H2G2 Cast Finalized, Starts Shooting in April 541
akahige writes "According to The Hollywood Reporter, Martin Freeman (The Office, Love Actually), Mos Def (Showtime, The Italian Job), and Zooey Deschanel (Big Trouble, Elf) have signed on to play Arthur, Ford, and Trillian, respectively. Stephen Moore is once again doing the voice of Marvin. No word on who's playing Zaphod (but wouldn't Eddie Izzard be great?). It worries me when they say things like, "Adams adapted his own novel for the screen. After his death, Karey Kirkpatrick came aboard for a rewrite." But it's Disney, so what do you expect? Shooting begins in April."
H2G2 (Score:5, Informative)
HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy
http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/
Re:H2G2? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:H2G2 a common abbreviation? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What to expect.. (Score:2, Informative)
I highly recommend you read Fast Food Nation [amazon.com]. The author goes into some detail about marketting to children. Some parts are a bit alarmist but overall it's a thought-provoking read.
Re:H2G2 a common abbreviation? (Score:2, Informative)
It's HHGG (HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy), only written like a condensed chemical formula.
I admit it's not exactly an obvious acronym... I read the 2 as "to" myself the first time I saw it.
Re:What to expect.. (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe the radio listeners thought the visual versions ruined it for THEM!
Start with the books (Score:3, Informative)
Additionally, the first three books are the best (Hithchiker's Guide to the Galaxy; Resturant at the end of the Universe; and Life, the Universe, and Everything -- I may have mixed up the order of the last two). So Long and Thanks For All the Fish and Mostly Harmless are ok, but get worse and worse. The trilogy probably would have been best if it had remained thus.
The draw, at least to me, is the sci fi humor and use of language that Adams used, "Huge yellow spaceships that hung in the air exactly the way bricks don't," and "'Hyperspace travel is rather unpleasantly like being drunk,' said Ford. 'What's wrong with being drunk?' asked Arthur. 'Ask a glass of water,' responded Ford."
Re:Someone explain to the non-Hitchhiker educated. (Score:3, Informative)
- Read the first three books a few times over.
- Play the infocom game
- Read the first three books again
- Buy "The more than complete hitchhiker's guide", read it
- Read the radio scripts
- Read the whole series over again (repeat yearly)
- Read So Long and thanks for all the fish
- Yup, the whole series again
- Download from napster the radio show and listen to it
- Read Mostly Harmless
- Watch some chapters of the TV show
- Series
- Salmon of doubt
Somewhere in there you should read The meaning of liff, the expanded meaning of liff, and of course the Dirk Gently books.Re:What to expect.. (Score:5, Informative)
by The Duke of Dunstable [imdb.com]:
For those of you who are worried about the Disney involvement of the movie, here's what Douglas said about it in December, 1998.
"First of all, I have not tried to 'downplay' Disney's role in this. Disney is the studio which is making this movie, which is financing it, which will be distributing it. It couldn't really be much more central to the project.
What I have tried to explain is that people's ideas of who or what Disney is is a little out of date. Yes, it made Bambi and Snow White and Flubber, but it also made Pulp Fiction, The Rock, etc., etc. It is a huge entertainment corporation, one part of which still makes what it originally made, i.e. family entertainment. So to talk about 'Disney-fying' Hitchhiker makes as much sense as saying 'Columbia-fying' it or 'Universal-fying' it. Yes, each studio has its strengths and weaknesses at any moment, depending on who's running what, but generalisations based on Bambi no longer apply. The important issues as far as I'm concerned is - who are the individual people I'm working with? The director, the producer, the studio executive etc. As things stand at the moment, I'm feeling very happy, confident and well looked after. But we have a huge task and huge challenges. Let's see how it goes."
Re:Can someone explain please? (Score:4, Informative)
You know you're lazy when an acronym is too much effort to type.
Re:What to expect.. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What to expect.. (Score:5, Informative)
The movie Starship Troopers actually spurred sales of the original novel Starship Troopers. Despite the movie being a horrible rendition of the book (emphasis on the "rend"). I may be mistaken but I think the movie actually launched the book back into the bestseller lists (the first time would be when it was first published and won a Hugo award).
Re:Not that strange... (Score:4, Informative)
I didn't. I pictured Arthur as a white English guy, and Ford as a really irritating Southern California hipster, race unimportant. Like some obnoxious American tourist who barges into an English pub thinking he's the shit and talking too loud. (I'm an American, by the way.) I think body language and style are far more important here than race.
Listen to the ORIGINAL incarnation of HHGTTG (Score:3, Informative)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams [kcrw.org]
Now, please refrain from slashdotting it until I've gone home for the day. I'm trying to listen to Fit the Third.
Re:H2G2? (Score:2, Informative)
No, because it's HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or HHGG, which "reduces" to H2G2.
See The BBC Website [bbc.co.uk] for a reference.
Karey Kirkpatrick info (Score:2, Informative)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005)
Laws of Attraction (2004) (post-production)
The Little Vampire (2000)
Chicken Run (2000)
Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves (1997)
James and the Giant Peach (1996)
Rescuers Down Under, The (1990)
Especially notable is James and the Giant Peach, a great film which did a great job of capturing the intent of Rohl Dahl, an author with a lot of similarities to Douglas Adams. As for Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves, well everybody has to pay the bills.
Plus (you've got to love IMDB), his brother wrote the theme song to the TV series "America's Dumbest Criminals".
Re:What to expect.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Can't we have ONE fucking movie without a rappe (Score:3, Informative)
Re:That's just the problem, HE did. (Score:2, Informative)
Regardless I'll be in the theater with my towel in hand.
Re:What to expect.. (Score:4, Informative)
You might be surprised. The book was written and first published in "younger" and more "innocent" times, and it caused quite a controversy. Not quite so much as Stranger in a Strange Land, but Starship Troopers wasn't an easily ignored thing. It portrayed women in combat roles as pilots of spaceships. It portrayed non-white and/or non-American characters in most (if not all) of the key roles. It portrayed a society in which the right to vote or hold office was gained only through military service. It contained public flogging and public hanging. It described "police action" that closely parallelled U.S. activities in Korea and later Vietnam -- some of these were acts we would consider terrorism today!
Aside from being controversial, the novel was also hugely inventive. The MI piloted what amounts to Robotech battle mechs.
Now go look up the first publish date and realize that all that was written probably before you were born.
... except it only applies to the web site (Score:4, Informative)
h2g2 (note the lower-casing) is the name of the online guide inspired by The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy. It's considered "official" because it was created by The Digital Village Ltd., the new media company that had Douglas Adams amongst its directors, and he assisted in its creation. It is not the name of the book, the radio series, the game, or anything else. Just the online, fact-based guide.
If you want to reference the fictional story or Guide with an abbreviation, I'd recommend HHGTTG. Or HHGG. Or HHG.
-- Yoz, who was one of the four original developers of h2g2.com, and is also horrifically pedantic
Re:What to expect.. (Score:2, Informative)
No it doesn't. The books weren't the original version of the story, but since they were written by DNA himself, they do give DNA's first-hand account of the story.