New Cast Information For 'Hitchhiker's' Movie 420
Kathleen writes "I was listening to the old Hitchiker's radio plays, and feeling nostalgic, I decide to check out how the movie version was going along. Well, they've filled out some important parts, Zaphod and Marvin have been cast. Zaphod is played by Sam Rockwell who's most recently been in Matchstick Men and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. Marvin is being played by Warwick Davis (Who was Willow Ufgood in Willow). Slartibartfast will be played by Bill Nighy. This news is a little distressing, since I was under the impression that Stephen Moore would still be handling the voice of Marvin."
More information (Score:5, Informative)
Burn Hollywood Burn (Score:3, Insightful)
another American atrocity this way comes
Just a reminder (Score:5, Insightful)
Note: Since this project is categorized as being in production, the data is subject to change or could be removed completely.
Re:Just a reminder (Score:5, Informative)
Worth noting, though, is that if you subscribe to their IMDbPro [imdb.com] web site, they have news items (subscription required) [imdb.com] available from The Hollywood Reporter that confirm the casting of Martin Freeman (Dent), Mos Def (Prefect), Rockwell (Zaphod), and others. It may still not be written in stone, but when it comes from The Hollywood Reporter, it can be considered pretty reputable.
- Greg
What's Important (Score:4, Insightful)
The main reason the film has never been made is that Adams was never happy with what Hollywod was offering. Do we really thing he'd be happy with some droid scriptwriter massacring his work?
If The Powers That Be didn't like DNA's script, they don't deserve to benefit from it.
Re:What's Important (Score:5, Insightful)
Missing Data! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Missing Data! (Score:4, Funny)
Wouldn't that be Adam Sandler [imdb.com]
Re:Missing Data! (Score:5, Funny)
For the entire time I was watching that Grinch film I was wishing my colon would jump up and strangle my brain. I even nibbled on my own leg to see what the feasibility of gnawing it off would be.
---
Re:Missing Data! (Score:3, Funny)
KFG
Re:Missing Data! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Missing Data! (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but he was in Ace Ventura, Ace Ventura 2 AND Batman Forever. If we can't agree that he is a filithy, hideous creature, we have nothing in common. The man is meant to be a Vogon.
To be fair, I liked him in The Truman Show.
Re:Missing Data! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Missing Data! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Missing Data! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Missing Data! (Score:4, Funny)
Personally, though, I *quite* like "Oh Freddled Gruntbuggly." It's right up there with Jabberwocky as some of the best nonsense verse I've read.
Narrator (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Narrator (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Narrator (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Narrator (Score:4, Interesting)
Tim Curry (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Narrator (Score:3, Insightful)
James Earl Jones would be good,
Bloody fucking hell.
James Earl Jones as The Book:
Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon: forget it. They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy--not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost agai
Re:Narrator (Score:3, Informative)
I tried to find a decent link, but this was the best I could do. [batcomputer.com]
Re:Narrator (Score:4, Funny)
Example phrase: "Well, isn't that interesting?"
English (cockney): "Wew, in't da' intrestin', luv?"
Scottish: "Wael, ehsn't dat interestin', ya bloody bastard?"
Sean Connery: "Wahl, izhn't thaht intereshting, Alexsh? I believe I had sexsh with your mother lahsht night..."
Of course, IANADC* so I admit the above may be a bit crude in translation, but I think it makes my point (all apologies to the English, Scottish, and Alex Trebek's mother).
*DC = "Dialect Coach"
Re:Narrator (Score:5, Informative)
If they want to do this well, they will go back to the original radio and TV scripts for the majority of their inspiration, as the book was actually the third generation of the story. (IMHO)
Re:Narrator (Score:5, Informative)
Not passage from "the book", passages from "The Book" (as in "The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, starring Peter Jones as The Book")
Re:Narrator (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Narrator (Score:3, Informative)
Second. The novel predates the TV series.
Re:Narrator (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, he died in 2000, but there are so many recordings of him, including all the right fragments from the radio series, that if they real
Marvin (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Marvin (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually I think that would be the majority of robot movies.
We don't need to fear. .
KFG
Re:Marvin (Score:4, Insightful)
video still [sadgeezer.com]
Re:Marvin (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Marvin (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, I liked the Zaphod [nicolaas.net] & the Trillian [floor42.com] too.
Re:Marvin (Score:2)
Actors! Don't talk to me about actors. (Score:3, Funny)
I suppose it's to be expected, what with my brain the size of a planet and everyone being so dreadfully stupid. I suppose an excrutiatingly bad representation of Marvin is as inevitable as the rest of the unspeakably dreary monotony that is my life. Life! Don't talk to me about life. I'm
I, for one... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I, for one... (Score:5, Funny)
Some of us wish we could forget our days as resistance fighters during the Second Vogon Colonial Wars. The harsh oppression visited upon us day in and day out was eclipsed only by the horror of the mandatory poetry recitals. Never Again!
Vive la Resistance!
Re:I, for one... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I, for one... (Score:5, Funny)
I would complain about the idiotic overuse of this joke, but ever since I got my digital watch I've been quite serene.
Re:I, for one... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I, for one... (Score:3, Insightful)
Think about the early 80's/late 70's when digital watches were the newest fad. In the early/mid 90's it would have been pagers, and today
Re:I, for one... (Score:3, Funny)
Fucking Willow?! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sorry, Kathleen, but I have to confiscate your Geek license. Please hand in your badge and toy phaser, on your way out.
Re:Fucking Willow?! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Fucking Willow?! (Score:2)
Re:Fucking Willow?! (Score:4, Funny)
It's not his fault . . . (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm all for hating on Lucas, but Warwick Davis was playing a role that, at the time, would have been a very big deal. Remember how aniticipated Jedi was?
I wonder (Score:4, Insightful)
Known for Willow? I don't think so. (Score:4, Funny)
There once was a robot from Sirius
His lust for my gold was quite serious
He let out a cry
As I punctured his eye
Now he's depressed and delirious!
That was... (Score:5, Funny)
Would you like to hear some more of my poetry? (Score:3, Funny)
But with these clothes it's not seen
To it I will write
An ode full of spite
As a leprechaun, I'm most obscene
A finitely improbable clover
Of these I am no lo-ver
But even look at me gold
And a grudge I will hold
And for you, it will all be over
The size of a planet, my brain
For me gold, I'll cut you in twain
And then you'll be dead
The last thought in your head
Will be "Oh no, not again."
Re:Would you like to hear some more of my poetry? (Score:4, Funny)
In, out, in, out, and in and out and in and out the G'gharfulk splorched disgustingly through the tight orifice of the N'hargla-fep. They quivered and squicked in an imperfect rythm as the G'hib flies laid their maggot-eggs upon them.
O where has the G'hib laid its eggs? From deep within the pie-crust of my heart I wish to gloop and splorch with the lowly G'gharfulk!
Why has this deep loneliness been denied me? I drink but my navel vomits forth, and I am not filled!
By devouring the N'hargla-fep I become the G'gharfulk and thus take part in its oozing dance!
Feed the G'gharfulk within your soul and let your mighty tendrils lick deep of the slime-covering on the N'hargla-fep's back!
Its salty ooziness covers your eyes and makes useless the panting and wheezing of your lungs! It spurts! Watch as the Tsuuba worm coils deep within your colon, and feel it push its way through your liver and out your navel! I cannot hold water! Come, come, this constipation consumes me!
So I dissolve, and the G'gharfulk eats deep of my brains and the stink of my teeth.
Good night. Or is it morning? Who am I to care. Where's my jock strap?'
Re:Would you like to hear some more of my poetry? (Score:4, Funny)
Though I'm sure you're a reasonable chap,
Only one line,
nearly finished on time,
So next time don't open your trap.
My Hero! (Score:4, Funny)
I'm Thrilled!
This means that one of my favorite stories will feature one of my favorite Televsion personalities!
Bill Nighy the Science Guy will be in HHGTG!
Wow. What's that? Nye? Not Nighy?
Well, I'll probably watch it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well, I'll probably watch it. (Score:3, Informative)
Mos Def (Score:2)
Alan Rickman ... and Darl (Score:5, Funny)
And why not cast Darl as a Vogon?
Re:Alan Rickman ... and Darl (Score:3, Funny)
I'd cast him as Zaphod. His two-facedness would save them $$$ on prosthetic makeup.
Movies always suck (Score:3, Funny)
Marvin is played by... (Score:4, Funny)
This explains soooo much! He wasn't a paranoid android, he was just self-conscious about his height! Really, there needs to be a support group for midget robots.
Wait, no, that's not politically correct! What is the PC term for those like Marvin?
"Little Androids?"
"Dwarfbots?"
"Vertically Challenged Metallic Artificial Persons?"
It's going to blow (Score:2, Interesting)
I know they are going to ruin it now. It's going to flop and everyone is going to talk about how much the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy sucks without knowing the triumph of the original radio, television and book series.
In the original radio, TV and book series, Ford Prefect was an alien who tried to assume a hipster personality circa 1978. I guess the choice of Mos Def is supposed to have a hipster character that is appropriate to 2004. But all you HHGTTG fans and I know tha
Re:It's going to blow (Score:3, Interesting)
I certainly have no desire to see another stilted, British production. I can only put up with about half an hour of that stuff per month (thanks PBS).
Re:It's going to blow (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's going to blow (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, and they're still stilted.
I assume you're basing this on TV that's actually made it over to the US, right? In which case yeah, it probably sucks. There's good British TV and films, but hardly any of it is popular, so I doubt much of it makes it over the pond.
Enough with the period pieces and Hugh Grant already. And there's nothing funnier than a British "gangster" film.
Period pieces? You mean Pride And Prejudice or Shakespeare or something? It's great literature. Get over it. Just because it
Re:It's going to blow (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's going to blow (Score:3, Insightful)
Just cause the guy is black doesn't mean it's going to be Men in Black nor that there will be Hip Hop. JC what a bunch of stereo-typical crap.
Maybe there IS going to be Hip Hop. So the fuck what?
I don't remember Douglas Adams ever pointing out the color of Ford's skin.
Re:It's going to blow (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's going to blow (Score:3, Informative)
Do you even know who Mos Def is [allmusic.com]?
Connecting him with hip-hop is not being racist. That's what he did (quite well I might add) before he decided to be a mediocre actor.
Re:It's going to blow (Score:4, Insightful)
Uh, somehow I don't think it's because he's black, but because he's a hip-hop musician.
I'm not familiar with his work, but usually when Hollywood hires a musician for a part, it's to cash in on the image they've already built up for themselves (e.g. David Bowie in Labyrinth, Sting in Dune, Henry Rollins in every film he's ever been in).
Re:It's going to blow (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, you can be an idiot and paint me with the racism brush, but it's not going to stick. The only problem I've got with the casting is that they didn't pick a more British type of hipster. Thank god they didn't cast that idiot Kidd Rock as Zaphod. Now that would have been a total tragedy.
Hip-hop (was Re:It's going to blow) (Score:4, Insightful)
In case you cared, Mos Def, unlike many self-styled "MCs," is a real artist, a poet who started off in spoken word venues like the Brooklyn Moon. Unlike the commercialized hip-hop spewed by Clear Channel radio stations targeted at white suburbanites to reinforce their stereotypes of people of color, Mos Def actually has a positive message for the urban counterculture, rooted in the Civil Rights Movement, and the struggle of people of color everywhere to attain equality.
I have a feeling that Mos Def and Douglas Adams would have had a lot to talk about. After all tHHGttG saga talks a lot about the disgusting excesses of capitalism and the rampant insanity of corporate culture (see Magrathea and the collapse of the Galactic Stock Market, the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation, Hotblack Desiato being dead for "tax purposes," the awesome satire in the sequence involving the Golgafrinchans, and the fact that the enemy in the final book is an evil corporation), the way the powers-that-be and the media manipulate the masses (remember, anyone you actually meet is the product of a deranged imagination, the fact that most everything is "somebody else's problem" makes it possible to create a good stealth device, and there's the irony when the tourism industry's campaign in Ursa Minor Beta backfires when they state that "when you are tired of Ursa Minor Beta, you are tired of life," and then there's the message in front of tHHttG which advises "Don't Panic!") and then there's the whole idea of revisionist history and the desecration of ancient sites all in the name of progress and profit (as in the story of the Cathedral of Chalesm, the poet who was bought out by the pen company and who had to plagiarize his own work in order to get them written, and more obviously the destruction of Earth in order to make way for a hyperspace bypass), the pointless destruction wrought by war (see the Silastic Armor fiends of Striterax, and the Krikkiters after them, and then those guys who fought wars just because they saw strange things in the sky, and ended up killing mostly the peaceful forest people in the middle), the evil of racism (again, the Krikkiters) and the fact that the people who want to have power shouldn't be allowed to have power (wonderfully lampooned by the description of the guy who actually runs the universe)
I think Mos Def would make a great Ford Prefect.
Isms (Score:3, Insightful)
And what exactly do you mean by underground hip-hop? Do
Re:It's going to blow (Score:3, Informative)
He's an extremely talented actor who happens to also be a pretty good lyricist as well. Get over it.
Re:It's going to blow (Score:3, Informative)
1. I have no problem with a black actor playing Ford
2. I DO have a problem with American actors in a British work
3. I don't think that Americans are very good at sarcasm without coming off as mean spirited
4. I don't think hip-hop and the HHGTTG mix regardless of whether the hip-hop artist is white or black. Em
Martin Freeman (Score:5, Informative)
Sam Rockwell... (Score:5, Informative)
My vote for Ford Prefect (Score:5, Interesting)
Weird casting, or what?! (Score:5, Funny)
I can see that the producers might be one of the first against the wall when the revolution comes. (After the board of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, of course.)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Weird casting, or what?! (Score:3, Funny)
He's made by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, that's why. They screwed up everything else, what makes you think they would get the case design right?
Tweaky the Paranoid Android? (Score:4, Funny)
Still, if he gets to wear Dr. Theopolis as bling...
This is Good (Score:3, Funny)
Re:This is Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Crack jokes about it if you like. But HGtGttG was and Dr. Who were far better than the scifi we have today. When you have '2nd grade art class' effects, you have to focus more on making the script interesting.
Frankly, I wouldn't complain a whole lot about the fx they had back then. I recently purchased the DVD for Hitchhiker and they actually stunned me with one of their effects. The guide had a full color animated screen. Today that'd be done with either a PocketPC (like in Nemesis) or by digitally adding the imagery later. What they did back then was they found a neat way to funnel light from a projector in that thing. Ingenius.
It's also worth mentioning that the animations they did for the guide won awards. Despite being hand-animated, they were quite effective in selling people on the idea that they were watching a computerized presentation of the information the Guide contained.
As an artist who does that kind of work, I found Hitchhiker to be surprisingly good, even today. I nitpicked it far less than I did Episode II.
Where's Your Source? (Score:5, Insightful)
Kathleen, you cite NO sources in this - just links to the actors' pages on IMDB.com.
What gives? We're now posting news articles with no sources at all? Let me rummage around for my bullshit flag.
Re: New Cast Information For 'Hitchhiker's' Movie (Score:3, Funny)
New Cast Information For 'Hitchhiker\'s' Movie
Garth Jennings directs? (Score:3, Insightful)
In both the radio show and the BBC TV Series, what made the jokes work was the voice characterization and acting. Without a good director at the helm who has a letter perfect sense of comic timing and voice characterization necessary to pull off the sarchasm, this movie will fail. My vote would have been to use a Disney cartoon director taking on live action for the first time if they wanted to save money.
Of course, I was the one that poopoo'ed the idea of Peter Jackson doing LOTR, so who the Hell am I to comment?
- ravepunk
Bruce Campbell... (Score:5, Funny)
I disagree: (Score:3, Insightful)
Incomplete information! (Score:5, Funny)
Who plays the other head???
inaccurate Movie DataBase (Score:4, Informative)
Some REAL information:
Note that Nighy is NOT confirmed for Slarti. Note that Warwick as the body of Marvin means nothing about his voice. And Moore has NOT been cast as the voice. Mos Def is the most controversial choice, but let's not write him off as Ford just cos nobody expected a black guy in the role before.
PLEASE NOT MOVED TO AMERICA (Score:4, Insightful)
More Casting... (Score:3, Informative)
Ford Perfect, Arthor, and Trillian are all listed.
Back from the dead ??? (Score:3, Interesting)
That would be quite a trick!
The American Hitchiker's Guide to The Galaxy (Score:3, Funny)
"Well, these alien Vogons destroy Earth so this English guy chases them across the Galaxy, destroys the Universe in revenge, and then learns the ultimate meaning of everything from some mice."
"I like it - but we have to make some changes...
Let's change Ford Prefect to Ford Pinto, Arthur Dent to Art Bump, Vogons to Russians (with English accents, the mice to Santa Claus, and the answer to the ultimate question is a big hug. Then the kid says, 'I love you Daddy'. Now that's a movie!"
Re:Eeek! Which will it be? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Eeek! Which will it be? (Score:5, Informative)
That being said, Rockwell can do a lot of different voices, and I have little doubt he could do British if that was the direction they went with the character. Although I hope not.
Re:Eeek! Which will it be? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Garth Jennings Fan Club (Score:4, Insightful)
Second, to the anti-Garth Jennings camp, could it possibly be any worse than a low budget 1980's BBC TV production?
Yes, it could easily be much, much, worse. I'm taking bets it will be an unwatchable disaster but hope to be amazed to the contrary. Jenning's moron value aside, most of the casting announced is already extremely dodgy. Add to that the film is being made in Hollywood and you've got an almost sure fire loser.
Not that I have anything against Hollywood per se, but they just don't seem to get British culture (witness the absolute travesty that is the upcoming Thunderbirds movie [thunderbirdsmovie.com] - did they even watch any of the TV series?).
I actually sorta liked the BBC TV series, believe it or not.
One of the reasons the BBC TV series really worked was because of the limited effects, though some of them were really complicated for the TV of the time. All the "computer" parts for the Guide were (apparently) done by hand...
Anyway, with the (comparative) lack of budget they had to rely more on (shock!) acting and (horror!) humour to make it work. And it did (Trillian perhaps excepted).
Putting an MTV director in charge of Guide style humour and class is like having Bill Clinton teach Japanese schoolgirls - you know damn well someone is going to get screwed, and there's going to be a hell of a mess!