(no subject)

[prog]

For the benefit of the half of my friends list who hasn't already mentioned it themselves, I'll note that there's a trailer to the new hitchhiker's guide movie on the Amazon front page.

• I am amused by some friends seeing the two seconds of Arthur being worried about Trillian and concluding that this means they'll be played as mutual love interests (which is contrary to the novel? I can't remember). Of course, they have a point, because as jadelennox recently wrote, the MSM typically decrees that men and women can't have any sort relationship except for romantic ones, so it's unfortunately reasonable to see one second of footage of a male character showing concern for the welfare of a female one and concluding that either she is his lover or he is hoping to make it so.


• So Arthur is actually British, then? I had it in mind that that he was made American for the movie... maybe it's Constantine bleeding across my Hollywood-adaptations-of-British-fantasies mental partitions.
  
  Ford seems to have an American accent, but that's OK, he's Ford. (OTOH, I can't not think of a pointed monologue I once heard from an Angry Comic about how black guys are often playing either aliens or people with alien qualities in SF shows, pointing to ST:TNG's Worf and Geordi as examples, so I squirm a little to see yet another example here. But OTGH, someone has to be Ford, and I think Mos Def will be a treat to see in the role; I loved him in The Italian Job.)


• Yes, Zaphod does have two heads, just not arranged like you think. They're both in the trailer, if you watch carefully. This could actually be played well. (Oh no, they put it on his ass or something! No, it's not that bad.)


• I hate depictions of the Earth blowing up. It always makes me really sad, even in a silly context. (A lesser reason I can't watch the new Battlestar Galactica series. The greater reasons being things like feeling deeply insulted that I'm expected to take deadly fembots seriously.) Basketball is a peaceful planet

---

My relationship with these books is strange. I discovered them though their Infocom game, which I loved even though it was way too hard for 10-year-old me and I had to play with the Invisiclues booklet in hand. I then read the books even though I was really too young & stupid to fully appreciate them when I read them, but I could still tell they were good. They're probably the only examples of the (cough) "geek canon" that I actually read as a kid (outside of those books that are also childrens/YA lit). Really, I was more into Hardy Boys-level stuff at the time.

Comments

[dougo.livejournal.com]

The interview that gblake linked to did mention that there is more of a relationship between Arthur and Trillian than in the books, due to the demands (or imagined demands?) of Hollywood, but that it won't be the central theme of the movie (like, say, the "Love Conquers All" studio cut of Brazil). We'll see.

I think there were actually some small hints in the book that Arthur at least had a mild crush on Trillian. (And that she and Zaphod used to date, or maybe just that Zaphod hit on her a lot? Maybe I should re-read it before April.) But assuming they're planning to make all five movies, they'll need to leave room for Fenchurch.

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

Oh, there was definately more than hints that Arthur had a thing for Trillian. She was supposed to be beautiful and brilliant. He, OTOH, was supposed to be neither, and while she does come to care whether he gets dissected, I don't think there was anything more on her end.

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

In the first book, true, there's not much of a mutual interest; in later volumes (I forget which, now), there is definitely a mutual thing between the two of them.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

Just to let you know -- the fembots have been getting unnerving in the past few episodes. *Philosophically* unnerving.