The new trailer for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is all over the place - try any of the geek links to the right to find it. It's spectacular. To quote Zaphod, it's not just amazing, it's amazingly amazing. It's very Douglas Adams and, despite minor complaints, is pretty much what I'd been hoping for all this time. If the movie is any where near as good as the trailer suggests, I'm glad for the twenty year wait. Call off the lynch mob, leash up the dogs, and cancel the orders for medieval torture devices. The boys did us proud.
Sheila's got a monster post up right now about one of my all-time favorite books, Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler (which she read in one sitting! [insert pretentious French adjectif meaning "obsessive, but in a good way" here]). She's always got this lovely way of expressing her thoughts like no other blogger I can think of. What she wrote was very moving. I haven't read Koestler at all since I was in college. I must get back to him, read more of his work and certainly more about his life (you can read brief notes about it here. The guy got around).
Another book I hadn't touched since college was Thomas Bell's Out of This Furnace, which covers three generations of an immigrant Slovak family who made their way to and eventually out of the steel mills of Pennsylvania. I haven't got that far in - fifty pages or so - but I recall when I first read it years ago having this sense that something about me had changed. I've never been able to quite put my finger on exactly what it was. I just know that my view of things and, in a larger sense, my perception of the world, had somehow seemed altered. This was a place I had never been, people I'd never known existed, stories I'd never heard told. Discovery like that is a wonderful, amazing thing. As a teen-ager, it frightened me, made me afraid of life and everything that can go wrong with it. As an adult, I can't get enough of it, that idea that even while your learning everything you can, you still don't have the slightest fucking clue what comes next.
At the suggestion of Mizz O'Malley, I also picked up a copy of Katherine Dunn's Geek Love. I think this is the hardest book to read that I have ever picked up. I usually get through books of this size in under a week. I'm only half-way through and I've owned it now for almost a month. It's not a frightening story; it's intense but not as intense as say, something like Notes From Underground, which damn near made my head explode ("I am a sick man, I am a spiteful man." Best opening line ever. How could those words make you not want to cancel your life until you had read ever last depraved page?) Trying to hash through a story, wrap your mind around it, about a world where ugliness and deformity are actually beautiful things not only to be admired, but were also the very bonds that held a family so close together. And the absolute surprise weirdness Dunn throws at readers - hello, where the hell did that guy in the parking lot shooting at them come from? And only to be gone almost as soon as he arrived? What about Olympia, stalking the daughter she'd abandoned years before right in front of her face, not letting on, and most painful of all, not understanding why her daughter would not love her deformity (she had a tail. A TAIL!) the way the rest of her family had their own, insisting for years that the nuns that cared for her not allow that which made her unique to be removed for the certainty that it was a part of herself that she would love someday. She couldn't have been more wrong. How much that must have hurt to learn.
Arty? Okay, that's a thousand word essay. His perverted megalomania is the stuff that makes psychiatrists drool - a dream patient for an ambitious study. I hate him. HATE him. Aren't I supposed to?
Dr. Phyllis - a woman who learned surgery so she could operate on herself to remove nothing but her own paranoia. Sick. Cold.
Little Chick. I want to hug him, give him as much of the love he desperately craves that I can afford.
The twins - can you imagine always having to share a BODY with someone else? Never EVER having a single moment to yourself? I think about how much I take that for granted, which is a stupid thing to do when you stop and think about it because solitude is a pretty accessible thing for most of us. I actually crave it a lot and can honestly say that lonely is not a feeling I experience very often. I'm just too easily amused.
These characters are amazing. Their exploits doubly so. They wantonly dismiss normality, practically hold it in contempt. Why would someone chose to go through life an ordinary person? Why would anyone who is not boring, common feel shame for being a physical aberration worthy of the pointing and gaping of strangers?
Why indeed. I confess that I've peeked ahead. My impatience almost always requires that I do. I know tragedy is on the way. Horrible tragedy. And I'm not afraid.
Phone off, knocking ignored, chores neglected. Here's to quiet Saturdays on the couch with a really great read.
Posted by Emily at February 26, 2005 11:32 AM | TrackBack (0) |OK, most (most, I say, most) of my cynicism of this project has been dispelled.
And the more I see Marvin (and I use him as my adiumx icon) the more I think he is just *perfect* for um, Marvin.
Posted by: mwk at February 26, 2005 12:07 PMI absolutely adore Marvin. Once the marketing people begin flooding stores with trinkets, plushies and action figures, I fully intend to buy every single form of him that I possibly can.
Personally, I think you'd have to be the most talent-free asshole that ever lived to mess this movie up, given the story that you had going in.
And I just love the line "...followed by the release date, so that the audience might plan the next few months of their life accordingly." In my case, it's pathetically true. Geekifus Maximus.
"...which sounds like a seven foot tall man who has been smoking cigarettes since childhood...*ahem*."
Oh, and "...it is intelligent and provocative. In other words, lots of explosions."
Posted by: Emily at February 26, 2005 12:19 PMBy the way, if anyone's having trouble finding it, e-mail me. I saved a Windows Media version to my desktop.
And I will proceed to watch it no less than 100 times throughout the course of the weekend.
Posted by: Emily at February 26, 2005 12:20 PMWell I will point out that they should undo what they've done to Alan Rickman's voice.. *simmer*
and I'm still not convinced that casting Freeman was a good idea..
On the other hand.. Dolphins!!.. and the whale is there..YIPPEE!! not for long though.. and has anyone heard anything about the petunias???
Posted by: peteb at February 26, 2005 12:41 PMI can't imagine why they'd put in the whale and not the petunias. Is there a sequence showing the missiles headed for the Heart of Gold? Because if there's two, the second one's got to turn into something.
"Oh no. Not again."
Posted by: Emily at February 26, 2005 12:50 PMThe sequence with two missiles is there, Emily.. it was in the earlier trailers.. but I've not seen any mention of the petunias anywhere.. and I'm worried that they may cut out that hilarious line.. but they might, just might, have a single line voiced.. after the whale.. with no explanation.. just to please us geeks.. *fingers crossed*
Posted by: peteb at February 26, 2005 01:00 PMI hated Arty too. He was terrifying to me. I need to read the book again - I think I blocked much of it out AS I was reading it. But certainly not the end. Certainly not the end. I can almost recite the last page from memory. It's AWFUL. But BEAUTIFUL. Which, I guess, is Katherine Dunn's point.
Weird thing, Emily: I've never seen a picture of Katherine Dunn - even when that book first was published. There was no picture of her on my copy, and I always wondered if she was - a dwarf, or an amputee - or an albino - something. She writes about the pain (and yet the pride) of being ugly SO WELL.
Day-um.
Olympia is one of my favorite characters ever. Got a big ol' lump in my throat thinking about her right now!
Not that dwarves or albinos are ugly, sorry ... Don't want to offend. I just wondered if she was, to use her own term, a "geek".
Posted by: red at February 26, 2005 01:19 PMI'm sure all of my dwarf and albino readers forgive you, Sheila.
Posted by: Emily at February 26, 2005 02:07 PMOh - and Arty...that's the best description of him. "Terrifying." The lengths that his ambition drove him to were frightening. He would kill a memeber of his own family at the slightest threat that they might overshadow him. I've known people sort of like this. Not ones that would go to the extremes of killing someone (at least I hope not), but the type of person that is disturbingly disappointed when they are not always number one. I can understand the drive to excel and succeed at challenges you might take on. That's a great human quality. It's when people take it a few steps further into insanity, where they MUST, at all costs - dishonesty, cheating, betrayal, and even the suffering of others - win every race they run that gives me the creeping horrors. I do not ever want a person like this in my life under any circumstances.
Posted by: Emily at February 26, 2005 02:17 PMFirst: Emily, that's not only the best movie trailer ever, it's also EASILY the coolest thing anyone's ever sent me in an e-mail. Whereupon do I lay down my blood for thee. Goddess.
Second, the main problem with the trailer is it's not the actual movie. I want the real thing so damn much now. I had previously been happy to wait a couple more months so as to try to make sure all my friends who haven't yet read the book or heard the radio show do so to ensure their principal perceptions of the characters and story come directly from Adams rather than through anything else. Now I just want to see the film. Desperately. I want to take a week of leave and watch it repeatedly.
Pete, you may have seen Martin Freeman in some things that I have not and get your wariness of him from that; I don't know. But as I watched all the episodes of The Office on DVD just after learning Freeman was cast as Arthur, I kept thinking, "This guy is PERFECT for the role." I was really excited. I don't know if I've seen in the previews just what I was hoping from him, but I'm going to let him fulfill my hope and justify my faith in him on April 29th.
Lastly, on the question of the petunias, I don't know, of course, what did or didn't make it through the editing process, but in a 28 May 04 article on the news page of the official site, the screenwriter, Karey Kirkpatrick, says (in an interview he does of himself) that they're in there. "....Eddie, Vogons, Slartibartfast, Deep Thought, Lunkwill & Fook, the mice, whales, petunias, dolphins, 42, even Gag Halfrunt; all present and accounted for."
Posted by: Steve at February 27, 2005 03:45 PM"WHAT THE HELL ARE THOSE THINGS?!?!?!?"
I'm sorry, I just *love* the way he throws that line off in the trailer. It's perfect.
Pete's one of those weird people, Steve, who didn't like "The Office." It's a character flaw, but we forgive him because he's a good guy in lots of other ways.
Posted by: Emily at February 27, 2005 05:36 PMWeird is NOT a character flaw, Emily.. harrumph.
But you're right, Steve, I've seen Freeman in some other shows too.. the one that comes to mind is the, hopefully, now-defunct Hardware, which ran for two series.. although in fairness the script, cast, premise, etc.. were all partly to blame for that.
But it looks like the petunias may make a, brief, appearance.. YIPPEE!!
And just to clarify, it's not that I didn't like The Office.. I just think it was a perfectly good one-off show - that turned into a soap opera.
Posted by: peteb at February 28, 2005 05:34 AMI finally watched the "other trailer" with Stephen Fry. I think the first version is much, much funnier.
Posted by: Emily at February 28, 2005 07:14 AMIt's cleverer, Emily.. and the overall effect may be funnier.. but the actual film clips in the "other trailer", IMHO, show that the movie itself will have funny moments.
Posted by: peteb at February 28, 2005 08:01 AMIt's a rare thing that anything related to comedy in the American version is actually more clever than the British version. You guys may suck at food, style, sex, and a million other stereotypes, but the one thing that the Brits do better than anyone else is comedy.
Posted by: Emily at February 28, 2005 08:19 AMIgnoring the implications of that list of stereotypes, Emily, and avoiding a debate on nationality.. you obviously haven't seen Hardware :p
Posted by: peteb at February 28, 2005 08:27 AMNot *every* bit of comedy is good (BBC America is slowly revealing this - and I'm pretty underimpressed by a lot of the comedy shows PBS runs on weekend evenings), but when it's good, it's usually really good, and much more subtle.
(I think this is why a lot of Brits were offended by the slapstick of the flopping shovels on Vogsphere)
Posted by: Emily at February 28, 2005 08:34 AM