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Bite my shiny metal flux capacitor!
Apr. 12th, 2005 08:41 pmSomewhere in my mother's closet is a towel. She has many towels, but this towel is particularly special to me. Not only is it that rare towel which is both fluffy and absorbent, but it has the number "42" worked into its blue art-deco sailboat design. It's on the side of the sailboat, and is quite clear, and is not just a change in shading. Whether this is because some anonymous towel designer decided to pay a small tribute to the book which got him or her into towel designing in the first place, or whether it's just because someone liked the number 42, I do not know. But that towel shall be around my neck as I sit in a darkened theater and watch what may be one of the biggest disappointments of my moviegoing experience.
Why, you say? How in the world could such a hoopy frood movie such as "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" possibly suck? Well, HERE. These people seem to know what they are talking about. It contains spoilers. Do not read if you want the plot to be a surprise. Do not read if you want to be disillusioned early. I'm hoping this is a red herring. The red herring of doubt.
I was really looking forward to it too. I wasn't expecting it to stay true to the book, plotwise. Actually, that would have been a disappointment--part of the fun of any adaptation, not just the various incarnations of "Hitchhiker's", is seeing how much the director (or whomever) can change the original and still make it worth your time.
This worked very well with "Naked Lunch," the movie version of which complemented the book perfectly. It wasn't so much a straight film version of the book (actually, this would be impossible to do while retaining any kind of artistic sanity), but a twisted biographical version of Burroughs' life while writing "Naked Lunch"...but assuming that everything in the book was true.
The opposite never seems to be true, though. Novelizations of movies seldom take any real artistic license. They're occasionally bowdlerized for children's versions (I'm slightly embarassed to admit that I own four novelizations of both "Ace Ventura" movies, and the difference between the kids' version and the adult version is a little startling), and often deviate from the final script of the movie--presumably the authors were given an earlier draft to work from in those cases. But there's relatively little style or imagination in the novelizations I've read. Most of them are quite badly written as well.
Was going to post a "Five books I would like to see made into movies" meme, but I've got to finish typing up notes so that I have time to watch "House" tonight. And "Roswell That Ends Well." Crossover idea: "Back to the Futurama." This may be redundant, actually.
Or maybe with "The Simpsons." Although I'm sure they've already done some kind of parody. Or at least made so many references that this would also be redundant. (I strongly believe that Bart Simpson is way cooler than Marty.)
South Park! Well, they already did that episode where Stan's future self shows up on his doorstep...but (spoiler spoiler) that wasn't really time travel. So, in conclusion,
Why, you say? How in the world could such a hoopy frood movie such as "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" possibly suck? Well, HERE. These people seem to know what they are talking about. It contains spoilers. Do not read if you want the plot to be a surprise. Do not read if you want to be disillusioned early. I'm hoping this is a red herring. The red herring of doubt.
I was really looking forward to it too. I wasn't expecting it to stay true to the book, plotwise. Actually, that would have been a disappointment--part of the fun of any adaptation, not just the various incarnations of "Hitchhiker's", is seeing how much the director (or whomever) can change the original and still make it worth your time.
This worked very well with "Naked Lunch," the movie version of which complemented the book perfectly. It wasn't so much a straight film version of the book (actually, this would be impossible to do while retaining any kind of artistic sanity), but a twisted biographical version of Burroughs' life while writing "Naked Lunch"...but assuming that everything in the book was true.
The opposite never seems to be true, though. Novelizations of movies seldom take any real artistic license. They're occasionally bowdlerized for children's versions (I'm slightly embarassed to admit that I own four novelizations of both "Ace Ventura" movies, and the difference between the kids' version and the adult version is a little startling), and often deviate from the final script of the movie--presumably the authors were given an earlier draft to work from in those cases. But there's relatively little style or imagination in the novelizations I've read. Most of them are quite badly written as well.
Was going to post a "Five books I would like to see made into movies" meme, but I've got to finish typing up notes so that I have time to watch "House" tonight. And "Roswell That Ends Well." Crossover idea: "Back to the Futurama." This may be redundant, actually.
Or maybe with "The Simpsons." Although I'm sure they've already done some kind of parody. Or at least made so many references that this would also be redundant. (I strongly believe that Bart Simpson is way cooler than Marty.)
South Park! Well, they already did that episode where Stan's future self shows up on his doorstep...but (spoiler spoiler) that wasn't really time travel. So, in conclusion,
