For anyone who cares:
................
Every once in a while you hear that some famous figure you remember from your childhood has died unexpectedly and far too young. Usually it doesn't really make much of an impact beyond an, "Aw, crap." There are only two famous people whose untimely deaths really did hit me with a sense of loss, and even anger that they had been taken out of the world before they could put more into it. One was Jim Henson, and the other was Douglas Adams.
The film of _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ continues both their legacies; it is, obviously, adapted from Douglas Adams's novel (partly by Adams himself), and the creature effects are done by the Jim Henson workshop. In a way, it's kind of an odd collaboration; the Muppet view of the universe was always considerably, well, warmer and fuzzier than the one Adams created in the Hitchhiker's Guide series. My friend Kevin introduced me to the books when we were in high school, and it truly was a formative experience. I had never read anything like it. Being an earnest, idealistic, and very serious-minded young misfit, I usually hated books that came across as cynical or nihilistic--I can still remember the screed I wrote after putting myself through _Candide_ for French class--but I could not resist _The Hitchhiker's Guide._ It was just so bizarre, so fresh, and above all, gut-bustingly funny. What got to me most was not the plot or the characters but the writing itself. I still remember one line from Adams's description of the Vogon fleet hovering menacingly in the sky just before they destroy the earth: "The ships hung in the sky much the way that bricks don't."
I was, therefore, pretty skeptical about the whole movie project. There have been other adaptations of the Hitchhiker's Guide books, none of them particularly successful, and I had always assumed that it was because there simply was no way to translate the experience of reading Adams's writing to the big screen (or the small one). Then there is the matter of plot. Adams's novels don't have plots; plotlessness is their point. The whole message of the HG books is that you better try to enjoy the ride because there is no destination. All the illusions that a plot creates--continuity, causality, coherence, depth, revelation, enlightenment, closure--are blown to smithereens once you widen your focus to include the cosmos. Plot is a human thing. Once the earth blows up, it's gone.
If you're gonna make a movie in this day and age, though, you need a plot; and so any attempt to film the books was bound to be a kind of devil's bargain. From one point of view, you could look at this film and say that it's a compromise bound to please no one; it's not enough like a normal Hollywood summer sci-fi blockbuster to draw in a new audience, and it's not faithful enough to the nihilistic spirit of the trilogy to make the fans happy. But rather than taking the Marvin view of things, what I would say is that the film got it right enough. I enjoyed it, would happily see it again, and would recommend it to anyone familiar with the series. How it plays to people who have never read the books, I cannot really say, though I can hazard a couple of guesses....
read the rest here:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/plaidder/94833.htmlSass that hoopy Ford Prefect,
The Plaid Adder
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
