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4/26/2005
EAR PLUGS
Friday night SW headed off to Smith’s Olde Bar to see some olde friends in The
Gourds. I met other degenerates at the Shuteye Hoedown at their HQ over on
Dekalb Ave. $5 got you “membership” and in the door where they had free beer,
vodka, and a mess o’ acoustic singer/songwriter Americana bands in a couple of
rooms. The space is interesting but eventually became so crowded it was more fun
to stand outside and chat than it was to try to cram inside to watch
touchy/feely heartfelt acoustic sentiments. Eventually they ran out of vodka and
a couple of degenerates hadn’t eaten yet so we headed around the bed to the
Yacht Club for dinner and another round. When I returned to the Hoedown things
were winding down a bit and you didn’t have to walk sideways to squeeze through
the door any more. I can enjoy a bit of acoustic music from time to time, but
usually after a few tunes “I wanna rock,” to quote Dee Snider, so I split. SW
and other degenerates apparently showed up a few minutes later and lingered
until something like 3 AM while beer flowed and strings strummed.
Saturday we headed over to Inman Park for one of the best festivals in town, but
mother nature was not kind this year. Record lows and cloudy skies kept us
shivering as the ragtag parade tromped by, everything from the Feed & Seed
Marching Abominables to neighborhood organizations to local restaurants to
random car dealerships to the basset hound rescue organization leading a pack of
several dozen of the droopy looking beasts down the street. There was plenty of
festive food, more acoustic and other styles of music, lots of art and hordes of
people to ogle. But the crowds and weather eventually wore on us so we split
without seeing everything, or even lurking around to hear any of the live music.
Sunday we dressed more appropriately and headed back to the festival where I
discovered corndogs and white wine somehow go together, I discovered, thanks to
the famous Corndog Lady and The Patio’s little sidewalk bar. Sunday the crowds
were much more tolerable than Saturday so we made a leisurely afternoon of it,
finding strolling on down to Carroll St. Café for another round or two of
beverages before wrapping the night up at Daddy D’z.
FILM FLAM
Tuesday I skipped the weekly trip to the drive in, due in part to the cold, wet
weather and in part thanks to SW wrangling me free passes to an advance
screening of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and in part due to Fever Pitch
winning the weekly vote at the drive in.
Hitchhiker’s Guide is challenging material at best from which to make a film.
Douglas Adams clearly wasn’t concerned about a strong narrative plot or story
arc, so it’s difficult to pull a coherent story from the books, especially one
approachable by a broad audience, the type needed to fund the special effects of
a summer blockbuster. Which is a little frustrating because one of the charming
things about the universe according to Douglas Adams is things aren’t all that
special. The story isn’t a sweeping space opera or a slick action thriller
packed with high tech gadgetry and shiny robots. At least it shouldn’t be.
The film almost gets it right.
As with any book-to-film transition, there are characters who aren’t quite what
you had imagined, others who aren’t even close. Mos Def is not nearly manic
enough as Ford Prefect. Martin Freeman as Arthur isn’t bumbling and lost enough.
Marvin is just too damn shiny and perfect. Sure, he’s depressed, but he looks
like a new Mac. But it may be that it’s impossible to cram 5 novels’ worth of
character development into 110-minute film.
But the biggest problem for fans of the books, like myself, is the effort to
create a coherent story where none really existed. It feels like the very things
that made the books so interesting have been ignored for the most part – the
clever sidebars and distractions. There are a few excerpts from the Guide
itself, cleverly animated, but none of the chapter-long ramblings about strange
alien races that just happen to be mattresses, for example. Then there’s the
relationship between Arthur and Trillian, something that works in the books as a
bit of unrequited love that apparently just doesn’t work on film. (It was proven
in a lab in 1949 in France.)
But all that aside, most fans of the books will enjoy it. The screening audience
actually cheered. And I think it has managed to appeal to those who didn’t read
(and re-read) a single book in the Hitchhiker’s series. The film deals fairly
well with a few of the questions posed by Adams, such as why we are here and
what does it all mean and all that stuff, and gives the audience a sense that
maybe we aren’t the biggest fish in the pond. Maybe we aren’t even the smartest
mammals on the planet.
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