The Importance of Being Idle

Don't Panic!

Well I've finally seen the Hitch-hikers movie, and all I can say is "wow-ish!". Sure it doesn't get it all right, and it does lose some huge chunks of my absolute favourite dialogue ("the lights had probably gone", "so had the stairs!" for instance) but it actually a pretty damn good version of the story - or at least it will remind fans of the good bits. Okay sure it draws in some of the greater conspiracy elements from later in the novel sequence (elements I never particularly cared for - part of the joy of H2G2 for me was the totally and utterly freeform way it was written with no thought of an over-arcing plot whatsoever), it emphasises the Arthur/Trillian thing and I thought it lost its way completely in the second half-hour or so when it deviated quite wildly from any known Hitch-hikerness and attempts to have a plot, but as soon as it's back on course and we're off to Magrethea everything is all well and good again. It does an absolute ton of things right: the cast is almost uniformly good (Bill Nighy as Slartibartfast is a particular highlight for me, although Helen Mirren for Deep Thought is just dreadful I'm sorry to say), the look of the film is pretty amazing (check out the Magarathean planet building yard!), and it does hit an awful lot of the right notes (witness the awesomeness of the Earth Mark 2 when life is begun, the few cameo's from other Guide alumni, or the final image being Douglas' face). My favourite new thing is definitely the Point-of-View gun. My favourite old thing is probably the whale, although like almost all the old stuff it is nearly wrecked by unnecessary changes. If you're a fan I think you'll love it with reservations, not just for what it does, but also for what it's trying to do. You will however go home and listen to the radio show again and remember just how good the material REALLY is. How regular people will react to it is anybody's guess, they'll probably be scared and confused...
This reminds me of one of the odd drunken conversations me and Stu had while he was here: Best and Worst Comic Book Adaptations. Our nomination for Best was unanimous, we both went for Ang Lee's The Hulk. I know lots of people hated it, but I think they are stupid and wrong. We felt that Hulk was a worthy winner for several reasons, most notably its amazing visual style, but also because we felt it had an emotional resonance that other comic book movies lack. We also applauded it not being a big slam bang action movie, in fact there is remarkably little action in it at all, it's all about the characters. So there, Hulk, best Comic Book Movie EVER. Controversial I know, but hey, we're right and you're wrong! Worst was more difficult to decide on. We both reckoned that Nick Fury Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. must be pretty bad just cos of the source material and the fact that it stars David Hasselhoff, but as neither of us has seen it we couldn't really include it. The Punisher (eighties version, although neither of them is a work of genius), Captain America, those dreadful seventies Spiderman movies with Peter Hammond, The Justice League, Tank Girl, The Crow we considered them all. We settled on Judge Dredd. When you think about it, that's a no-brainer. The movie takes every single good thing about the original Dredd, and ignores it. In fact, it doesn't even ignore it, it deliberately seems to go out of it's way to do the exact opposite thing, and therefore piss on the source material. We could identify only two things that the movie got right, those being the casting of MacGruder (who is only a background character in the movie), and Mean Machine Angel, again only used in passing, far too easily dispatched and therefore almost totally wasted.
Bloody hell I've written tons about nothing... that's unlike me eh? ;p

posted by BadMonkey @ 4:39 PM