Monday, May 2, 2005

A little Will and a lot of Douglas

The Big Mac show opened this weekend. As tired of the show as I’ve sometimes gotten, I had a rousing good time performing it. I think the mental health sick day I took from work on Tuesday helped. Friday night was particularly great, followed as it was by the posh wine and cheese gala the company hosted. For fifty bucks a ticket. I always wanted to do Les Mis…

Saturday night I went to a midnight showing of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie. I’ve been a huge Douglas Adams fan since late childhood, as were my two companions and we were all fairly pleased. It was a strange beast in many ways. Adams himself always said each incarnation of his mythos was complete different from all the others, which is fine with me, as it made the movie wonderfully familiar and also very new. Can’t imagine what a non-fan would make of it though. The single funniest bit, which is not from the books, was probably Ford whacking the terrified Vogons with a towel as they cried “Run! He has a towel!” yet the towel significance is never explained anywhere in the movie. Visually the movie was great, I loved the fact that Henson creatures got in on the action. And Warwick Davis! It’s like the ‘80s! Which I mean in a very good way. The casting was also great, Martin Freeman, Bil Nighy and Alan Rickman were all perfect, and not coincidentally British. The Americans were just fine too, although Zooey Deschaniel probably transcended “just fine”. The 40 year old virgin demographic might not like the conventional, happy love story between Arthur and Trillian but I did, it’s what I always *wanted* to happen in the books. Whenever people talk about having had crushes on fictional characters rendered only in prose, Trillian has always been at the top of my list. Adams supposedly wanted the happy love story, and I’m glad it was there. Okay, the line “The only important question is: is she the one, and the answer is yes, it’s not bloody 42” made me cringe a bit, but somehow it made me smile too.

One of my friends complained that they did a too typically Hollywood “arc” of character development for Arthur, where he Learns to Take Risks and Be His Own Man or something like that, which is probably accurate but Freeman is so damn charming I didn’t care much.

I could go on, I really could, but I probably won’t. You know what I really want though? For Douglas Adams to be alive. That would be awesome. I wonder if he’s writing another book in the Afterlife. He was a very strident atheist who violently disdained the idea of an Afterlife. If there turns out to be one, I imagine he would say something really hilarious about it.

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