This review is posted on National Review Online, http://nationalreview.com/mathewes-green/mathewesgreen200504290805.asp If you're an old fan of the Hitchiker books, you'll probably love this movie; as I read over reviews, it looks like the fans are the most enthusiastic. For people like me, who knew a little abt the books second-hand from a son who was a fan, the movie is too crowded with details to hang together coherently -- but it's still very enjoyable.
It's Holy Week for Orthodox Christians. God bless all of you who are completing the fast. I have been working on a "small" book (though it keeps growing) titled "First Fruits of Prayer." It will have the full text of the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, divided into 40 readings. This is a 8th century penitential hymn that is largely based on reflections on Old Testament Scriptures, and its very long; the service this year (its always in the 5th week of Lent) took over four hours. It's longer than the Pascha service.
So in the book the Canon will be on the right hand pages, and on the left I'll supply all the Scriptures referenced and explain anything else that might be unfamiliar. Each chapter will conclude with a brief meditation, though I certainly can't write anything as profound or beautiful as the Canon. It should be out in time for next year's Great Lent. It's not difficult to write this book, it's mostly organizing and looking things up and transcribing. I have learned a lot, especially from exploring the meaning of Greek words (St. Andrew, like all the early church, relied on a Greek version of the Old Testament.) I started writing the book April 5 and hope to finish today, though I'll do more rewriting and reorganizing next week. Please keep me in your prayers. And have a very blessed Pascha.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy What's wrong with this picture? Take your red crayon and draw a circle around the whale falling through space. Now draw a circle around the bowl of petunias falling beside him. A whale and a bowl of flowers falling through endless space are not impossible-they're merely *improbable*, which is how they happened to get there. The spaceship Heart of Gold has an "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" is based on the five-volume "trilogy" by Douglas Adams, who had lived with these characters most of his life. The "Guide" started out as a radio show and improbably morphed into books, a TV series, a video game, and finally this film. As I watched the film in a packed screening audience I kept wondering "What's wrong with this picture?" Fans of the book, who are as dedicated and picky as fans of "Harry Potter" or "Star Wars," have been heaping the movie with garlands of praise, and long lines had been waiting to get into the screening. But they weren't laughing. They seemed to appreciate and respect the movie, and at the end gave a long round of sincere applause. But while the film was rolling they studied the screen silently. I think the problem is that the charm of For those of us with less exposure to the books, or none at all, the film seems merely frenetic. The scraps are often delicious. For one thing, instead of using computer graphic effects, the space monsters are the product of Jim Henson's workshop, so they are big, stuffed authentic creatures rather than digital illusions. They have a homey familiarity, in an 80's kind of way. Likewise Marvin the Paranoid Android; he's old school, pleasantly so. Sam Rockwell is terrific as Zaphod Beeblebrox (and Douglas Adams was terrific at names). John Malkovich is suitably eerie as a new character provided by Adams, Humma Kavula. Yet overall the movie is a grab-bag of bizarre images, rather than a story. The love triangle between Zaphod, Trillian, and Arthur Dent, nearly absent from the book, is here developed just enough to seem implausible. Hovering in the background are the Big Questions. A computer named "Deep Thought" was once built to answer the question of "life, the universe, and everything." After 7 1/2 million years, Deep Thought produced the answer, after warning, "You're not going to like it." The answer is 42. The new quest, then is to discover what the ultimate *question* is, which will go with the answer "42." Douglas Adams was a self-described "radical atheist." He added the "radical," he said, to make clear that he was not an agnostic. "I am convinced that there is not a god," he told American Atheist magazine in a 1999 interview. (http://www.americanatheist.org/win98-99/T2/silverman.html ) "As a teenager I was a committed Christian," he said. "Then one day when I was about eighteen I was walking down the street when I heard a street evangelist and, dutifully, stopped to listen. As I listened it began to be borne in on me that he was talking complete nonsense." As the characters of the "Hitchhiker's Guide" scramble through the galaxy looking for clues to the ultimate questions, Arthur Dent runs into somebody who has stopped thinking about it. This character is Slartibartfast, brilliantly portrayed by Bill Nighy, who brings a twitchy nobility to the role and manages to make the whole raucous movie slow down for a moment and be human. Slartibartfast works for a business that creates custom-made planets, and was part of the team that made earth ("I did the bit called "Well, are you?" Arthur responds. Twitch. "No. That's where it falls down, of course," he says. Here's an ultimate question for you. Look at a photo of the beautiful earth taken from space. Think about the confusion and tragedy that fills it. And ask: What's wrong with this picture? ********
Frederica Mathewes-Green www.frederica.com |
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