With Wings As Eagles: Craig P. Steffen's Blog

guides to the Galaxy

2005 May 01 12:41

I submitted a review of the Hitchhiker's movie to slashdot yesterday morning. It wasn't accepted, so I'm reposting it here:

The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie came out yesterday. It has been reviewed all over the place, both good and bad. Roger Ebert, and others who have had their reviews posted on slashdot, didn't especially like it.

However, I'd like to weigh in here as a long-time fan who read the books and got them (which clearly Mr. Ebert and others didn't).

First of all, the movie is good. It's funny, quirky, and you have to stay on your toes to follow all the plot bits the first time (I've only seen it the once). No, it doesn't have the seamless tight plot of, say, The Terminator, but you know, neither has any of the other Hitchhiker's incarnations. It's not epic science fiction, but I don't think anyone ever prentended it was going to be. It's silly, strange, very intelligent science fiction. For those used to sci-fi being like Independence Day, it's a bit of an acquired taste. But that was true of the books as well. Anyone who doesn't like the movie is the sort of person who would have read the books and missed the point.

So, the movie itself. Arthur is a good, suitably British, with a mix of the befuddled character of the books and the hero of the radio series. Ford is suitably wierd and spot-on. Trillian is the first Trillian that I've seen that matches Douglas' description; sexy, charming, and very smart. I'm not sure that I totally agree with how Zaphod is done, but he definitely fits the role of president-of-the-galaxy on the run.

The Vogons are suitably vile, excellent work by the Henson creature shop. Marvin has the usual bits, and is woven into the plot a bit more than before. Look for cameos of Simon Jones and the Marvin from the BBC TV series.

I'm very pleased that lots of lines from the radio series and books survive intact. Many were changed, because the plot isn't precisely the same. I'm also glad that several bits of narration were done as guide entries, which connects the film very well to the other Hitchhiker's incarnations.

I sat in the theater next to people that had never experience any of the previous. They didn't have the movie-going experience of their lives, but they thought it was funny.

In conclusion: see the movie. It's good. It is Hitchhiker's. Is it Douglas Adam's Hitchhikers? Hard to say, but it would be hard to prove that it wasn't. It's not Independence Day with Arthur replacing Will Smith. It's funny, wierd, and overly cerebral, just like the other incarnations. I very firmly believe that people who don't like the movie at all wouldn't like or get the books.

I went shopping at Fry's in Chicago yesterday, and I helped a friend buy an iPod. It turns out that she was more interested in using it to record lectures and conference presentations.

Since I have a PDA that plays music, and so can my laptop, iPod's really haven't been something that I've gravitated towards. However, having an easy way to record sound to a digital format (as opposed to recording on a micro-casette and then digitizing) would occasionally be useful. Recording speeches and whatnot, for one thing. Plugging into the voice circuit in an airplane would be another one that could occasionally useful. Not to make a safety recording in the event of a crash, but as a way to go over communcation post-flight and review if there were things that I missed, or could have done better.

So now I'm all interested in Linux on the iPod. My brief Googling on that subject seems to indicate that the "3rd generation" iPod was the first to be able to record sound, and the most recent one current supported one for iPod Linux. They are available on ebay, but expensive enough still that I won't be rushing right out and getting one.