Double Flee A

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

JV and I went to see this last night. We had dinner and then piled into the theater downtown with high expectations.

A long time ago, at my brother's behest, I picked up some books by Kurt Vonnegut. The first one I read was Breakfast of Champions, followed by Welcome to the Monkey House, then Slaughterhouse Five. Those were so good I read most of the rest of them. All of them, I think, except timewarp, or whatever similar title is always advertised on the Vonnegut book jackets. You may know the one. Anyway, the frist three were always my favorite, and most other people's as well. Years later, I saw that there was a movie based on Breakfast of Champions. "That book was EXcellent. How bad can the movie be?", thought Dale... When I watched it, I found the answer to this question was: Horrible. Awful. Shit-sucking turd nightmare Satan's asshole. I had been taught a valuable lesson. Or so I thought, until last night.

[Important statement: This movie wasn't that bad. Nothing can be as bad as the movie Breakfast of Champions.]

Douglas Adams's grave is smokin'. I can smell the burning peat from here. He is rolling in his grave, spinning, trying to exceed the speed of light in order to turn back the clock and undo this heinous misdeed. Unfortunately, fantastical things like this are imaginations, only.

They slight Adams with a screenwriting credit when an aficionado knows there's no way. The jokes are butchered. The story is changed. The guy even gets the girl. I thought I was going to throw up when they turned it into a love story. Even the guy who played Arthur couldn't do what he does best, because the tempo of the movie wasn't built around his experiences, the way it should have been, buut around the irritatingly wacky beetle-juician (think Michael Keaton here) Zaphod Beeblebrox. The guy who played Arthur is an acting Genius, and they didn't allow him to do his thing. Which could have saved this turkey.

One scene was excellent, when Arthur and Slartibartfast take the air car out into the hangar of Magrithea, but that was all.

I didn't want to write this. But I also wanted the movie to be better. So in short, I am hurt by this movie. What could have been an epic feast of interestingness was boiled down into a thin gruel, for what the studios saw when they looked at the potential viewers. So we got a lukewarm sci-fi love story.

Feel free to disagree. I could have spent all day writing about this, and it probably deserves better treatment from me, but I have to go to work.

posted by dale @ 8:35 AM