Current Ramblings
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
I need to clean stuff.
Today was supposed to be a nice day to relax and put together another bag of old clothes I'm really clearly never going to wear and my children aren't that likely to want for being "retro" to take to Goodwill. Sadly, I realized last night that at some point after Saturday when I used it to open some boxes from Amazon, my tool keychain went missing. I really liked my tool keychain, a Lego Hagrid keychain with a little Maglite, a nifty pink Swiss Army knife, a Cross Ion pen, and a 256mb SanDisk Cruizer Micro USB drive with all my school files. I'm hoping I just set it down somewhere stupid while revelling in the excessiveness of the Invader Zim DVD set box and I'll find it soon. I actually went out to the dumpster and found the Amazon boxes to make sure it didn't end up in one of them.
I would like to talk about Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for a bit, desperate search for my gadgets going on or not. If you care that much but still for whatever insane reason haven't seen it, skip this next paragraph. I'll add a cut to the LJ version.
I haven't gone on about it much here, but I am a certified, towel-carrying Douglas Adams fan. I would go so far as to say the books changed my life, but that might be an essay for another day. The release of the movie has been bittersweet for me, since it was one of the subjects he went on about looking forward to when I saw him speak a month before he left us. It breaks my heart to think that he never got to see it come to fruition, though at the same time I wonder if it was sped along after his death as absolution for holding it up so much when he was alive. As for the movie itself...well, I really, really liked it. It seems strange to think that people could throw fits over changing something that itself was changed from the source material: the books themselves made serious plot and character changes from the radio scripts. Admittedly, the first part - the actual Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy part - stayed pretty much the same, but it's a series that Adams himself changed whenever he felt something needed tweaking and so I didn't expect it to be, well, Sin City. I felt the characters were pretty dead-on portrayals, and I thought Trillian lived up to even more of her potential than she has in a lot of the previous versions, even if it did just result in romantic complications. Okay, so maybe I relate a little too much to the cute-AND-intelligent woman who'll follow any guy with a spaceship. I was thrilled that she was attractive but not eye-candy. Ford could have been played up a little more, but it was great how he just pulled out his towel for everything. Zaphod was very Zaphod, though the Bush thing was a little distracting and is going to date the movie a bit. I was really impressed by the old-fashioned effects for the Vogons. Too many movies these days fall back on CG effects when costumes, prosthetics, and animatronics can look much better. But what I appreciated most about the movie was how much it felt like it was done by people who actually appreciated the source material, right down to a handful of nods to the BBC miniseries. In a time where I'm seeing some other things I'm a big fan of handed over more and more to business interests with no real appreciation for the material (okay, yes, I am sniping at Master Collectors in my Hitchhiker's Guide review), it warms my heart to see so much love in this movie, both for the source material and for Adams himself.
Also, I'm sick of seeing movie reviewers who are so vapid that every British-originated comedy must be called "Python-esque". Though I will accept Gilliam-esque for this one. Greg Dean at Real Life has some good things to say regarding the movie and its loyalty to the last version of the script Adams had written.
And now I'm gonna go look for that damn keychain.
posted@2:19 PM by:Trixter: 0 comments