Hitchhiker's Guide, coming in May

[Deticui]

just a completely random thought i had this weekend. when star wars movies come out, people dressed as dumbass fanboys weilding lightsabers and blasters appear randomly the day of theater release. same prolli went for when the star trek movies were released.

so yeah, what if in May, when Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy appears in theaters, fans of the Douglas Adams book series appears at the theaters equipped with...towels.

why towels you may ask? well, if you havent read the books, the you prolli would ask.

here is the answer, straight out of T.H.H.G.T.T.G.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vaporsm; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it around your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you-daft as a brush, but very very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: nonhitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have "lost." What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still know where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in "Hey you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is." (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)

why I am posting this on a Fallout forum is because the FO:2 developers gave a special easter egg in honor of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. it involves the whale that seems to have fallen from a great height and the flower pot. This is a reference to what happens from the use of the Improbability Drive while the Heart of Gold was under attack by a barrage of missles. The flower pot was actually a bowl of petunias in the book, tho.

so yeah, summary, when Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy comes to theaters, bring a towel with you to the box office, to commemorate the life's work of Douglas Adams. BTW, Adams passed away late last year.

Ill have my towel. will you? ...my god that sounded cheesy ^^

 

[SuAside]

i'm very curious, but i'm not getting my hopes up. the TV series was nowhere near the books or the radio show.

& i didnt know Adams died, very sad. but the dude's life was even sadder though... he never liked to write books rofl, but did it out of necessity.

 

[welsh]

I saw a trailer for this, that didn't really reveal much accept that it's coming out.

I am not sure it's a good thing. It's like how some songs shouldn't be covered because the original or an earlier version was probably as good as it gets.

I didn't read the books but I heard tapes of the original BBC show a while back. I also saw a few of episodes of the TV show. Would a new movie make that much of a difference? Was Jim Carrey's The Grinch a big improvement or maybe the original cartoon was pretty good as it was?

Ironically this raises the question about whether WB should adapt with Looney Tunes.

Or what happened to originality?

 

[Flop]

Yep,I've been following this project and I'm really looking forward to it. It seems that John Malkovich has gotten a part that apparantly was especially created by Douglas Adams for the movie (that had to be made sooner or later).

Ironically this raises the question about whether WB should adapt with Looney Tunes.

Really? How so?

I don't think I'm giving too much away, when I say that earth blows up right in the beginning of the book, so it really shouldn't matter what WB does, since everybody dies anyway.

 

[SuAside]

Flop i think you're completely missing the meaning of the sentence rofl

maybe you should read the WB thread

 

[SimpleMinded]

has anyone actually seen a trailer for this that didn't just reveal a date? I've been looking forward to this but kinda leery without having seen anything from it. Lotsa interesting book movies in the making... this one, the lion the witch and the wardrobe and the neverending development cycle of Ender's Game...

I just hope they don't all turn out sucking

 

[Jebus]

I have been looking forward to this movie for ages.

I loved the books, but I've never heard the radio transmissions nor seen the TV episodes. Are they perhaps stored online somewhere? I'd love to see/hear them.

 

[Brother None]

A full trailer has been out ofr a while, showing footage from the film, special effects, characters in action etc. Just take a look at Imdb.com, it's sure to be on there (though it was exclusively on Amazon earlier, but meh)

I'll just copy some of the comments I made on this film on DaC. Note, it's not very positive and contains spoilers for the trailer (oooh) :

Zaphod has a head under his head, yes, a very cheap way to solve the problem of "how to realistically represent a man with two heads." It also doesn't fit, because the books often mention Zaphod's one head looking at the other one, amongst other things.

I can't say I share your roaring enthusiasm for this film, a film starring a rapper and a guy whose carreer peaked at "Ali G in da house" directed by some video clip director generally sounds like a bad idea, but that's even more so when making a film of a book like THHGTTG. Heck, the book depends almost completely on ideas, not images. Comparisons, similes, jokes, thoughts, that's what drives those books (and the Discworld books), I don't think it's even vaguely possible to do it justice on the screen, let alone like this.

The fact that ol' Adams wrote the script himself means jack-shit too, because just like ol' Nabokov was a horrible translator of his own books, Adams might very well be a horrible translator-to-the-screen of his own works.

But hey, who knows, it might be good. Promising it does not look.

----------------------------------

Well, let's be honest here, with the whole "Huh, what?"-factor, Arthur's role is about as difficult as that of Frodo after the first LotR; stand around, look stupid. Hence indeed it doesn't matter much if the person playing Arthur would be an untalented twat just like Elijah Wood is. But yes, Martin isn't a bad choice, and I was kidding with the Ali G thing.

I still don't see why Ford has to be black or played by a rapper. And sadly, the whole "I was stranded on a strange planet..."-bit smells too much like Will Smith Men in Black humour, I mean jeesh.

I think Warwick Davis is the best-picked actor (that said Martin does look stupid, he should look more depressed, not clumsy, useless and slightly amusing. Bloody comedy relief hour)

Sam Rockwell looks better than I would've thought. I don't generally like the guy or his acting (except for his role in the first TMNT), but he doesn't look bad here.

Stephen Fry's a good touch. I don't particularly like Zooey Deschanel. I would like to say it doesn't matter since Trillian is pretty irrelevant anyway, but it looks like they bumped her up to love interest (did he really called her "Tricia" in the trailer?)

PS: one of the Vogons in the original THHGTTG is desribed as having a "blubbery arm", they got that wrong. Though I like their idea of the slug-like Vogons.

 

[Flop]

Flop i think you're completely missing the meaning of the sentence rofl

maybe you should read the WB thread

It would seem that you are right.

And thanks a lot for the info on that other trailer Kharn, I hadn't seen that one. After seeing it, I must say that I doubt this movie will be a masterpiece that can live up to the books (not that I actually thought so, before), but hey, it still looks good enough to be worth the price of ticket.

 

[welsh]

Flop- have you heard the original BBC recordings? You might want to try those first.

 

[Flop]

Flop- have you heard the original BBC recordings? You might want to try those first.

No, I never got around to that, but I'm pretty sure I have them somewhere on my harddrive. I guess I always assumed that they weren't very good.

But if you say they are, I might dig them out and give them a go.

 

[Malky]

I still don't see why Ford has to be black or played by a rapper. And sadly, the whole "I was stranded on a strange planet..."-bit smells too much like Will Smith Men in Black humour, I mean jeesh.

Eh, just wait. I love Mos Def, and I think he'll bring the role justice. He's not just some "MTV rapper," hell, he's not even on MTV. And he's done a decent job in other films, like the remake of The Italian Job.

He's also one of the best lyricists in the rap game. Brilliant dude.

 

[Radial]

Mos Def seemed a bit wooden and stand-offish in the trailer. I had thought Ford was supposed to act like a cool cat most of the time, just strange in subtle ways.

I was dissapointed in Zaphod for a second, I guess they wanted to make the extra arm and head a surprise instead of pretty obvious.

 

[Deticui]

I would like to say it doesn't matter since Trillian is pretty irrelevant anyway, but it looks like they bumped her up to love interest (did he really called her "Tricia" in the trailer?)

actually it makes sense to have Arthur call her Tricia, since he originally met her at a university party and was getting on rather well before she left with a gate-crasher (Zaphod). Zaphod called her Trillian, she was originally Tricia.

PS: one of the Vogons in the original THHGTTG is desribed as having a "blubbery arm", they got that wrong. Though I like their idea of the slug-like Vogons.

The trailer doesnt show much of the Vogons, but they do seem to have arms, since they have hands to pull levers and such with.

From the trailer also, though, ive already begun to dislike Zaphod's character, he seems more hick-ish (like america's current prez) than the cool cat he is in the books.

Zaphod: I am so hip I have difficulty seeing over my pelvis.

And having his heads move like a roladex might possibly be the straw that breaks the camel's back. I mean really, with all the tech for blue screens and digital imaging, dont you think they could have at least TRIED to make both his heads sit beside eachother, even having a head growing from his shoulder or something id believe. ugh. damn hollywood.

Casting Ford as a black guy isnt too bad of a thing, since I dont remember the book ever specifying what he looked like. Apparently there are black people on Betelgeuse too, tho.

Even though we havent heard Marvin yet, casting Alan Rickman as his voice will end well, i think, since he is an incredible actor.

Everything else, though, i spose will have to wait for the theater.

 

[Brother None]

actually it makes sense to have Arthur call her Tricia, since he originally met her at a university party and was getting on rather well before she left with a gate-crasher (Zaphod). Zaphod called her Trillian, she was originally Tricia.

It's not just Zaphod. Her space-faring name is Trillian. In the books, Arthur calsl her Trillian.

But that's not my problem, my problem is the whole love interest bullshit

The trailer doesnt show much of the Vogons, but they do seem to have arms, since they have hands to pull levers and such with.

The Vogons in the trailer and from set pictures have thin arms. In the books they have blubbery arms. Obviously Adams envisioned them differently, but once again I like the movie-Vogons.

And having his heads move like a roladex might possibly be the straw that breaks the camel's back. I mean really, with all the tech for blue screens and digital imaging, dont you think they could have at least TRIED to make both his heads sit beside eachother, even having a head growing from his shoulder or something id believe. ugh. damn hollywood.

Don't overestimate current technology. We're all busy fellating today's CGI special effects, but if you look at Neo fighting Agent Smith times one hundred in the second Matrix film you can see a lot of rubbery and fake computer effects. We're nots far alnog as Hollywood wants us believe and in my opinion old anamotronics still look more realistic than CGI. In fact, it looks vaguely like the Vogons are based on anamotronics.

It's very expensive and difficult to do the two-head bits, because the heads have to interact and, even more, the second head has to focus on stuff around him. It's very difficult to get an actor to do that properly and cut it in later. A CGI head might work, but once again we're not at that level yet.

Casting Ford as a black guy isnt too bad of a thing, since I dont remember the book ever specifying what he looked like. Apparently there are black people on Betelgeuse too, tho.

It does. After he and Arthur crash on the Earth, he is described as getting back "bronzed". Black people don't get bronzed, the sun doesn't affect them. Hence he is white in the books.

Also he's described as being short in another book.

Even though we havent heard Marvin yet, casting Alan Rickman as his voice will end well, i think, since he is an incredible actor.

He's not that good. All Alan can do is the sarcastic mean guy.
Which is perfect for Marvin.

Note that in the end I don't really care about how true it is to the book. I more care about it being a good flick. Right now it just looks like Men In Black 3.

 

[welsh]

Ok, so the film is out.

Has anyone seen it? Was it any good. Reviews are not great.


From the BBC-

Review: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
By Darren Waters
BBC News entertainment reporter


Verdict on the new big-screen version of Douglas Adams' much-loved science-fiction novel.

Don't panic - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is not as bad as I had feared. Then again, it is not as good as I had hoped.
Stuck in development hell for the best part of 26 years, Douglas Adams' book has finally reached the big screen - four years after the author's death.

Adams' deceptively complex novels are crammed full of witty erudition, great gags and lengthy digressions, so it was always going to be a struggle to turn it into a neatly packaged two-hour movie.

Understandably perhaps, huge swathes of the novel have been cut in order to make a consistent, story-led film.

At the same time, director Garth Jennings tries hard to retain the comedic essence that so defined Adams' originals.

Beguiling

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy centres on the hapless Arthur Dent, who awakes one morning to find his best friend is an alien, his planet is about to be destroyed and that he is somehow central to a galactic scientific experiment to determine the meaning of life itself.

What marked the book out as more than a mere comedic romp was the density of ideas that Adams managed to distil in the text - everything from handheld computing to existentialism to musings on cricket and maths.


The key characters are all present in the film, with Dent played note perfect by The Office's Martin Freeman.
Sam Rockwell does a great turn as Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed president of the galaxy; Mos Def is passable as Ford Prefect; while Zooey Deschanel is beguiling as Trillian.

As the voice of Marvin the Paranoid Android, Alan Rickman perfectly conveys the character's world-weary disdain, despite being woefully underused.

A lot of effort has gone in to keeping the film as faithful to Adams' vision as possible. But somewhere in the production process the crew has lost sight of the fundamental aspect of the books - they were immensely funny.

Truncated

The film burbles along at an amusing canter, occasionally rising to levels worthy of a chuckle. But unlike the books and radio series, it rarely makes you laugh out loud.

Some of the original gags find their way into the film version, but they feel neutered or truncated.

Screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick, who continued the adaptation work started by Adams, has had to make a number of sacrifices to get the text into cinematic form.

Unfortunately, one of the elements sacrificed is sense.


Hitchhiker fans will know what is happening, but newcomers will be left scratching their heads at a story that flits from one unpronounceable planet to another - each one populated by equally exotic-sounding characters.
Did I say characters? Hmmm. While Dent is a familiar cipher, audiences will be left clueless by Ford Prefect, bemused by Zaphod Beeblebrox and indifferent to Trillian.

Despite outstanding production design and some fantastic visual effects, overall the film is a bit of a mess. A charming mess, maybe, but a mess all the same.

Did the script veer too far away from the source material or tie itself in knots trying to keep faith with it?

Bizarrely, I think the answer is both.

from Ebert, and this coming from someone unfamiliar with the books.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy


BY ROGER EBERT / April 28, 2005

It is possible that "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" should only be reviewed by, and perhaps only be seen by, people who are familiar with the original material to the point of obsession. My good friend Andy Ihnatko is such a person, and considered the late Douglas Adams to be one of only three or four people worthy to be mentioned in the same breath as P.G. Wodehouse. Adams may in fact have been the only worthy person.

Such a Hitchhiker Master would be able to review this movie in terms of its in-jokes, its references to various generations of the Guide universe, its earlier manifestations as books, radio shows, a TV series and the center of a matrix of Web sites. He would understand what the filmmakers have done with Adams' material, and how, and why, and whether the film is faithful to the spirit of the original.

I cannot address any of those issues, and I would rather plead ignorance than pretend to knowledge. If you're familiar with the Adams material, I suggest you stop reading right now before I disappoint or even anger you. All I can do is speak to others like myself, who will be arriving at the movie innocent of Hitchhiker knowledge. To such a person, two things are possible if you see the movie:

1. You will become intrigued by its whimsical and quirky sense of humor, understand that a familiarity with the books is necessary, read one of more of the Hitchhiker books, return to the movie, appreciate it more, and eventually be absorbed into the legion of Adams admirers.

2. You will find the movie tiresomely twee, and notice that it obviously thinks it is being funny at times when you do not have the slightest clue why that should be. You will sense a certain desperation as actors try to sustain a tone that belongs on the page and not on the screen. And you will hear dialogue that preserves the content of written humor at the cost of sounding as if the characters are holding a Douglas Adams reading.

I take the second choice. The movie does not inspire me to learn lots more about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide, The Salmon of Doubt, The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, and so on. Like "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou," but with much less visual charm, it is a conceit with little to be conceited about.

The story involves Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman), for whom one day there is bad news and good news. The bad news is that Earth is being destroyed to build an intergalactic freeway, which will run right through his house. The good news is that his best friend, Ford Prefect (Mos Def) is an alien temporarily visiting Earth to do research for a series of Hitchhiker's Guides, and can use his magic ring to beam both of them up to a vast spaceship operated by the Vogons, an alien race that looks like a cross between Jabba the Hutt and Harold Bloom. The Vogons are not a cruel race, apart from the fact that they insist on reading their poetry, which is so bad it has driven people to catatonia.

Once aboard this ship, Arthur and Ford are hitchhikers themselves, and quickly transfer to another ship named the Heart of Gold, commanded by the Galaxy's president Zaphod Beeblebrox (Sam Rockwell), who has a third arm that keeps emerging from his tunic like the concealed arm of a samurai warrior, with the proviso that a samurai conceals two arms at the most. Zaphod is two-faced in a most intriguing way. Also on the ship are Trillian (Zooey Deschanel), an earthling, and Marvin the Android (body by Warwick Davis, voice by Alan Rickman), who is a terminal kvetcher. There is also a role for John Malkovich, who has a human trunk and a lower body apparently made from spindly robotic cranes' legs; this makes him a wonder to behold, up to a point.

What these characters do is not as important as what they say, how they say it, and what it will mean to Douglas Adams fans. To me it got old fairly quickly. The movie was more of a revue than a narrative, more about moments than an organizing purpose, and cute to the point that I yearned for some corrosive wit from its second cousin, the Monty Python universe. But of course I do not get the joke. I do not much want to get the joke, but maybe you will. It is not an evil movie. It wants only to be loved, but movies that want to be loved are like puppies in the pound: No matter how earnestly they wag their little tails, you can adopt only one at a time.

Kung Fu Hustle anyone?

 

[SuAside]

a friend of mine went to the opening in London. (won trip + hotel + gadgets + opening)
he says it's pretty good (way better than the tv series ofc), but they HORRIBLY screwed up the end.

a true fan will immediatly see that there is a concistancy issue there & that it does not belong. it's just not true to the story.
(anyone that wants to hear why just has to PM me, i'm not gonna post a spoiler here)

 

[welsh]

If it's not true to the story- than what is it (like most big movie productions of popular books) really about-

Money, cool hard money.

“The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”

Hand over the money

Apr 28th 2005
From The Economist print edition


Hitching all the way to the bank

HE WAS a one-trick pony, but what a trick. The Douglas Adams bandwagon has just reached its logical destination with the release of the film version of “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”. So far, the idea, which Adams claimed he dreamed up while trying to sleep in a foreign field as a penniless hitchhiker, has been incarnated as a radio show, a television series, a “trilogy in five parts” of novels, a computer game, a stage play and, in a case of life imitating art, a website that attempts to recreate the original idea of an encyclopedic, if erratic, guide to Life, the Universe and Everything. In this context, a movie was inevitable.

Perhaps equally inevitable is that it is posthumous. Adams, who died four years ago, likened the process of putting together a film deal to grilling a steak by having a series of people walk through a room and breathe on it. No doubt there is something in that, but it is also true that he wanted so much control over the process that deals, though tantalisingly close at times, never quite seemed to get signed. In an ironic twist on the Silicon Valley adage that to make an invention commercially viable you have to shoot the inventor, it was Adams's death that unlocked the process.

The tension between artistic integrity and commerce is clearly apparent in the final cut. At times, the journey of bemused earthling Arthur Dent, his alien companions and his totally unbemused fellow earthling, Trillian, is as wacky and entertaining as it was a quarter of a century ago, when the idea first crackled over the airwaves of the BBC. At other points, though, the heavy hand of Disney's plot police is rather too visible. The romance between the two surviving earthlings, non-existent from Trillian's point of view in other versions of the story, is played up and there is a disappointingly happy ending. But perhaps you have to have such things to be big at the box office. As Zaphod Beeblebrox, president of the Imperial Galactic Government, so aptly put it: “It's partly the curiosity, partly a sense of adventure, but mostly I think it's the fame and the money.”

 

[Malky]

The important thing to remember is that every incarnation of HHGTG was different.

If you go into any movie expecting a totally faithful adaptation from the source material, you're going to be disappointed.

It's ridiculous to complain about the Arthur-Trillian romance. There were a few hints at this in other incarnations of the series, and it's perfectly natural to want to flesh it out for a movie. The bottom line is that Adams wrote it in...who are we to argue with the guy who created this whole thing?

I'm going to see this tonight. I'm keeping an open mind, and taking it for what it is. We'll see.

 

[Roshambo]

That is true, every incarnation was different and had its own continuity.

I don't mind a bit of change in those terms, though from what I hear the changes were made mostly before Adams' death. I do understand the feel for not wanting to have a Zaphod with two heads. Three arms as well, IIRC.

Sorry, but The City of Lost Children and other film masterpieces were able to do the splicing of two instances of an actor into the same frame, and I think they would have gone with the two heads if they weren't specifically steering away from digital effects on purpose.