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<ANIMANIACS ANNOUNCER VOICE>It's time for another good movie/bad movie</ANIMANIACS ANNOUNCER VOICE>

As I noted earlier, my love and I snuggled up and watched the graduate last night. I wish more movies were made in that style. The first thing that made it really work for me was the small pool of characters. When watching Where the Boys are, I had to ask wooisme who the characters were literally every few minutes. In The Graduate, I didn't have to ask at all.

A lot of the plot centered around awkward social situations. Most of the time I can't stand movies or TV shows like that. Trying to watch modern sit-coms or reality shows really stresses me out as I worry about why people are acting so stupidly, so frustratingly. But The Graduate didn't have that effect on me. I'm not sure entirely why; I think it seemed less overdone than most things I've watched. Less fantastic and implausible. I could really be drawn in by it and connected to it.

I watch very few movies. Most of the time, for many reasons, they just frustrate me. I really would like to see more like that one though. Maybe Andrea can introduce me to some of them. Though I was the one who originally mentioned The Graduate, having heard something on NPR about Anne Bancroft, it was Andrea who went out and rented it along with some other things she picked up. Though her taste in movies is, I think, rather more varied than mine, at the same time she seems to have a very good idea of what I like. I'm deeply appreciative of that, because with me, I think, that's a tough thing to know.

Now; bad movie.

The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy was two hours of my life that I will never get back.

I will admit that I had some complaints- ok, a lot of complaints- that centered around variances from the books. That's to be expected. I have read the series more times that I can count and can quote large passages verbatim. I can say, with very little exaggeration, that HHttG is something of a holy book for me. I knew that there would be some divergences that I wouldn't be happy with. But there have always been significant differences between the various iterations of the concept. The radio plays were different from the books, which were different from the BBC series, which was different from the Infocom text game (what a fantastic game that was!)... That's ok. I'm ok with differences in execution if the spirit is the same and it's done with style and grace.

But this: it was like a completely different series of random events that, though it happened to include some of the best known sound-bites from the other versions, was at best only vaguely related to the source material. The disjointed plot served to highlight the poor characterizations, those of Zaphod and Slartibartfast being particularly cringe-worth, though I didn't think any of them were stellar. All the characters seemed compressed and stretched in a manner similar to what would need to occur in order to convert the entire saga of the original Star Trek into a half hour TV show, then stretch only the content from that single show into a two hour movie, and, in case the end result still bore too much resemblance to the original product, turning the occasional interference by Star Fleet command with Kirk's decision making into the overarching plot of the entire film, admirals laughing grimly as they force the whole crew of the Enterprise to sign three separate forms in their own blood just to engage their warp engines.

Wait; let's focus on the weird obsession of the film with the Vogons bureaucracy. They blew the books mention of the Vogon's bureaucratic nature out of all sane proportion and made it central plot of the movie, yet almost completely removed the fantastic irony of the similarity between Arthur's being unaware of the impending fate of his house because of the inaccessibility of the announcement papers and Earth's surprise at it's fate due to the announcement having been out for years in an inaccessible (to Earth) nearby star system.

Speaking of lack of subtlety, they managed to cut out nearly every single piece of the brilliant wit that I have come to intimately associate with Douglas Adams, and what was left was so bizarrely transformed or out of context as to be unrecognizable. How is that they could throw in such a great nod to the in-crowd as the scintillating jeweled crabs of the Vogon home world, yet systematically destroy the entire remaining body of subtlety of the work? Anything that wasn't totally different from the spirit of the books seemed incredibly over-simplified and false.

Maybe they thought that they could appease the long-time fans by throwing in a little fan service by way of the crabs and the cameo by the original Marvin, but even Marvin was over done. The responsible parties couldn't be contented with just one appearance: no, he appeared once so that all the old-school fans could point out to those less steeped in HHttG lore that "Hey, that was the original Marvin the paranoid android!", and then again so that their friends who, after the first appearance were saying "What the hell are you talking about", could get a second look at him and the old-timers could feel like they were privy to a great secret that they could pass down to the next generation. Yes, it was nifty to get another look at Marvin. No, it did not make up for the rest of this montage of recycled space-junk.

I know that many people will say that, taken on it's own, it was a decent movie and it must be looked at separately from the book. I suppose I'm not in a good position to comment on that, except that I feel justified in that my lovely wife, whose only experience with the book is my having read it to her once over the course of a few weeks, shares my reaction to it. In light of the existing body of material it's a travesty, but even as a stand-alone story I thought it was atrocious. It seemed disjointed, overly sappy, and simply unbelievable.

I should stop. There are more things I could complain about (Deep Thought spending millions of years watching TV?), but Andrea is nearly done watching her movie of the night (Jersey Girl) and we have plans for a game afterward, so I'll sign off.

Suffice it to say that I would not recommend this movie. To anyone. Please, go see something more interesting and coherent. Like Red Zone Cuba.