TV And Films

The shows and movies I like (or don’t).

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

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Prairie and I went to see The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy last weekend, on opening night at the Cinerama. The perfect time to go, as far as I’m concerned. A gorgeous theatre, and lots of excited fans looking forward to seeing the show — including a few who showed up dressed for the occasion in bathrobe and with towel slung over their shoulder.

I’ve been perusing various reviews since then, and it’s been interesting to see the reactions. I haven’t seen many people who were entirely disappointed, but I haven’t seen many people head-over-heels in love with it, either. Most of the consensus seems to be that they did an acceptable job in translating the book to film.

For my part, I had a blast. It wasn’t perfect, but I thought it was quite enjoyable, and a reasonably good attempt at putting Douglas Adams‘ particular brand of absurdity on screen.

While I could point out a few things that bothered me a bit (Sam Rockwell as Zaphod, for instance, came across more as annoyingly-annoying rather than insanely-egotistically-cool-annoying-but-still-a-hoopy-frood) and a whole list of things that I was thrilled to see (the BBC TV series Marvin in line on Vogosphere, or the entrance to the Magraethea factory floor), there was one particular standout point for me.

In a movie that was cast fairly well overall — Mos Def as Ford and Martin Freeman Arthur were both good, Zooey Deschanel as Trillian is really cute, and I loved Alan Rickman as Marvin’s voice — far and away the single best piece of casting was Bill Nighy as Slartibartfast. He was, to my mind, jaw-droppingly perfect. While I don’t think any of the other actors will replace the mental images I’ve had in my head for years from reading the books, as far as I’m concerned, this was as if Slartibartfast was plucked whole from the pages and put on screen. Absolutely brilliant.

Even better, Royce called me on Tuesday to wish me a happy birthday and chat for a while, and as we were discussing the film, he said nearly exactly the same thing — good movie, pretty well done, Slartibartfast was perfect. It appears that great minds think alike…and so do ours!

iTunes “So Long & Thanks for All the Fish” by Hilary Summers, Kemi Ominiyi & The R’SVP Voices from the album The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005, 2:26).

Serenity

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Okay, okay, okay already. When no less than four people on my reading list mention the trailer for Serenity — the upcoming movie from Joss Whedon‘s Firefly show — and I’ve barely started going through my feeds for the day, I figure I should probably check it out.

Dori:

You’ve heard us rave about Firefly and how much we’re looking forward to Serenity, but now, you can go see why for youself: the first trailer was just released. Oh. My.

Shelley:

Thanks to you all I have become addicted to this show and have now watched the entire series three times in a very short period of time. Wonderful show, and the movie looks to be as good.

Tvindy:

Today they released the trailer for Joss Whedon’s new Firefly movie. It looks pretty good. Who knows? Maybe they’ll even base a series on it.

Jacqueline:

Scot got it right when he called it “distilled awesome”.

Admittedly, I’m intrigued. I can’t quite match the level of excitement that other people are, though that may be because I’ve yet to watch Firefly (I just finished Buffy a few months ago, and finally wrapped up Angel last week), so I think I need to pop that onto the top of my Netflix queue. But I know that I generally like Joss Whedon’s work, I’ve heard nothing but good things about Firefly so far, the effects look nice, and there’s some fun dialogue in the trailer.

We’ll see how amped up I get after I know a little more about this thing…

This could get pretty interesting.

Define ‘interesting’.

…’Oh God, oh God, we’re all gonna die?’

iTunes “It Can’t Rain All the Time” by Siberry, Jane from the album Crow, The (1994, 5:35).

There is hope…

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I refused to read any further than the first two sentences, but towards the end of his latest post, Kevin Smith has this to say about Revenge of the Sith:

“Revenge of the Sith” is, quite simply, fucking awesome. This is the “Star Wars” prequel the haters have been bitching for since “Menace” came out, and if they don’t cop to that when they finally see it, they’re lying.

But it’s funny because they’re gay!

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For the past three weeks, I’ve been using bittorrent to watch Grey’s Anatomy, a new medical drama based here in Seattle. So far, it’s struck me as fairly average-but-watchable television — nothing groundbreaking or award winning, but not horrid.

Gray's GeographyMuch of the fun for me (and many others, see Seattlest’s week one, two, and three wrapups; Metroblogging Seattle’s week one, two and three wrapups, for example) has been laughing at the bizarrely twisted geography of this alternate universe Seattle, where the main character can live on Queen Anne, drive north to work along the Alaskan Way Viaduct, and work in a hospital practically underneath the Space Needle that has a picturesque bay window view of the Pike Place Market sign, and yet has South Seattle’s distinct lack of high-rises in any exterior shots.

One thing about this week’s episode really bothered me, though. There were two subplots in the episode that both dealt with essentially the same situation, but they were played in very different ways. On the one hand, we had Meredith dealing with the overly aggressive attentions of a fellow intern, a bike messenger, and a doctor (the last being her primary love interest on the show); on the other, we had George’s discomfort at being under the very appreciative eye of an obviously gay patient.

What got to me was that each situation was dealing with unwanted sexual advances, yet where Meredith’s were played more seriously (complete with Dr. Yum coming to her rescue), George’s scenes with the gay patient were played very much for laughs. I’ve seen this type of double standard a lot, too — if a man harasses a woman it’s a Serious Matter that Must be Dealt With; if a man hits on a man, it’s Comic Relief.

It’s an attitude that has always bugged me. Sure, we’ve come a long way over the years, in that the humor of the situation these days is more often expressed through the straight man’s discomfort, rather than the gay man’s homosexuality, but it still strikes me as just another side of the same coin. It’s still homosexuality being used as a comic foil.

In this particular instance, toward the end of the show the gay character brushed his advances aside as “just flirting”, but he was still doing the same thing that the straight male characters were doing with Meredith — pressing their advances onto an obviously unwilling and discomforted victim. If his lines had been coming from a straight man talking to a straight woman, they would be seen as rude, aggressive, and creepy.

It’s rather sad — though not entirely unexpected — that we still can’t seem to seem to treat homosexuality as anything other than weird, threatening, freakish behavior, something to be laughed at. Maybe the laughter is a little kinder, a little less malicious than it used to be — but it’s still laughter.

iTunes “To the Mountain Top” by Edelweiss from the album Wonderful World of Edelweiss (1992, 4:43).

Best. April. Fools. Story. EVAR!!!1!!11!

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Courtesy of StarTrek.com:

With Star Trek: Enterprise hanging by a veritable thread the last two years, a new direction for the show has recently been unveiled that is being hailed both as a triumph of corporate synergy for the Viacom-owned Paramount Pictures, and a way to keep the show on the air.

[…]

Enter the darlings of Viacom-owned Comedy Central, Star Trek fans Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park. Parker and Stone, you may recall, also made Paramount’s “Team America: World Police,” which ran in theaters last year and comes out on DVD in May. The movie grossed only $50 million worldwide, but it turned a profit for the studio due to its low production budget.

“The pieces fall together brilliantly,” said a top Viacom spokesperson. “Matt and Trey take over Enterprise, and it’s all done with marionettes! It’s like Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet all over. Gerry Anderson, watch out.”

[…]

Parker and Stone have already started making a shooting model of the Enterprise NX-01, thus reviving an old Star Trek tradition. “We prefer the look of physical, tangible models over CGI ships any day,” Parker said. “Of course, we have no visual effects budget whatsoever, so we won’t be painting out the strings. You’ll get used to it. Still trying to figure out where to put the propeller.”

“We’re also gonna re-do the opening title sequence,” Stone revealed. “Record a new theme — something bombastic, action-oriented. Y’know, something that isn’t, like, totally gay.”

Marilyn Monroe

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Up until last week sometime, I’d never actually seen a Marilyn Monroe film. Marilyn MonroeI knew who she was, of course, and had seen the occasional brief clip from one film or another here and there, but I had yet to actually watch any of her work. All I knew about her was the image — the blonde bombshell, most often posed either with her skirt blowing up around her waist or in her famous nude shot.

Last week I got Some Like it Hot from Netflix), Prairie and I watched it over that weekend, and both really enjoyed it — as much for realizing just how cute Marilyn was as for the excellent humor running throughout the film. This week we decided to try another of her films, and picked Monkey Business, which was equally enjoyable.

Something tells me there may be more Marilyn films in the future ’round my place.

iTunes “100 Mile Dash” by Giacchino, Michael from the album Incredibles, The (2004, 3:07).

They used to be funny…

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When did Steve Martin stop being funny? It had to be sometime after 1991, when he wrote and starred in one of my personal favorite films, L.A. Story. I found out some time ago that Prairie hadn’t ever seen L.A. Story, finally managed to remember that while we were wandering through Blockbuster, and got to introduce her to it this weekend. As I expected, she loved it.

Still, I’d watched Bowfinger, a more recent Steve Martin comedy, earlier in the week and had been singularly unimpressed with it. Neither Steve Martin nor Eddie Murphy are nearly as funny as they used to be — in fact, these days I generally tend to avoid movies with either of them. Admittedly, Eddie Murphy has done some worthwhile voice work lately, as Donkey in the Shrek films and as Mushu in Disney’s Mulan, but his recent live-action work (Daddy Day Care? Dr. Doolittle?)…well, even the trailers make me cringe. Meanwhile, Martin, who has two of my favorite films in his past — L.A. Story and Roxanne — has been turning out such quality fare as Cheaper By the Dozen and Bringing Down the House (I’ll admit that I haven’t seen either of those — but again, the trailers don’t give me any reason to bother).

A shame, really.

iTunes “Blues Line” by Toyes, The from the album Toyes, The (1996, 4:13).

The Last Unicorn

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I have no idea what the status of this is, how close to completion it may or may not be, or whether it will actually ever see the light of day — but there’s a live action version of Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn (previously produced in animated form) in production.

In theory, this could be a very good thing — though I must admit, I’m a little more excited about the live-action version of C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe — apparently the first in a planned seven-film series covering the entire set of books, with special effects by the crew of Weta (you might have heard of them — they did the effects for a little series called The Lord of the Rings). Apple has a short look at Weta’s work on the film and another on director Andrew Adamson.

iTunes “I Love Saturday” by Erasure from the album I Say I Say I Say (1994, 4:02).