymore /. articles i'm just going to go see the thing for myself... hope it doesn't suck
The Answer
Every time a British content creator waters down and ruins a project while making a US adaptation, people call it "Americanizing" like it's somehow the fault of us ignorant "colonials" that these fucking limeys are failing to sell products which insult our inteligence over here.
Did you see the US version of Coupling? Same English writers, actors with better teeth, but really a third-rate production.
Douglas Adams lived in America for much of his life and knew better than to insult us by not crediting us with being able to follow his stories of byzantine complexity. It's one of the reasons why he was a best-selling author, and the jackasses behind the BBC/FOX Doctor Who TV movie are now bussing tables.
Thank you for another great negative review, thus assuring my expectations will be appropriatly low so I can enjoy the film.
Curse you for giving away the part about Malkovich, it would have been an entertaining surprise.
I could not believe how awful this film was
Oh, come on, now. Deliberatly saying something's bad just so that the downloaders can claim they're sticking it to The Man for making bad movies... that's so, well, earlier this morning.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Napoleon Dynamite is, I think, a very generational movie. If you grew up as a "child of the 80's", and were part of a specific sub-culture (the geek/dork/outsider), you can look at this movie and laugh your ass off because you see how true to life a lot of it is. If you weren't in those circles, then it is hard to see how the movie is funny.
I myself was part of that culture, and now as a successful adult I can look back and recall all those childhood memories this movie brings up. The aweful clothing, the moon boots, the tater tots for lunch. For a lot of people, it's like their childhood (except streched out into late high school and taken to the extreme).
I, Robot didn't suck. It just had absolutly nothing to do with the book. I bet your opinion of it would be a lot higher if they had stuck with the original title, "Hardwired".
Technoli
Did you see the US version of Coupling? Same English writers, actors with better teeth, but really a third-rate production.
Well, considering only an American company would buy the rights to a show that was a ripoff of something they themselves produced in the first place, does it really surprise you that it was bad? As for The Office, the American version is absolutely dreadful. Hey, let's toss out anything that was remotely funny about the original and turn it into complete shit. Then let's sit there scratching our heads wondering why it didn't do well...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
compared to Arthur, Ford was an absolute nut.
Do you know what my favorite moment in the story is?
When Arther Dent, stuck on past Earth, announces that he has decided to go mad.
Ford suddenly appears and agrees that it's a good idea.
What I like about that moment is that I didn't really care for anything which came after it. Don't get me wrong, the prose was still very funny, but all this stuff of Aurther learning to fly, a planet-wise parody of what a boring sport cricket is, the truck-driving rain god, and the destruction of all possible alternate realities... It just wasn't up to snuff with the book material spawned from the original radio plays.
So, I have decided the following:
Arthur really did go mad at that moment. Ford never showed up. Arthur never learned to fly. Mattress creatures did not flollop. The reincarnated plant did not seek out revenge against Arthur. None of it happened. It was all just the delusions of Arthur's madness.
Looking at the final three and a half books of the trilogy in this light makes them much more enjoyable for me, especially since it discards the "Goddammit! I'm not writing a sixth book ever! Fuck all you drooling fanboys who will demand that my publisher lean on me to write more!" fatalistic ending. YMMV.
For that matter, one could take this premise and craft a fairly amusing fan-fic which picks up just as Arthur recovers his sanity, still stuck among the cave men.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I never think that Penny Arcade comics are funny, but often still laugh at User Friendly.
This pretty much renders your opinions on comedy invalid, doesn't it?
Go ahead -- mod me 'Troll' for speaking the truth! The world will remember me!
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I'm one of those few moviegoers who would take snappy dialog over pretty pictures any day. Hollywood knows how to do the epic special effects. They don't really respect writing. And it shows movie after movie, but as long as the lemmings show up for the blockbusters, writing will take second place.
An example from the famous babelfish passage:
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: `I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'
`But,' says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'
`Oh dear,' says God, `I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.
`Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
How the heck are you supposed to film that and keep some semblance of flow to the story? You could do it as a voiceover I suppose, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the plot yet passages like this are a defining feature of an Adams book. I'll be interested to see if they attempted to put passages like this in the movie and if they can pull it off.
Compare with LOTR, or Harry Potter, or any Michael Crichton novel, which are more plot driven works and thus can translate to a visual medium like movies and still capture the spirit of the original text much better. At least IMHO
Still, I'm intent on seeing the movie and hope it retains some of the classic Adams humour...
The movie wasn't a retelling of the book, but you'd be nuts to try it. The book is a string of disjoint short stories. The same characters keep poping up, but they are complete stories unto themselves. You could perhaps make a mini-series out of them, but I don't think the majority of the American public would GET IT.
The movie it self though was very true to Asimov's theme, which was basically "Given these three laws, how can things go wrong while the three laws are still being obeyed... and then how can I get these characters out of this mess?" additionally, they brought in the concept of the 0th law that we saw at the end of the Robot novels (although in this story line with tragic consequences).
Perhaps the name was a bad choice, but it got the fan's attention. However, equally well it could have been called "The Three Laws", or something simmilar.
But why should I have to compare it to that one to enjoy it?
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
I never think that Penny Arcade comics are funny, but often still laugh at User Friendly.
This pretty much renders your opinions on comedy invalid, doesn't it?
Yeah, you're right about that. While I like PA a lot, I can see how not everyone would find it funny. But there's no excuse for thinking UF is even remotely humorous.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Well, he's right about one thing. Penny Arcade comics are indeed unfunny.
I see your point. The first couple times I thought the H2G2 books (the first 3 anyway) were quite funny. The 4th was thought provoking and the 5th quite a bummer.
I did find, 10 years after reading the first three that I found them to be more cynical than I recalled, with some fairly biting sarcasm embodied by certain characters and actions I didn't really see before. Eventually I believed it was funny while taking aim at a lot of things Douglas Adams probably found frustration with, like satire. There certainly are some very visible satirical references, but it seemed to me that like much humor there is often a target which is true, though by not being familiar with it we don't get all of the joke.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I found it bizarre to watch the first time. But now for some odd reason I remember parts of it, and it seems funnier now.
Lines like:
"Pedro offers his protection", or "You gonna eat those tots?", while on there own don't sound funny, it the right context with people who know the reference can be fairly entertaining.
I'd say Napoleon is funnier after you've see it, not while you're actually watching it.
I still liked it better than "Friends", ugh, I'm glad that's over.
Sean D.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
I wouldn't say this is true in general.
Perhaps I should be posting anonymously, but I, for one, was a big Three's Company fan.
I, Robot didn't suck. It just had absolutly nothing to do with the book. I bet your opinion of it would be a lot higher if they had stuck with the original title, "Hardwired".
...", that is.
Yes, our opinion would be different if they had refrained from RAPING ASIMOV'S CORPSE!
Then again, I haven't seen it, because of what Will Smith said on Leno: "It's very faithfull to the book [...] My character is the only man on earth who doesn't trust robots, everyone else does..."
Yeah, that is the exact opposite of the book, jackass.
Asimov's estate should sue them for diffamation... if they weren't busy swimming in their giant cash-filled swimming pools from all the horrible crap they've sold labelled as "Asimov's
You can't take the sky from me...
Well, OK, fine. There's many good bits in MH, but why end on such a downer? And even though the dark ending did sort of fit in with the general theme of "the big bad universe doesn't care" it seemed pointless. I got the sense Adams was in a bad mood while writing the thing.
If it can survive the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Trall, it can survive a bad movie.
...
You could use it to hold popcorn, to wrap yourself in if the theatre is too cold, and if you carry a tube of cyanide stitched into the lining, you could kill yourself if it is too much to bear.
Most importantly, you could cry into it if the reviews are right
Sam Rockwell does a great turn as Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed president of the galaxy; Mos Def is passable as Ford Prefect; while Zooey Deschanel is beguiling as Trillian
Then a few paragraphs down we get this:
Did I say characters? Hmmm. While Dent is a familiar cipher, audiences will be left clueless by Ford Prefect, bemused by Zaphod Beeblebrox and indifferent to Trillian.
Indifferent to Trillian? I thought the actress playing her was "beguiling"!?! How can an actress potray a character in a beguiling way that leaves the audience indifferent? That's almost as funny as some of Adams' turns of speech. :)
In brief, the reviewer liked the movie, but didn't like all of it. In fact, he called it a "charming mess". Having been a fan of Adams' work for over twenty years I had always been under the impression the same could be said of the books. And even Adams' own later sequels lacked the punchy humor and wit of the originals. It is hard to make lightening strike twice.
I recently downloaded the BBC's HG2G TV adaptation. Although some parts are brilliant, many parts drag and are truly awful. Translating Adams' writing style into a visual medium is bound to be difficult. Even the British couldn't get it all right.
The Splintered Mind - Overcoming
Case in point: "Whose Line is it Anyway?"
It's a show that progressively got more and more American comedians, but still remained funny, in large part because the host was a balding British guy. :-) But seriously, it worked because they weren't trying to dumb down the humor for American audiences. The Drew Carey version... still funny, but I only saw about one episode of the new Whose Line that even approached the humor of the original British show.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I agree with you on that one, and to me it's actually a proof of two things.
1 - The basic concept was strong enough. (Apparently a tried-and-tested improv formula anyway)
2 - Something can be less than the original but still actually work.
It felt like a very different beast in some ways, yet still taken from the same mould in others. And in a way that's possibly the best way to go about such things.
Having said that, Whose Line did have one major thing going for it. It's real strength wasn't it's Britishness, it was the format. And it showed. Even though the Drew Carey version wasn't quite in the same class in my opinion, it was still a really fun show to watch.
Tiggs
"120 chars should be enough for everyone..."
I'll put it short and sweet. To expect the HHGG we know and love. Actually. Just fuhgit about it...at least on the big screen. Why? Two reasons.
#1. Most of the best humor just wouldn't work in a movie format. Why? To do it well you'd need an absurd amount of time, and as well, the story would start to drag on. Really.
Now, from what I'm hearing, they're filming a TON of material for the DVD version. Meaning that all the stuff that didn't make it into the theatrical cut, may very well make it into an actual "Guide" cut, with all those little asides that make the book.
A DVD package with "Don't Panic" on the cover and given the LotR extended edition treatment? Oh yes.
#2. Like it or not, he's just not the same guy he was when he wrote the book. Hell, he wasn't the same guy when he wrote the sequals. And one thing that DNA wanted, was to update HHGG..the philosophy and feeling behind it, to get it out of his past and move it into the present. And because of that, after he died, when the production team had a doubt about the tone of any of the material, they looked up his latter stuff. To see how it would go, and work.
Maybe that's the ultimate problem. The true fans wanted the classic, but that's just not going to happen.
This, of course, was not the point. The comedy derives from Fawlty's failure, and bystanders' horror at the way this man runs a hotel, just as The Office runs on David Brent's horrifically misguided approach to management. Both take on characters we've all met - surly hoteliers or awful coworkers - and then eliminate the redeeming features and turn everything wrong about them up to eleven.
I think it's this dark side that drives a lot of British comedy and makes it so distinct from the American variety. American remakes tend to kill off British comedy, because they try to force in some Beautiful People when the story really calls for twisted monstrosities...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I think you find "Britain" in fact means "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" (people with a [dangerously IMO] over inflated sense of national identity and bored people looking to pick fight aside), the specific meaning being context sensitive. Both the offical government appointed tourism agency and the Wikipedia entry seem quite happy with this short hand.
God forbid it should not be the complete title in it's entirity every single time, lest the IRA get over excited about it and decide to blowup some [more] children. Thanks but I'll stick with using 'Britain' (and 'UK' when I'm feeling like being particularly terse).
I think we've had enough disagreement and killing over it, and we could officialy rename the entire country Earwig , or 'nation fourty four' (after the country code) for all I care.
Well, at least British humour has jokes. Ever seen 'Friends'? Most of the whole appeal seems to be the cast being attractive. That's it. Some attractive people come onto the set, read out some crap lines, and that's it. Where are the jokes?