Wednesday, February 16, 2005 |
11:15 - Freeeeooow!
http://hitchhikers.movies.go.com/main.html
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Surely I must be in some beautiful dream.
First Tolkien, and now this... a big-budget, high-production-value, well-acted, adapted-for-real-for-the-big-screen version of The Guide?
Douglas Adams was working on a screenplay for it when he died four years ago; since he's credited along with Karey Kirkpatrick, I guess this is it. Great glory and splendour, as Sam put it.
Because from the look of the trailer, it's got the potential to actually be very, very good. No slavish adherence to the book's silly contrivances, as the 1981 BBC series and Ralph Bakshi both failed to see was a good idea, to the detriment of their respective products. No Infocom-esque obsession with trivialities like what the Dentrassis eat or the Betelgeusian national anthem. Instead it looks like it'll have real plot, real timing, real actors, real special effects, and perhaps a reimagining of the Guide itself to account for the fact that in its conception, Douglas Adams essentially prognosticated the Internet itself. The plot appears to cover several of the books at once (Arthur yells "Tricia!" instead of "Trillian"); and if it ends less depressingly than the books did, in what amounted to a fit of pique by an Adams who'd grown sick of the series, this could be a real marvel—everything relative to the old BBC series and the books as the Jackson movies were to Bakshi and the LotR novels.
Maybe I'm just getting my hopes up too high. (Marvin doesn't look much like I'd imagined him, but then, neither does Ford. Zaphod, though... spot-on.) But if nothing else, I suppose this tells me I really ought to have been paying closer attention to the movie rumor sites, huh?
UPDATE: I guess the only place to see the full trailer is at Amazon. And here's a bigger version; share and enjoy.
UPDATE: Okay, here's something I've never understood:
The motto stands - or rather stood - in three mile high illuminated letters near the Complaints Department spaceport on Eadrax - "Share and Enjoy". Unfortunately its weight was such that shortly after it was erected, the ground beneath the letters caved in and they dropped for nearly half their length through the underground offices of many talented young complaints executives - now deceased. The protruding upper halves of the letters now appear, in the local language, to read "Go stick your head in a pig", and are no longer illuminated, except at times of special celebration. At these times of special celebration a choir of over two million robots sing the company song "Share and Enjoy". Unfortunately - again - another of the computing errors for which the company is justly famous means that the robot's voices are exactly a flattened fifth out of tune and the result sounds something like this, only slightly worse...
The joke in the book, however, ends with "...Except at times of special celebration."
My question is this: Why, if the slogan only reads "Go stick your head in a pig" through an unfortunate lexicographical and geological accident, would the company write its official song around the accidental meaning? Doesn't this expansion completely ruin the meaning of the joke by reversing its sense? I always assumed the "special celebration" was some kind of Bastille Day sort of thing where the locals all made fun of the giant corporation and mocked the fallen edifice that stood as a testament to its hubris, while the company obligingly lit up the sign in a good-natured self-effacing gesture. But according to the radio and TV series (which, I realize, came before the books), the company apparently adopted "Go stick your head in a pig" as its official slogan? I don't get it.
It was funny in the books. But the BBC series, when I saw it, was just full of little moments like this where it took a joke I knew and loved and just dragged it out, way too long, to the point where they'd ruined the humor with needless complexity and ambiguity.
And whenever the director decided to silence the background music and draw in the camera for a close-up while Marvin delivered a line like And that... was with a coffee machine, it was like getting smacked in the face with a 2x4 that had JOKE printed on it.
I know some are BBC-series purists, but for my part I couldn't stand it.
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