Just a Few More Minutes

My friend Mark and I are visiting my brother in Fairfax this weekend (while the child is having a weekend with my in-laws and the wife is enjoying a bender her first ladies' weekend out in four years. Tonight we saw the new movie adaptation of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That series in its novel, TV and radio drama forms was a big cultural part of the high school geek crowd I ran, er, slouched with. I was eagerly awaiting revisiting this part of my youth. That excitement was tempered somewhat when Adams biographer MJ Simpson wrote a blistering, devastating early review. (Link is to the Google cache, as Simpson's site is currently down.) We speculated a fair bit on whether Simpson was simply too close to his subject, or if the movie was truly that bad.

Having seen it for myself, it is my considered opinion that Simpson was smoking crack. Hitchhiker's is far from a perfect movie -- it's unambiguously a mess. But what a glorious mess, zipping from slapstick to sardonic humor. There are a couple of sentimental tar pits that bear no resemblance to the nihilistic authorial voice Adams adopted for his final Hitchhiker novel, Mostly Harmless. But those are thankfully brief. Hitchhiker's throws a ton of ideas on the screen, and there are more than enough winners to make the movie worth the price of admission, particularly if you are fond of its previous incarnations. Just don't expect the Second Coming of Adams. That would be needlessly messianic.