"Then again, when I was watching Predator I didn't think two members of its cast would become governors, either"

Wherein I link to humor to make up for that boring political crap in the previous post


From David Wong comes The 10 Best Sci-Fi films that never existed. Good stuff - that quote at the top is his. There's the Alien 3 we were promised, but never given; the Snow Crash someone should be constitionally mandated to make; he makes good points about Star Wars without even mentioning the damn teddy bears; etc.

By this point, even the casual reader of this blog should expect that if there's an opportunity to pimp Neal Stephenson I will. But I'm working on being unpredictable - the girl at the coffee shop has memorized my name and drink, so next week I must change both. Instead, I will quote his description of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; this amused me even though I have no intention of seeing the movie and stopped reading the book after 10 pages. Quoted:

There was a movie that perfectly captured the Douglas Adams experience, the combination of bitter sarcasm and sharp imagination, the droll British wit and whale-exploding slapstick that infused his novels. And that movie was Shaun of the Dead.

That movie was not, unfortunately, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a movie that floated around Hollywood for about 20 years before it finally appeared in theaters as a flat, lifeless, americanized lump that was mostly hated by people who liked the book and loathed by people who hated the book.

Why? It wasn't funny. Forget the plot elements they left out -- you can't squeeze an entire novel into a 120-page screenplay. We'd have forgiven all of that if the movie had made us laugh, if it would have captured that Adams sense of humor. You knew from the opening musical sequence with the dolphins; the type of person who would find the singing animals hilarious is not the type of person who finds joy in Adams' pages of dark, bitter irony.