On Apr 29, 2005, at 8:13 PM, Max Battcher wrote:
I, myself, thoroughly enjoyed it. Its not the books or the radio plays, but it works. Whine all you want about your favorite bits that got left out or cut down (and I do have a few of my own: for instance, the "amazingly amazing" line of Zaphod's was replaced with a line that sped the plot), but the movie is jam-packed to the point of nearly bursting with _too much content_ that I can see why so much had to be cut. Hopefully those looking for more of the "whys" and "explain why you were laughing at that" will pick up the trilogy.
You laughed? Wow, you would have stuck out in the theater I saw it in. There were a few chuckles, but that was it. (It was a fairly well packed house too.)
The problem with the pacing was that it *did not have to be cut*. All the screenwriter had to do was start from the original material -- as I mentioned before the first installment in radio form was only 2 hours long to begin with -- remove the stuff that simply could *not* be filmed, and then apply a little spackle to cover the holes that would have emerged as a result.
Presto, a 90-minute movie that didn't have to be cut, absolutely did not have to have anything added, and still had a plot that worked. And, as much as possible, the words that are what *really* makes HHGttG the funny adventure it is.
It was the unforeseeable way things fit together that really made the story so damned clever.
I thought a lot of that was well intact.
You did? You mean that, to you, Arthur's early and unnecessary flashback to the party at Islington represented keeping the unpredictability of his meeting Trillian later "intact"? It's impossible for a later meeting, foreshadowed in the opening minutes of a movie, to be described as unexpected, isn't it?
> (Well, that and Adams's careful honing oflanguage, most of which was changed in the script by someone with the same notions of subtlety as a hammer-wielding three-year-old.)
That would be good old Douglas Adams himself. I've heard that he was often his harshest critic of his own prose when writing the script than any stereo-typical Vogon that some of you may believe was actually to blame.
Yes. You might not have seen my point, which was that Adams *really understood* humor in language and really knew how to make it work. By extracting much of his finely-crafted prose, the screenwriter essentially destroyed the humor value of the words Adams spent so much time agonizing over.
Honestly, I enjoyed it.
Even the totally needless Malkovich intervention? That served no purpose whatsoever; the Point of View Gun, while clever, wasn't necessary to making the story work, Humma Kavula himself was not in any way necessary to the story, and the idea that the HoG needed "coordinates" to locate Magrathea was asinine.
The damned ship uses *improbability* to get where it's going. It doesn't *need* coordinates to locate a planet as vastly unlikely as Magrathea is; you just basically have to calculate the odds against Magrathea existing, feed the data into Eddy, and push the "Make spaceship go now" button. (But explaining that to many theatergoing audiences would probably be difficult; these are people who, in the main, probably have a hard time balancing their checkbooks.)
They couldn't show everything, but I think they got the essential core of the story in there...
They couldn't show everything partly because they added crap that did not need to be there.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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