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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."
I could not believe how awful this film was. The story has almost nothing to do with previous versions of Hitchhiker's Guide and just rambles all over the place, but not in any humorous or interesting or entertaining or enjoyable way.
All the changes from the book and TV show and radio play seem to have been made for no reason and not only do they not add anything, they actually make it worse.
NONE of the books/radio shows agree with each other, so why should you expect the movie to?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I absolutely HATED "Napoleon Dynamite." I laughed ONCE during the entire movie. Yet, the reviews were raving about it. Then we had the recent article about the guy that's spent like 20 years studying Douglas Adams and his books/etc, and he hated the movie. Other reviews of this movie said it was clever & funny. Now the BBC says that there were just a few chuckles.
Generally, I think that humour is in the eye of the beholder. I never think that Penny Arcade comics are funny, but often still laugh at User Friendly.
Bottom line: The movie probably doesn't suck that bad at all, but the "The book was better" fanatics are going to jump all over it.
I fully agree. The "Americanization" of BBC shows is WRONG. Have you seen NBC's version of "The Office"? IT IS TERRIBLE. The timing that made the UK version work so well has been completely dumb'd down for the US populace, just to make a few bucks. Its sad.
On the other hand, I'd really like to go see "Oracle 8.5 The Complete Reference", especially if it was in Mandarin with subs.
I know what you're thinking. Did I forward 65,535 packets or 65,536 packets?
You know the thing that made the books so snappy ... it was that compared to Arthur, Ford was an absolute nut. Zaphod was bombastic. Marvin was quite possibly a sorrier character. All that contrast was fairly extreme and therefore, the wossname, chemistry worked, because each's point of view was quite extraordinary. And yet, all were sane within their idiom.
They could have just sat around in chairs on board the Heart of Gold for 90 minutes cracking jokes about earthman-monkey, diodes down the left side aching, vogon poetry, etc. and many book/play fans would gobble it up. This is trying to mass appeal, what already had mass appeal. See the problem?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The previews of the movie don't look good for use Adams fans. They seem to emphasize special effects and the bustle of the books, but give no evidence of the deep humor and insane and yet insanely self-consistent universe that Adams created. Rather than create Adams' mind-boggling humor (which is harder), they seem to have created the usual array of eye-boggling visuals.
I hope the actual movie is better than the previews.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Well, I think I on the other hand, speak for many when I say this is the only series of books that had me laughing so hard I had to put down the book for a second.
Maybe you're just not a fan of british humour (IANA Englisman)?
While Dent is a familiar cipher, audiences will be left clueless by Ford Prefect, bemused by Zaphod Beeblebrox and indifferent to Trillian.
Personally, in reading the books, I've always been left feeling quite indifferent to Trillian. Almost like she's a background character with little to no importance. So it sounds like they at least got that right.
Ender-
Nothing to see here
Never read Fight Club. Saw the movie and thought, 'damn, not another "crazy guy" film'. Didn't read Forrest Gump, but my sister's opinion was the film was considerably better. A rarity it seems.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Call me crazy, but unless I'm mistaken, Douglas Adams had a rather sizeable role in creating the movie script for this movie before he died and even added a character or two of his own not found in the books... funny that he would be ticked off about his own work.
It gets an 8/10 on imdb...that's a pretty good rating.
How about "anyone speaking American English" and "anyone speaking English"? Since English is the native language of a country called England that you may have heard off?
We shouldn't have to qualify our language, "English English" would be somewhat redundant afterall.
And Fight Club ends completely different in the book, not a Hollywood ending at all. Simply for the ending I'd recommend it.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Americanization of British TV shows worked a lot better before Americans had access to the originals. Remember Sanford and Son and Archie Bunker? Adaptations from the UK, and there are others.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
Jump ahead to just a few months ago, where I picked up the audiobooks of the first and second books in the series, unabridged and both read by Douglas Adams himself. There's just something about the way Adams reads his own work that made it so much funnier. Then again, maybe it's because I don't have an imagination and/or hate the sound of my own voice when I read the paper books, even if it is only in my head.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
I saw and loved the original version of The Office.
:-).
I watched the US pilot of The Office a while back, expecting it to be hell on toast (especially after what friends in the US had told me about the Coupling remake).
I thought it was really good. The acting was good, and the timing was still there. One of the things I was curious about was how some of The Office is so rooted in British culture that the references wouldn't work. A few changes were made to adapt it to American culture, but the changes were appropriate and even funny in and of themselves (e.g. the 'Gareth' character is no longer in the TA, but sombrely tells the camera that he is a Volunteer Sheriff's Deputy at weekends, which made me laugh out loud).
Most of all, the sense of awkwardness and overall feeling of futility and despair which really made The Office work seemed to be there in spades in the US version. I really didn't expect that to get carried across.
In summary: pleasantly surprised, and I have gone back to watch the pilot a couple of times - it really stands up on its own, I think.
I was hooked from very early on, with the interplay between the boss and the receptionist, when the boss commented to camera that if you thought the receptionist was pretty, you should have been here five years ago
Maybe the moral is that just converting a great book to a movie isn't enough to have a great movie: you still have to have a good director, good casting, and a good screenwriter. (In the case of Princess Bride, Goldman was the screenwriter, and it was his idea to cast Andre the Giant). I also think the Princess Bride (which other than a few edits such as the Zoo of Death, is almost unchanged from the book) shows that it should have been possible to import entire scenes, unaltered, from the radio series and novels and get something which would be as funny- if not funnier- than the originals.
The radio series shows how goddamn funny the dialogue is when well acted. I thought "...all the diodes down my left side" was merely amusing on the page, but I was howling with laughter when I heard it read in that chronically depressed voice on the radio plays. Frankly you have to be one hack of a director to screw up the Hitchhiker's Guide: you've got a wealth of great material, both written and spoken. Your only problem is the painful decision of what not to put in.
Lord preserve us from a BBC sci-fi miniseries (or series) that actually had good special effects. That would kill the whole flavour, and the writers might start relying on SFX instead of good writing.
In the case of HHGTTG, the whole thing was supposed to be a spoof, a farce. You don't dress up that with effects that are too good, or people won't be sure if you're trying to be funny or not.
-- Alastair
...instead of just something difficult to translate to a movie. Did the creators of this movie read the books, listen to the radioshows, or even watch the BBC TV versions? In all 3 the book was a character, it had it's own voice, it's own dialogue and was some of the funniest shit I have ever read, heard and seen. Much like in LOTR, Peter Jackson nearly made the ring a character and the ring did not have much to say. The Book in HHGTTG has tons to say.
You do it exactly as was done in the miniseries: Ford tells Arthur to look up "babelfish" in the Guide, and we cut do the animation plus voice-over of the Guide's entry. (The book and the radio program also treat this as a Guide excerpt, but I don't recall if they segue this by having Ford tell Arther to look it up.)
The accompanying cheezy "computer graphic" animation adds an element of humor and keeps the voice over from being too heavy-handed.
The problem you do run into is length. Most books -- especially these days with the customer demand for thicker books for the buck -- are far too long to squeeze everything into a two-hour movie. (The rule of thumb for screenplays is that each page of the screenplay translates to a minute of film time. That rule doesn't necessarily hold for a book because of differences in writing style (description vs dialog, etc).
Michael Chrichton, of course, has written both books and screenplays, and directed movies (eg "Westworld"), so knows intimately how to write a book that will translate to a movie -- but large chunks of his books get left out of the movie version anyway. Marshall McLuhan may not have been absolutely right ("the medium is the message"), but he certainly raised a valid point about how the medium affects the message (content).
-- Alastair
How about I'll call it British English, and you call it English? That way we'll both be happy.
.o0('course furriners aye seem to nae ken the difference atween 'England' and 'Britain', an' I da suppose that helps onybody work out fit the richt thing tae cry it is.)
I agree that it seems reasonable just to refer to it as English, as the previous poster says, 'English English' seems redundant.
After all, 'British English' ought by denfinition to refer to the version of English spoken throughout the Kingdom of Scotland as well as the Kingdom of England (not to mention the Principality of Wales and the Province of Northern Ireland). However, Scottish English - aka Scottish Standard English - is a seperate beast (or should that be beastie). The cultural influces from Gaelic and Scots mean not just the vocabulary varies - the actual grammar does too.
To me, it only seems appropriate to use the more general term British English in specific circumstances.
As someone who has read the book, I would love for you to detail in general which scenes you are taking about. this is not meant as a troll, I would seriously like to understand the redeming features of that movie.
Yes, our opinion would be different if they had refrained from RAPING ASIMOV'S CORPSE!
That's going a little too far. While I'd agree the movie is a travesty demonstrating that Hollywood is hard pressed to produce even one new idea in almost a hundred years, some of the dangers the movie obsessed over were at least hinted at in Asimov's works. That there is some gold dust sprinkled on, however, does not change that what you have stepped in is primarily a turd. If they had left the original "Hardwired" title in, and yanked the attempts to exploit Asimov's name, it would merely be bad; if such had been offered on DVD free with a box of cereal, I'd have bought the box provided I wasn't allergic to the cereal. (Five brand name candidates, last I counted.)
As is... I took different measures.
Then again, I haven't seen it
Given my respect for film, I didn't want to trash the movie without seeing it. On the other hand, if it was as bad as reported, I didn't want any of my money going anywhere near the people responsible. So when the DVD came out, for my first and only time for a Hollywood release, I downloaded BitTorrent, found a pirate torrent, and tied up my DSL for two days. If it was any good, I would have bought it. After watching it, I deleted it. I have better uses for the 5GB of storage.
Having seen it, the only reason I feel that the time spent watching it was not completely wasted is that I can say with a clear concience: It is a Piece of Crap; Someone Please Buy Harlan Ellison The Movie Rights.
The HHGTTG movie sounds bad, but not that bad. I might catch a matinee... but I'll bring a towel to wrap around my head, just in case it's worse than I expect.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
On the night that the final episode of the 2nd series was first broadcast on the BBC my wife went into labour and we rushed off to the maternity ward, taking a radio with us. We were able to listen to the episode just before my son was born.
... what I didn't expect was that the new Doctor Who would copy my son's Manchester dress sense !
So it was inevitable that my son would grow up to be an active contributer to the H2G2 website
Paul
www.opencouncil.org
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