{"id":7267,"date":"2005-04-12T09:18:22","date_gmt":"2005-04-12T16:18:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/2005\/04\/12\/well-this-is-depressing.html"},"modified":"2014-11-06T09:42:44","modified_gmt":"2014-11-06T16:42:44","slug":"well_this_is_de","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2005\/04\/12\/well_this_is_de.html","title":{"rendered":"Well. This is depressing"},"content":{"rendered":"

A major Douglas Adams biographer was invited to a pre-screening of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy<\/em>. His (non-spoiler) review:<\/p>\n

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy<\/em> movie is bad. Really bad. You just won’t believe how vastly, staggeringly, jaw-droppingly bad it is. I mean, you might think that The Phantom Menace<\/em> was a hopelessly misguided attempt to reinvent a much-loved franchise by people who, though well-intentioned, completely failed to understand what made the original popular – but that’s just peanuts to the Hitchhiker’s <\/em>movie. Listen.<\/p>\n

And so on…<\/p>\n

It’s bad on a big scale because enormous swathes of the story have been dispensed with – most of the Guide entries, whole scenes – or changed beyond all recognition. And it is bad on a small scale because many, many wonderful lines have been cut or in some cases actually rewritten to make them less funny. Whatever your favourite line from Hitchhiker’s<\/em>, there?s a good chance that it won’t be in the film. Even if it’s really well-known, widely-quoted, much-loved, very funny – it will probably be absent from the movie. Or if it is there, it might have been changed.<\/p>\n

Douglas Adams was a dialogue writer. That was his skill – writing great dialogue. And when he had written it, he would rewrite it again and again and again, changing a word here or there because he knew that good comedy writing is like poetry. It has a meter to it and when you get the right words in the right order it just sounds right and nothing else will do. Douglas’ dialogue was perfect. However, the makers of this film, despite all their talk of being faithful to Douglas’ intentions and ideals, have seen fit to piss about with his carefully crafted, wonderfully quotable lines.<\/p>\n

To put it bluntly, they have cut most of the jokes out. I’m not being metaphorical here, they really have, in a very literal sense, removed the jokes from the story. There are scenes where all we’re left with is the set-up dialogue, there are jokes where we get the feed-line but not the punchline. It?s astounding. Occasionally, the filmmakers have actually bothered replacing the jokes but they have replaced them with really, really pisspoor, unfunny jokes; they have replaced them with stupid playground humour and pointless slapstick.<\/p>\n

[…] The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy<\/em> movie is an abomination. Whereas the radio show, TV show, books and computer game are all recognisably variations on a theme, this is something new and almost entirely unrelated. It’s not even a good film if viewed as an original work: the characters are unsympathetic, the cast exhibit no chemistry, the direction is pedestrian, the pace plodding, the special effects overpowering (lots and lots of special effects, none of them funny mind you) and above all the script is amazingly, mindbogglingly awful. Oh, and they have taken most of the jokes out.<\/p>\n

This is a terrible, terrible film and it makes me want to weep.<\/p>\n

And so on.<\/p>\n

Oh, my.<\/p>\n

The long, spoilerish review is here<\/a>. The things-not-in-the-film are here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

(via Solonor<\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A major Douglas Adams biographer was invited to a pre-screening of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. His (non-spoiler) review: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie is bad. Really bad….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[15,372],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-star-wars-media-movies"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2032,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2002\/03\/23\/not_panicking.html","url_meta":{"origin":7267,"position":0},"title":"Not panicking","author":"***Dave","date":"Sat 23-Mar-02 12:26pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Which Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy character are you? (Via Sekimori)...","rel":"","context":"In "Personality Tests"","block_context":{"text":"Personality Tests","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/personal\/personality-tests"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7513,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2005\/02\/16\/dont_panic.html","url_meta":{"origin":7267,"position":1},"title":"Don’t Panic …","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 16-Feb-05 1:45pm","format":false,"excerpt":"... because the trailer for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy doesn't look all that bad. Not brilliant, mind you -- a bit too glitzy-action-packed -- but I've seen far,...","rel":"","context":"In "Media & Culture"","block_context":{"text":"Media & Culture","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/media"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9211,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2006\/01\/23\/the_greatest_sf.html","url_meta":{"origin":7267,"position":2},"title":"The greatest SF movies never made","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 23-Jan-06 3:13pm","format":false,"excerpt":"I don't know that I would rush out to see all of these, but I can't argue with the list of 10 or the reasoning behind it: 10. The \"Real\"...","rel":"","context":"In "Movies"","block_context":{"text":"Movies","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/media\/media-movies"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1658,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2001\/11\/29\/and_in_entertai.html","url_meta":{"origin":7267,"position":3},"title":"And in entertainment news …","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 29-Nov-01 9:16am","format":false,"excerpt":"\"America.01,\" an ABC news show that was about the 9-11 terrorist attacks, how the aftermath is affecting the US, and the War on Terrorism, was cancelled after two lackluster showings,...","rel":"","context":"In "Books"","block_context":{"text":"Books","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/media\/media-books"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5356,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2004\/04\/01\/shoot_grunt_wit.html","url_meta":{"origin":7267,"position":4},"title":"SHOOT GRUNT WITH SHOTGUN","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 1-Apr-04 10:55am","format":false,"excerpt":"Now this is ... um ... interesting. IF Quake is a port of id Software's Quake 1 engine to the Inform programming language. Inform is a language for creating Interactive...","rel":"","context":"In "Gaming"","block_context":{"text":"Gaming","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/gaming"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":45076,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2014\/09\/10\/some-global-results-on-that-recent-book-meme.html","url_meta":{"origin":7267,"position":5},"title":"Some global results on that recent book meme","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 10-Sep-14 7:40am","format":false,"excerpt":"Yesterday, I blogged about ten meaningful \/ memorable \/ impactful books in my life (https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2014\/09\/09\/tagged-for-ten-books.html), having been tagged for it by +DeAnna Knippling.Apparently this meme's been floating around a bit, and Facebook did some analytics on the results, published a few days ago. Here are the top 20: 1. Harry\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7267"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47048,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7267\/revisions\/47048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}