Movies

I've (finally) started trying to write a little something about every movie I see, but the point is that I don't have to edit any of it into readable form, since it's just for me, so I'm not going to bother putting any of it up here. Maybe I'll just mention a title at the bottom of a post if I want to mention it but don't want to actually write about it. That sounds good.

I have some thoughts on Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and maybe I will post them here at some point, but I don't feel like doing so now. Instead I'll link to, and post an excerpt from, Anthony Lane who may be my favorite film critic at the moment. (Incidentally, I don't like David Denby, the New Yorker's other main film critic, much at all.) I hadn't realized this until just recently, but upon further consideration, it may just be true.

The problem is not that the film debases the book but that movies themselves are too capacious a home for such comedy [my emphasis], with its tea-steeped English musings and its love of bitty, tangential gags. The demand for the literal, too, seems overwrought; a leading character with two heads became, in Adams’s hands, a sustained joke about split personality, whereas here he’s merely a job for special effects. As radio listeners, we couldn’t believe our ears. These days, as hoary old moviegoers, we shrug, and believe our eyes.