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So, anyone going to mention Revenge of the Sith?

Two words: Plot holes. *cringes* This one directly contradicts the original trilogy in about ten different places. That's all I have to say.

"Captain A. Ssasin, please report to the infirmary"

You know, I say, and hear this so often: "Great spectacle, visually impressive, but I didn't like what they did to the story / main characters." It seems like, in order to enjoy a film these days, you have to check your brains in at the cinema door, and try hard not to expect anything even vaguely like the book it may be based on.

Johnny Depp is good at what he does, but clearly isn't the right choice for Wonka. I can see why the film execs chose him. They wanted 'a big name star, someone a bit weird, but with whom modern kids can identify - someone who will successfully sell this film to its target audience'. It's criteria like this that drive casting choices, not how well the actor can portray the character described in the book.

(Never mind, maybe those kids who are impressed by Depp's performance in this movie will be inspired to watch 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'. That should expand their minds a bit. {chuckle})

Anyhow...film after film seems to turn out a big disappointment in terms of plot and characterisation but we still keep Hollywood in business by going to see those films, don't we? Well, maybe not. I personally have vowed never again to go and see, rent or buy any film for which the screenplay was written by David Benioff. His crime? The screenplay for Troy; I had waited 25 years for someone to do justice to The Illiad on film. Watching that movie ranked amongst the top 10 disappointments of my life. Some good set-piece combats and Peter O'Toole's performance as Priam were its only graces. I don't know, maybe the studio management were to blame, maybe the screenplay got doctored but if that were the case and Benioff had any integrity he'd have asked for his name to be taken off the credits....

Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy was another monster disappointment, an expected one however so that didn't hurt too much.

Why can't these people get it right? All this technology available now, but they screw it up because the marketing people want their hooks for the target audience, the screenplay writer thinks he can do better than the author (in the case of HHGTTG we had someone who wrote the screenplay for Chicken Run thinking he could write funnier dialogue than Douglas Adams), the director wants to stamp his ego all over the thing, and in between all these conflicting forces the story just gets mangled. All we're left with is something vaguely like the original with some neat special effects to distract us from the awfulness of it all.

Having said that, there have been a few good 'spectacular' movies around recently that haven't disappointed - inasmuch as they did 'exactly what it says on the tin'. The Marvel comic adaptations like 'X-Men', 'Spiderman' and 'Fantastic Four' turned out OK - I suspect because Stan Lee keeps an iron grip on artistic control of those movies. (Though 'The Hulk' was a bit screwed up in terms of plot - I know, they wanted to make something more complicated than a film about some big green guy that smashes things - but the end result was messy).

But then I didn't expect too much of those movies anyway.

Maybe when Hollywood-scale CGI becomes affordable by small independents we'll start seeing some real artistic gems that combine spectacle with integrity.

Trouble is, of course, there'll then be loads of filmmaker wannabes flooding the market with rubbish at the same time....as with popular music, there'll be those who think that glitz, technology and some pretty faces can be a substitute for talent. The issue then becomes what actually makes it onto the big screen. If rubbish sells, then rubbish is what will be shown. Again, just like the music industry.

And when someone does make a film that actually adheres (in places) to the source material rather than pandering to the expectations of the masses, what happens?

They say things like:

":I thought the movie was pretty good, but the ending was lame."

":so bacteria killed them? Couldn't they have come up with a better ending than that?"

":there've been too many alien-attacking-earth movies; I think they should try something new for a change."

(*sigh*)

{/rant off}

OK, things that irritated me about the film.....where do I start?

The casting wasn't so bad - though I didn't like Martin Freeman's Arthur Dent at all. Arthur Dent isn't supposed to be spineless - a bewildered englishman struggling to maintain a stiff upper lip in the face of a universe vaster and stranger than he'd imagined, yes, but a spineless buffoon? I couldn't see Trillian copping off with that limp rag - that kind of disturbed my 'suspension of disbelief' a bit.

Special effects - yup, great.

The screenplay. Ah. Well, no, it wasn't like the book, or the radio series (which I listened to at the age of 14 on a home-made crystal set) or the tv series, or the vinyl-format LP versions (rare collectors items residing in my LP collection...). No, these things weren't all identical either, but they had something in common that was almost entirely lacking from the film - brilliantly sharp, funny dialogue and humour that relied on unpredictability.

Now, a piece of folklore circulated by the studio management was that the screenplay was written by Douglas Adams, and they've cannily given him a posthumous credit as Executive Producer, but personally I don't believe that Mr Adams would have been proud of this film. Fact is that the screenplay was doctored into oblivion by Karey Kirkpatrick - an awful choice. He wrote the screenplay for Chicken Run; which is a great piece of visual slapstick, but notably lacking in the kind of witty dialogue that was the essence of Hitch-Hikers.

They killed the dialogue based humour by mangling Doug Adams' own jokes, butchering them and in some cases adding their own unfunny punchlines. Here's an example:

The Original:

"I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
"That's the Display Department."
"With a torch."
"The lights had probably gone."
"So had the stairs."
"But you found the plans, didn't you?"
"Oh yes, they were 'on display' in the bottom of a locked filing
cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying
'Beware of the leopard.'"

The Film:

"I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
"But you found the plans, didn't you?"

Unnecessary. I wouldn't have minded them chopping chunks of the plot out (Doug Adams plots were always so haywire that it hardly matters) but by butchering the dialogue at the micro-level they destroyed the essence of what made it funny (for me, anyhow).

Instead they replaced it with visual slapstick. Some of which was good - I loved the 'knitted dollies' sequence and Arthur puking string - but mostly it was painfully unfunny and predictable (e.g. the ultimate demise of the scuttling jeweled crab - oh, I didn't expect that!)

They could have had both. If they needed to slim the script down because of time constraints they could have cut out the whole John Malkovitch thing - which was totally unnecessary. (I'm not saying that I didn't like it - but it would have been a worthy sacrifice to preserve some of the original dialogue-based humour that they killed.) They could also have dispensed with the naff hollywood cliché ending. Not sure what would work best as a replacement ending but almost anything else would have been better!

The bit that made me laugh the most in the film was Simon Jones' cameo appearance as the recorded message from Magrathea - and his final quip at the end. The only real belly laugh the film got out of me.

They should have gotten Richard Curtis / Rowan Atkinson / Ben Elton to work on the screenplay for this film - the creative minds behind Black Adder. Black Adder is far more similar to Hitch Hikers' in its humour than Chicken Run. It's virtually all dialogue based.

Don't get me wrong - the visuals were good, but they could have had great visuals and some intelligent dialogue based humour as well.

Oh, one thing about the visuals wasn't so great. The book sequences - which were incredibly naff considering the tech we have available now. They looked like rapidly cobbled-together flash animations.

The BBC tv series 20 years ago had far better book sequence animations. And they were done the old-fashioned way - hand-drawn, frame by frame, onto sheets of acetate. On a tiny budget.

Don't think that I failed to enjoy this film because I've analysed it too much. I'm analysing why I failed to enjoy the film.

If you liked it, that's great for you. I spent most of the duration squirming in my seat in discomfort.

second, the whole mosquito-swatter-hitting-the-nose sequence was abismal.

Agreed!

first, IMO the ook sequences were cartoonish on purpose and stylish.

Well, I appreciate that this is very much a matter of taste. I guess they were stylish in a 'minimalist' sort of way.....

'Minimalist' these days is of course all-too often a euphemism for 'Minimal content / effort / materials, sold at maximum price that idiots with more money than sense can be conned into paying'

Not that I go overboard on kitsch either, I'll hasten to add....style-wise, I actually prefer the 'pared-down' look. As long as I pay a pared-down price as well....

;-)

I just thought the book sequences looked a bit amatuerish and thrown together as an afterthought. Maybe they were done like that on purpose, but I'm not sure if the only purpose was to be stylish...that's a whole lot of big screen minutes filled at very little cost there...

Then again, playing devil's advocate against myself, I guess the actual 'book' itself would be designed to be very user-friendly - i.e. dumbed down enough so that some frood smashed out of his head on Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters would still find it just about readable....

personally, i find pratchett's humor very inconsistant.
some of his books (like pyramids) or parts thereof make me laugh uncontrollably. Others, however, (i.e. feet of clay) mostly leave me cold, with the occasional giggle.

come to think of it, some of Adams' later books (DTTotS and the later HH books) are also hit and miss in my opinion.

It doesn't have to be consistent, it just has to be Adams-esque. I've always found Pratchett to be somewhat Adams-esque, at least in his earlier books. The Color of Magic and The Light Fantastic, particularly.