(no subject)
It's amazing how much interpersonal relations are governed by expectations. How rifts can develop between people because of a failure to meet expectations even, or especially, when the 'expected person' is oblivious.
Of course I've managed to mortally insult a couple of people because I expected them to understand my sardonic humour and they took it as a personal insult. I've never been very good and backpedaling and trying to explain that, say, I wasn't trying to literally disparage them but instead to illuminate a prospective pathway that I considered sub-optimal by means of deprecation, sarcasm and large pink elephants.
And, believe me, very little jars one quite like being impacted by a rapidly rotating, fetchingly fuchsia, miniature mastodon.
Now what do these two concepts really have to do with one another?
Well I have slowly been coming to the conclusion that my ability to pre-judge films could essentially guarantee reversing my initial opinion of them. For example I expected Van Helsing to be the most toe-curlingly, retch inducing, awful waste of celluloid in recent memory and actually walked out of the theater thinking that it was reasonably entertaining despite it really having almost no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
Which brings me to the point, and I do have one somewhere, that I just watched the new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
I expect that the Guide phenomenon missed most people that weren’t' relatively youthful almost 30 years ago, living in England, and willing to listen to radio drama. I can still remember being left in the local (well, not all that local really) Sainsbury's (English supermarket chain) parking lot and listening to a bizarre robot getting so incensed that it blows up the bridge that it's standing on and plummets to its demises. Admittedly I can't remember what the robot was called, but I take that as a compliment, thank you very much. I even liked the television series, which wasn't really widely admired at the time. I like the books, although they spiraled downwards towards the end with Mostly Harmless being a less than stellar fifth entry in the trilogy (although I do appreciate, and still have, the autographed copy my sister gave me. Thanks!)
My pre-conceived ideas about the new Guide were that it would be dismal. Partially based on a belief that it would be difficult to make a film of such a surreal book, but mostly because I heard they were casting Mos Def, an American rapper, as Ford Prefect - whose rapping skills were, and I say this with some certainty, utterly unknown.
I apologize unreservedly to Mr. Def. His performance was so far from being the worst thing in the film that he almost deserves an award. In fact he is probably the third least awful thing about the film, with the first being that it really does end eventually and the second being Magrathea. The film itself is excruciatingly abysmal, almost to the point of nausea. It manages to be frenetic in the manner of a five year old screaming for attention whilst at the same time having absolutely nothing to say in a plot that they'd have to add several syllables to the word incoherent to even have a chance of reasonably describing it's nonsensical vapidity. It wasn't really bad, it was so far beyond bad that it was in severe danger of crashing into bad from the other direction. It was as much worse than Mostly Harmless as Mostly Harmless was to the original radio show. A Gnab Gib if ever there was one.
In fact I'm not even sure that breaking out my thsaurus will give me the vocabularly necessary to depict its mind-buggering paucity of worth. It's the artistic equivalent of having your brain smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a huge steaming turd.
I think that this review gives a much more in depth dissection of what is wrong with the film and I have to go and stick my brain in a steam cleaner for a few hours so it will have to suffice...
Planet Magrathea's review of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
My own pet theory is that they were so determined for it not to resemble the television series at all that they deliberately changed everything they could and thus forcibly replaced the things that worked with crap whilst replacing the stuff that didn't work with newly invented crap. Predictably you're left with one big pile of your local organic farmer's favorite stuff.
Of course I've managed to mortally insult a couple of people because I expected them to understand my sardonic humour and they took it as a personal insult. I've never been very good and backpedaling and trying to explain that, say, I wasn't trying to literally disparage them but instead to illuminate a prospective pathway that I considered sub-optimal by means of deprecation, sarcasm and large pink elephants.
And, believe me, very little jars one quite like being impacted by a rapidly rotating, fetchingly fuchsia, miniature mastodon.
Now what do these two concepts really have to do with one another?
Well I have slowly been coming to the conclusion that my ability to pre-judge films could essentially guarantee reversing my initial opinion of them. For example I expected Van Helsing to be the most toe-curlingly, retch inducing, awful waste of celluloid in recent memory and actually walked out of the theater thinking that it was reasonably entertaining despite it really having almost no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
Which brings me to the point, and I do have one somewhere, that I just watched the new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
I expect that the Guide phenomenon missed most people that weren’t' relatively youthful almost 30 years ago, living in England, and willing to listen to radio drama. I can still remember being left in the local (well, not all that local really) Sainsbury's (English supermarket chain) parking lot and listening to a bizarre robot getting so incensed that it blows up the bridge that it's standing on and plummets to its demises. Admittedly I can't remember what the robot was called, but I take that as a compliment, thank you very much. I even liked the television series, which wasn't really widely admired at the time. I like the books, although they spiraled downwards towards the end with Mostly Harmless being a less than stellar fifth entry in the trilogy (although I do appreciate, and still have, the autographed copy my sister gave me. Thanks!)
My pre-conceived ideas about the new Guide were that it would be dismal. Partially based on a belief that it would be difficult to make a film of such a surreal book, but mostly because I heard they were casting Mos Def, an American rapper, as Ford Prefect - whose rapping skills were, and I say this with some certainty, utterly unknown.
I apologize unreservedly to Mr. Def. His performance was so far from being the worst thing in the film that he almost deserves an award. In fact he is probably the third least awful thing about the film, with the first being that it really does end eventually and the second being Magrathea. The film itself is excruciatingly abysmal, almost to the point of nausea. It manages to be frenetic in the manner of a five year old screaming for attention whilst at the same time having absolutely nothing to say in a plot that they'd have to add several syllables to the word incoherent to even have a chance of reasonably describing it's nonsensical vapidity. It wasn't really bad, it was so far beyond bad that it was in severe danger of crashing into bad from the other direction. It was as much worse than Mostly Harmless as Mostly Harmless was to the original radio show. A Gnab Gib if ever there was one.
In fact I'm not even sure that breaking out my thsaurus will give me the vocabularly necessary to depict its mind-buggering paucity of worth. It's the artistic equivalent of having your brain smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a huge steaming turd.
I think that this review gives a much more in depth dissection of what is wrong with the film and I have to go and stick my brain in a steam cleaner for a few hours so it will have to suffice...
Planet Magrathea's review of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
My own pet theory is that they were so determined for it not to resemble the television series at all that they deliberately changed everything they could and thus forcibly replaced the things that worked with crap whilst replacing the stuff that didn't work with newly invented crap. Predictably you're left with one big pile of your local organic farmer's favorite stuff.