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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?
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
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.
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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
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