The review you’ve been waiting for. Despite some serious gripes, I gotta say, I’m damned impressed. Tim from “The Office” is the perfect Arthur Dent. Sam Rockwell knocks it out of the park as Zaphod Beeblebrox as well. Mos Def and Zooey Deschanel as Ford Prefect and Trillian do well with characters that are a lot less interesting than what’s going on around them. Deschanel kinda cribs a couple of moves from Mary Louise Parker’s character on “The West Wing” but it works for her. It’s great fun to see Deep Thought, to see a Babel Fish (I’d forgotten that this is where that came from) and to see the Infinite Improbability Drive in action. They kept the bit about the Sperm Whale. But they lost Mostly Harmless. And, despite all characters holding towels throughout 99% of the film, the explanation of WHY you should keep a towel has been dropped. Griping, griping. The movie is pretty close to awesome, even if the middle section gets a wee bit bogged down.
1 Comment
Welcome
Jordan Hoffman is a New York-based writer and film critic working for The Guardian, Vanity Fair, Thrillist, Times of Israel, NY Daily News and elsewhere.
He is the host of ENGAGE: The Official Star Trek Podcast, a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and challenges you to a game of backgammon.
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical
value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you – daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.