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- Jul 8, 2004
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these omissions could work, the book is probably as hard to slim down as Lord Of The Rings, besides stuff like the vogon poetry is better left a little ambiguous as no one would be able to write poetry that badly
Craig Charles does, I saw him live a few years ago!Entia non multi said:these omissions could work, the book is probably as hard to slim down as Lord Of The Rings, besides stuff like the vogon poetry is better left a little ambiguous as no one would be able to write poetry that badly
dot23 said:Looks like all the bits that have been removed are references to religion and British place names. Why is it that we Brits have to put up with incomprehensible dialogue, gags that revolve around obscure NFL commentators and constant barrages of brand names/ pseudo-religious moralising whilst the mention of Croydon is deemed too confusing for US audiences?
Entia non multi said:holywood script writers second against the wall come the revolution, after all we know who is first
Heckler said:Entia non multi said:holywood script writers second against the wall come the revolution, after all we know who is first
James Randi?
"Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came."
Hitchhiker's guide in your pocket
Soon you will be able to carry around a real version of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
The mobile edition has been made by the BBC rather than "the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor" who, in Douglas Adams' book, created the original.
Owners of smartphones and handheld computers will be able to access the guide while they are out and about.
The portable edition contains 7,000 articles from the H2G2 site covering life, the Universe and everything.
The original idea for Earth's very own version of the guide put together by anyone who had time to contribute came from Adams himself.
Mostly harmless
Mr Adams' own company managed the project in its early days but in 2001 the BBC took over and moved it to its current website.
In some respects the way that the H2G2 website was put together pre-figures the idea of the wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, that is also written, edited and checked by ordinary web users.
Phone and PDA users can get access to the mobile version of the guide by sending "H2G2" in a text message to 81010 or simply visiting http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/h2g2.
Visitors can browse the entries, search for specific topics or hit a Surprise Me! button that takes them to a random database entry.
"Douglas Adams was years before his time," said Tony Ageh, BBC controller, Internet. "But thanks to modern mobile technology, what was once only a harebrained idea has now become a startling reality."
Mr Ageh said that the entries picked for this edition were the most relevant and useful for mobile users.
"We cannot take for granted what any of the mobile interfaces are," he said, "but its a reasonably pleasant experience on most mobiles."
"We're quite pleased that we have delivered the vision that Douglas had in the first place," he said.
In Douglas Adams' first book the Earth only merited a single short entry in the guide but the phone edition holds information about a huge variety of subjects; everything from how to hypnotise a chicken to hangover cures.
Entries under "Life" cover animals, plants and humans. Those under "Universe" concern geography and space, and "Everything" deals with everything else.
The mobile edition of the guide has been timed to coincide with the release of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film.
Also being updated is the Radio 4 Hitchhiker's website that is offering new versions of the game of the book and radio series.
The BBC is also planning to broadcast the last ever radio instalment of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on 3 May at 1830BST.
--------------------------------
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/t ... 447885.stm
Published: 2005/04/15 10:56:08 GMT
© BBC MMV
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
*** Cert PG
Peter Bradshaw
Friday April 22, 2005
The Guardian
If Jorge Luis Borges had written an episode of Blake's 7, the script might resemble Douglas Adams's 1970s radio masterpiece The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which became a less good, but still decent TV serial and also a globally bestselling novel. Adams's inspired absorption of influences - Kubrick, Lucas, Python, Carroll - would not have been possible without the strength of his own insouciant comic originality; and on his death in 2001 at the unfunnily early age of 49, we lost a playful virtuoso of ideas. When Richard Dawkins, in the television programme accompanying his book The Blind Watchmaker, presented his computer simulation of how natural selection works, modifying imaginary little animals, the benign inspiration of Adams was obvious.
Article continues
So much of his energy had been expended on trying to get a longed-for movie version off the ground. For years, nothing at all happened and the only sci-fi comedy, incidentally, which had anything like the Adams spirit was the very funny Galaxy Quest. But here the film version finally is, and the author and co-writer has a melancholy posthumous exec-producer credit as well as a final dedication to "Douglas". The film is no disgrace, and honours the Guide's gentle, low-tech BBC origins. But it doesn't do justice to the open-ended inventiveness of the original. The inevitable Anglo-American accommodations of casting have muddled its identity and the performances of the new American stars can be uneasy. It somehow seems heavier-footed and slower-moving than Adams's concept; the gravity is stronger.
Arthur Dent is the put-upon English bloke enraged to find that his house is to be demolished to make way for a new bypass, at exactly the same time that Earthlings discover that the same thing is to happen to their insignificant little planet: a giant cluster of alien construction ships is massing just outside the ionosphere ready to reduce it to dust. With magnificent bureaucratic scorn, they announce that the plans have been available for inspection for over 50 years now at Alpha Centauri and it is too late to lodge an official complaint.
Martin Freeman (Tim from The Office) is inspired casting as Dent, and delivers exactly the right note of futile English sarcasm in the face of complete and utter planetary destruction. His best friend, the oddly named Ford Prefect, tips him off about what is about to happen; together they escape and hitch-hike across the Milky Way, armed with their invaluable book, the Hitchhiker's Guide, voiced with lucid serenity by Stephen Fry.
Prefect is played by Mos Def, and a wisecracking American figure is arguably the right choice to guide our clueless and innocent Brit out of trouble. Zooey Deschanel plays the woman to whom poor Arthur loses his heart, and this casting, too, works reasonably well, though female roles were never particularly strongly conceived in this comedy galaxy. The problem is with Sam Rockwell playing the bizarre figure of Zaphod Beeblebrox, that arrogant inter-galactic adventurer who has somehow become a kind of itinerant universal president and the figure responsible, with one negligent signature, for the annihilation of Arthur's home planet.
Rockwell sashays about gamely, but largely uncomprehendingly, sporting a glam-rock costume and unreliable grin, but the character never really connects to anything or anyone else on screen. He's virtually on autopilot. There's a visual difficulty, too, with his two faces. When Mark Wing-Davey played Zaphod on television, he had an extra face floating waxily alongside his real one. Rockwell's Zaphod has his second face shooting up periodically from under his chin like some sort of Exorcist possession, the hidden id to Zaphod's ego. It is somewhat odd, and when Mos Def, Rockwell, Deschanel and Freeman are rattling around together in the one scene, they look baffled by each other's existence.
The real star has to be the Book, here re-styled as a hi-tech laptop, with witty onscreen graphics illustrating Fry's voice. Its presence is a little slimmed down but the film nicely portrays one of the most surreal sequences: imagining the thoughts of a giant sperm whale, suddenly magicked into existence in the sky, and left to drop thousands of feet to the ground. My favourite character is the Babel Fish, which shoved into your ear will translate any language. The film, sadly, misses out the Book's devastating aside - that the Babel Fish, by making everyone understand each other perfectly, has been responsible for more and bloodier wars than anything else in history.
The savour and flavour of the Adams original, its playfully ruminative feel, has been downgraded in favour of a jolly but less interesting outerspace romp.
melf said:so has anyone seen it yet?
Hitchhiker film takes £4.2m in UK
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie has taken £4.2m at the UK box office, mirroring its "answer to life, the universe and everything" - 42.
In a coincidence to delight fans, the film took £4,223,150 in the UK between Thursday and Bank Holiday Monday.
It is based on the stories of the late Douglas Adams, which state that the answer to life is simply "42" without giving any further explanation.
The movie also topped the US box office chart, taking $21.7m (£14.2m).
Robert Mitchell of UK distributor Buena Vista International said film-makers were "delighted" with the movie's "incredibly strong opening".
He said the Hitchhiker's movie beat action film XXX: The Next Level at the UK box office, as it had already done in the US.
To beat off the hottest weekend of the year so far in the UK and strong competition from XXX in the US to record these figures is a phenomenal achievement," Mr Mitchell added.
The XXX sequel, which sees rapper Ice Cube take over from action star Vin Diesel, made one third of Hitchhiker's takings despite opening at almost 400 cinemas in UK and Eire.
Last week's number one, Nicole Kidman's thriller The Interpreter, dropped to three but continued to perform, its third week takings of £749,529 taking its total UK box office haul to more than £5m.
Romantic comedy The Wedding Date fell to four while the Amityville Horror remake slipped to five.
Elsewhere in the chart, Downfall has now become the most successful German-language film ever at the UK box office with total takings of £1.33m.
The Adolf Hitler drama - in 12th place after five weeks on release - beat the £1.24m accrued by 2003 comedy Good Bye Lenin over the weekend.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainmen ... 509721.stm
oooh, so nearly half of 42 million.The movie also topped the US box office chart, taking $21.7m
The TV show was rubbish in comparison to the radio show. It must have been "dumbed down" for a television audience or something as all the speech was slowed down and stuff. Hard to make something sound witty when you are speaking so slowly and carefully. The actual effects were fine, it doesn't need them. Well it shouldn't need them. And you must listen to the radio show to hear about the Shoe Event Horizon. well if you want to that is..mothman1 said:I have seen the movie and really enjoyed it. I watched a re-run of the first episode of the BBC series and actually ended up prefering the new movie. All film adaptations are very limited accounts of the original material and I think they did the job quite well. It wasnt as funny as it could have been but the characters were better in the film than the Beeb version. By the way, my aunt made the false head for the BBC version and it wasn't that bad honestly, well not when I had a look at it years ago.
You have to remember the BBC was run on very little money then and shows like that had tiny budgets to work with so I think folk should give pre 90's BBC programs a lot of credit for how they are given the resources allocated them to begin with.
I've told my kid, I might take him to see it, if he reads the first book first.