THHG2G
Arright, I watched The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with good friend Chad of Dublin Saab on his weekend excursion up here recently (and y'all thought bloggers never met in person).
For those who like to think movie versions are inevitably inferior. Well, duh. A virtually plotless novel was contorted into a movie. And you know what? I think they did a pretty fine job of it. I never like books (particularly books I love) made into film. Nor does anybody else. But I think the adaptations were thematically true to the novel in a way that make most conversions look even weaker than they aught. Arthur was Arthur. Zaphoid was Zaphoid. Marvin (God bless Alan Rickman) was most certainly Marvin.
In fact, every one of DNA's characters, with the possible exeption of the miscast Trillian (a wandering Zooey Daschell) said their part flawlessly.
A Vogon reading very bad poetry.
So, nimrods who feel that the novels should be matrixed somehow directly into the screen just aren't getting it. The cinematic version captures the idea of what Adams was getting at splendidly. I've read the books three times apiece. He himself (as he wrote the screenplay, before his unexpected death) liked the way the film incorporated his ideas. Why the dissident purists want to raise a fuss is beyond me.
posted by JPS at 5/03/2005 03:03:00 AM
13 Comments:
I can't wait to see the Hitchhikers...Galaxy. I agree that the book is usually better than the movie, unless you're talking about Charles Dickens. The key is to keep your expectations low. I mean, you may have loved every one of the 500 pages of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, but you can't expect all those details to fit into a two hour movie. The essence is retained, and btw, I thought the HP movies were great.
I liked Hitchhiker's, and had read the book so long ago that it was refreshing rather than disappointing to any expectations that I might have had. Nice to see Tim from The Office (Martin Freeman) move up in the world.
Wow, Natalie, you're now the second person I've talked to who's heard of The Office. You people watch way too much BBC on cable.
Claudia, I liked the Harry Potter movies quite a lot, unencumbered by the expectations of having read the books.
One of the problems facing anyone trying to make this movie is that the novels are virtually plotless--190 pages of Douglas Adams' very amusing rambling followed by 30 pages of plot resolution. A movie can't get away with that without boring the audience to tears; hence, it's a movie. If people wanted to read the novel, they should have stayed home and done so.
Jim Henson's Creature Shop, btw, gets an AAAA+++++ for the Vogons. They look so freakin' real kids are gonna have nightmares about 'em. Whoever is in charge of that operation these days needs to call George Lucas (and Peter Jackson, etc) and give them a presentation on how much better high-end puppets still look than glow-in-the-dark CGI cartoons.
Anyway, I liked the film and will probably watch it again. So did the other people who made it debut at #1 over its opening weekend. (Obviously it caught on with people other than the book fiends.) It was an IMDB discussion thread full of annoying Brits who pleasure themselves nightly to the original radio series bashing the new film which aroused my ire, hence the semi-coherent post-bar-closing digression on the matter.
The reason I despise books made into movies is because from here on out, anyone who reads or even thinks of Hitchhikers after having seen the movie will have the same images in their mind of the settings, the characters, etc. How boring and conforming we can make life.
Hamel, one thing you might take into consideration is that the author of a book tends to have a specific visual idea of his novel's version of reality when he writes. That we have open-ended and infinitely diverse interpretations of it may well be a nice bonus of reading, but it is actually due to a lack of specificity on the part of the writer. So your argument isn't really, as I understand it, against movies made from books, but against movies in general. Remember, they were all screenplays with invisible concepts before they got made into films.
I'd disagree with the fact that they were all screenplays. Many authors out there sell rights to their movies, but some established authors say no for the very reason of which I speak. It's my understanding that's why Catcher in the Rye hasn't hit the big screen,but then again, allying myself with JD Salinger doesn't really say much for the ammo available in my belt, now does it. In my original post, I should have been more specific. Particularly disconerting to me are "fantasy" books such as Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. I feel bad for kids who from now in will picture the characters in their minds from the movies, rather than using their own imaginations and interpretations of the books. Movies aren't evil, by any account, but I do think it takes away from the creativity and thinking required of the reader after viewing the movie. But remember, I'm a dorky English teacher who prefers Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet to all other versions because he's kept the play fully intact.
I liked Branagh's Hamlet well enough, but could really have done without the whole Victorianization of the setting. Makes it no longer match the language, and hence I could have done without it. I preferred his Henry V.
I suspect you may agree with my assertion that Leo DiCaprrio's Romeo and Juliet was a steaming pile so large that it has not fully cooled ten years after release.
I'm not sure I agree about the whole idea of movies imposing a vision on a book. I read Carl Sagan's Contact after seeing the so-so film, and my visions of the characters in no way resembled Jody Foster and Matthew McConoughie (wild guess on the spelling). Just like if I re-reaad HHG2TG again, I will still form visions of the characters independent of the film. Hence Ford, Trillian, and Zaphoid all go back to being English, and the Vogons go back to being formed in my imagination and not Jim Henson's creature shop.
I have far more of a problem with music videos supplying the image for a song than the movies/books issue. In former instance, a lot of people get them at or near the same time, so you're told more directly what your idea of the song aught to be. I think when you have an art form as interpretive as lyrics/poetry, the video takes more away from the imagination than a movie does for a novel. But perhaps I'm splitting hairs.
I am going to go WAY OUT on a limb here and assert that however cruddy purist English teacher found the Danes-DiCaprio Romeo & Juliet to be, anything that gets teenagers reciting Shakespeare is a positive thing.
CL, you must not get out much if you've only met two people who dig the (BBC version) Office, lots and lots of people have recommended it to me. It's all the rage! I finally got it from Netflix and dang is it funny.
Hamel - I think if one read the book before the movie, they retain their original vision of the characters and settings, but if you see the movie first and then read the book, you'll just picture what you've already seen. Staying with the Harry Potter example, my vision of Hermione was not nearly as pretty as the movie version, but when I read the next installment of the book, I still pictured "my" Hermione, not the Hollywood version. But maybe that's just me.
LS,
I haven't been in a household with cable since 2000, so forgive my being out of the loop on the BBC show-o-the-week. People were still into AbFab and The Young Ones about the last time I had a clue. I watch baseball and basketball at sports bars, follow online when I can't, and see movies generally in the theater. Am I a caveman? Sure. I do get a lot of reading done as a result, though.
The movie/book imagery conceptualization is fascinating. It seems not everybody does it the same way. If anyone knows of any links to psychological studies related to the matter, I'd love to read them.
If someone watches a movie and then, because they liked the movie, then go out and watch the play or read the book, that's wonderful. But in terms of Shakespeare, if kids go around talking about a movie that so butchers Shakespeare's ideas of characterization, love and lust, who cares? It's like taking a quote out of context, which is dishonest. It's not truly liking Shakespeare because you saw the movie version.
As you would admit yourself, Hamel, there is film Shakespeare, and there is film Shakespeare. Even some of the ones that take liberties (Orson Wells' Othello, for instance) can be of some value. My problem with the R&J we're talking about is that it edits out enourmous chunks of dialogue, not for brevity's sake, as it's still plenty long, but to replace it with music video chase and action sequences. It's more like "highlights from R&J put to a cool soundtrack" (which, admittedly, it is). The Rule of Centerleft: if you have time to put silly cars-flipping-over in the rain sequences, you have time to include more than one line from Tybalt and Romeo's fight scene. That movie is Shakespeare gutted to the point of being Cliff's Notes. So, I argue it has little value either as attraction or representation for the Bard, any more than that horrendous NBC version of Gulliver's Travels a few years back gives anyone a clue as to what Jonathan Swift's satire was about.
My point exactly, about the Shakespeare movie. But I'll stick to my guns about the movies replacing, or at the very least reducing, the imagination required on the part of the reader. I know that every one of my students who reads Hamlet and then watches it with me, says that now they picture Branagh. I feel bad for kids and the Harry Potter books and the like.
Perhaps I will test my previous assertion by rereading Hitchhiker's and seeing if I can do it wothout hinking of the movie actors. I think it just happens that way for some people and doesn't for some. Or maybe I'm a freak whose memory doesn't work properly. And perhaps it's different at different ages, as cognative formation varies. Something definitely worth investigating. I'm not saying anyone else is wrong; but I've read both Contact and The Graduate after seeing the films, and did not think of the film actors as I read them.
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