The best hamburger I've ever had...
| ...was this last weekend at Dottie's Dumpling Dowry, in Madison, Wisconsin. Spectacular. Two thoughts while watching the new "Hitchhiker's" movie: 1) Douglas Adams was a comic genius; 2) There's definitely something missing there, for me. Kate suggested that the passivity of the characters, combined with the macro-thinking asides ("The Earth is x" or "The entire history of the Universe can be summed up y." totally saps any investment in the story or the characters. I don't know. All I know is, all the lines were tremendously witty and inventive, and I was nonetheless checking my watch. I am perfectly prepared for this to be a deficiency in ME, not in Hitchhiker's. Also--and I know this is just the type of thing that makes me so annoying on a day-in, day-out basis, the movie didn't look right. It should've been made in 1980, with that kind of film stock; it should've been the long-lost brother to Holy Grail or Time Bandits. So much of the humor is embedded in 1970s British malaise...Ah, well. Better this good movie than that great nonexistent one. Also: go see "Kung Fu Hustle"! |
posted by Michael at 6:44 PM
Comments on "The best hamburger I've ever had..."
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Anonymous said ... (10:13 AM) :
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Lee said ... (5:26 PM) :
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Michael said ... (8:11 PM) :
post a commentWell, I think many people wished Gilliam would tackle Hitchhiker's--and I think what you're missing, besides the warmer film stock of that era--is Gilliam's special visual genius. Hitchhiker's was directed by a guy best known for making a Blur video that had a milk carton walking down the street; despite the inventiveness of the special effects, on a shot-by-shot basis, I don't think it had the creativity to sustain the story it was telling.
I agree with Kate in a sense--it's a tough movie because much of the humor comes from essentially passive, feckless characters stuck in insane situations. Make them more aggressive, and you lose a lot of what people love about the story: and I think to combat that, you need some really transcendent visual work (I think, as a whole, this is ignored, because it's much harder to qualify, as it is so frequently working on a subconscious basis).
Mike--you haven't posted much about The Office Season One. Season Two goes down the tubes a bit, but I'm really curious to hear your thoughts.
I don't know why I'm posting rants to the Schwarz/Gerber Blog Emporium, other than the fact that I've been in a "pot rut" and am debilitatingly lonely.
xo
MF
I literally just saw it. Weird.
I thought it was mediocre at best. It's really strange because no one, including me, laughed at any of the wittier lines. I think it may have been the timing, as well. Comedies are almost always screened and then re-edited, until they get all the pauses perfect. I don't know if they did that with this one, but maybe it would have helped.
I don't think it was so bad visually, but I agree. Wasn't Douglas Adams in the Footlights? With Stephen Fry, I believe. Perhaps there's the Python connection. It should have looked like Brazil.
Also, the story was pretty weak. Was there a love story in the original? I don't remember, but it seemed a tad forced here.
The depressed robot was the best character, though, so I'm glad he was the one who ultimately pulled the trigger at the climax.
Lee, I agree. Marvin the depressed robot was the best thing about the movie. Kate also thought that the love affair was cooked up specifically for the film, and it shows. Half-hearted, and at odds with the fundamentally discursive, consequence-free nature of the rest. It felt like shoehorning a romance into the middle of Wodehouse.
I dug a little on the question of Adams' Footlights-ness; turns out he graduated Cambridge in 1974, but seems to have been on the outer fringes of the Footlights' orbit. Of it yet not of it, sort of like how Al Franken wasn't on the Lampoon, but early SNL was of a piece with NatLamp.
Like the writer Alan Coren, Adams' stuff is so stylistically reminiscent of the whole Footlights movement--beginning with Beyond the Fringe, continuing with Python, and I guess petering out after Rowan Atkinson--I think that's the best way to categorize him, whether he wrote revues or not. Terry Gilliam's similar. Gilliam went to Occidental (and worked on the humor magazine) but his aesthetic is so in tune with the post-psychedelic (with all its Victorian/Edwardian collaging) Britain of queues and bureaucrats and reduced expectations, that he's an honorary Footlight in my brain. As with the National Lampoon, there was clearly something afoot that was driving the larger comic movement. The zeitgeist demanded it, perhaps.
Matt, I agree; it would've been wonderful to see Gilliam tackle HGTTG, for the reason I just said. He had arrived at a visual style around 1980 that would've been a great counterpoint to Adams' prose. HGTTG is definitely about the UK/US of the later Cold War, so having it come out now is a bit deflating, Zaphod's Texas accent notwithstanding.
Feeling that Gilliam was sympatico with HGTTG is a common enough sentiment to suggest that perhaps Gilliam had concrete reservations about doing it. Has anybody unearthed anything on that? It seems to fit so perfectly--why didn't he do Hitchhiker's rather than say, "Time Bandits"? HGTTG was a lot "bigger" in the UK in 1982 than it is today.
That's fascinating about the film stock; do you know why this is? As far as the visual look of the movie is concerned, it felt weirdly disjointed to me--on the one hand very brightly-lit, with a lot of flatness and color, and then (as with the Vogons) almost self-consciously Gilliamesque in its griminess. The thing I like about Gilliam is that the look is a unified look, with a intellectual/philosophical reason behind it.
In the end, I think you needed somebody with as flamboyant and far-reaching visual sense as Adams' had in words, and those people are rare. We're lucky to have gotten a film version at all.
Sorry about your pot rut. I'll pick you up a bong in Boulder. (My brother Jack is graduating.)