Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

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Tuesday, May 3, 2005
00:13 - Mostly Harmless	(top)
Random thoughts on the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie: � On the whole, it didn't feel significantly different from the old BBC series, from which it even borrowed the theme music. It's like what the BBC series would have been if it'd had more money. Rather than, say, having been remixed and reworked to better fit the necessary composition and timing of the big screen, the way Lord of the Rings was (with such staggering success). With this one, they were working from a half-done screenplay by Douglas Adams, and I don't think they were willing to toss out anything he'd done himself, even if that meant certain scenes�like the whole opening sequence with the bulldozers, or the animated Guide sequences, which are mostly just slicker, Internet-age versions of the corresponding cuts from the series�just don't flow right. Some things work best on the printed page, and that includes Douglas Adams, I'm afraid. � Alan Rickman as the voice of Marvin: inspired genius, and it works perfectly. In fact, it's almost like it's right out of one of those "ideal dream cast" posts on fan sites. � The old Marvin design from the series waiting in line at the Vogon DMV (or whatever it was). Excellent. � Zaphod was interesting. They managed to work in that whole business about him splitting his brain in half, which only was imposed on the story in later books, presumably by Adams trying to figure out some way to account for this bizarre two-headed, three-armed character he'd dreamed up seemingly without thinking too hard about how such a thing would look or function. I liked this interpretation. Would have liked to see him get his second head back at the end, though, just for some closure; having him stagger around in half-brained stupor is fine, but really can't be left as the final state of things. � Slartibartfast was marvelous. They resisted the urge to make him a cross between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Gandalf, as is so easy to derive from the books; here he's got actual character interest and doesn't come across as something we've seen a hundred times before. � The "Point of View Gun" was an excellent, and oddly poignant, addition. (And it gave Trillian the opportunity for a genuinely snort-worthy one-liner.) Though I think they sort of screwed up in leading the viewer to think that Magrathea is the planet where Deep Thought is... � Ford�well, not sure what to think about him. Being black and being American were two things I never would have expected from him, and I'm not all that sure it works too well. But the movie provides an oblique reason for his name (they never mention "Prefect", a joke which would have been lost on anyone not English and not born before about 1960) more successfully than the book does. (Incidentally... one of the weird things I've noticed in talking to friends and reading reviews is that everybody mentions how Ford is indeed a hoopy frood and muses over the merits of him being American-voiced; but nobody anywhere seems willing in the same context to bring up his being black, whether to describe it as good, bad, or neutral to the story's presentation and texture and Adams' original description of the character. As though just having the temerity to notice such a thing amounts to a gross faux pas. Talk about an elephant in the room. It's like if someone did a movie of Othello with an Asian guy cast in the title role, just daring anyone in the press to mention it. Or if Peter Jackson's Elves were all dutifully multicolored like Vulcans in deference to modern sensibilities, Tolkien be damned.) � Trillian�another inexplicably American casting choice. She was good, but I really think the movie loses a lot by sacrificing some of its quintessential Britishness in these decisions. � Oh, and the whole subplot about keeping Earth's destruction a secret from Trillian (and Zaphod's complicity) was a good comon-sense addition that added a lot to the plot. I's a startling oversight in the book, now that I think about it. � Magrathea's factory floor is one of the best pieces of eye candy I expect to see all year. � The holographic head warning visitors off Magrathea was cool (and filmed in 3D, incidentally), but I really don't think they had to go through the song-and-dance about the whale and the bowl of petunias, even though it's bedrock Adams and therefore inviolable�I just don't think stuff like that helps a movie adaptation, and in fact just distracts from any attempt at plot they're trying gamely to knit together. � Same goes for that atrocious "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish" title song. Seriously, do they have to amplify every one-liner by turning it into a clumsy showtune that runs the original gag into the ground (quite literally, in some regrettable cases)? It's one of the aspects of slavish Adams-worship that I think does the story itself no favors at all. � Arthur was about as good as could be imagined. Not much to say about him�he was just Arthur. Though I don't buy him being the one to pilot that escape craft thing. Since when do Ford or Zaphod or even Marvin let the monkey-creature do anything? � I want that toast-slicer lightsaber thing. It seems like a genuinely good idea. � They captured the look of the bridge of the Heart of Gold perfectly, but the ship itself sure doesn't look like a running shoe to me. � The animated Guide sequences, superfluous though they might ultimately be and serving only to mime out the already perfectly evocative narration of various outlandish scenes, were done by Shynola, who created that Junior Senior video that amounts to the best use of 6,480 pixels I've ever seen. � The Vogons were marvelously executed, though their ships were hardly what I'd describe as looking like they'd "congealed". � Deep Thought is pretty funky. The idea of an ultracool city-sized computer with a velvet-draped office for a terminal must seem dated by now, somehow, so they went the wacky route. � At least they avoided most of the potentially irritating digressions for which the book (and the series) were so famous: no "Mostly Harmless", no Eccentrica Gallumbits, no Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster ingredient list, no rhapsodizing about the virtues of towels, not even the bit about locking up the computer with making tea. The story might be thought to be the poorer for it, but it's really not that necessary. � There was apparently a planet somewhere on Magrathea's factory floor shaped like Douglas Adams' head. Overall, good, not great. I really think they could have done more with it if they given themselves a bit freer rein with elements such as what turned on-screen into stilted and awkward dialogue, especially in the protracted introduction scene on the bridge of the Heart of Gold, and forced jump-cuts in and out of the Guide as a narrative device. They did manage to give us better characterizations of Arthur and Trillian than the book deigned to show us, which I think is all to the good. Now all I want to know is, why was the movie prefaced with trailers to the Herbie and Pink Panther remakes, Valiant (Disney's first post-Pixar CG venture), and Sharkboy and Lava Girl? Having to sit through those, and then endure the omnipresent Fandango ad, and the moronic CG "cow-moo box" THX logo bump, left me in no condition to be very charitable toward the first fifteen minutes of the movie at all.