not sure where my towel is

During her stay in Cape Town my poor mother is being exposed, whether she likes it or not, to a far more sf kind of movie than she usually enjoys watching. She's being very polite about it; minimal kicking and screaming. I dragged her off to see Hitchhiker's Guide today, and, while both she and I enjoyed it I shall, recking not the probably anguished cries of d@vid and other Adams geeks, feel impelled to be slightly rude about it. Sorry.

• It was a fun film. I giggled often. Bits of the casting were inspired, notably Arthur Dent (who was deeply endearing in that helpless British way), Slartibartfast and Ford Prefect. Jury still out on Zaphod Beeblebrox, I'm not sure if the manner in and degree to which he drove me bananas was legitimate given the parameters of the original.
• It had lots of dolphins, with their own theme song, of both of which I thoroughly approve.
• The overall scrappy, dotty, klunky, semi-amateur feel of the film was, while irritating at times, very true to the spirit of both the books and the radio series. A very slick finish would not have worked. Conversely, the scrappy feel didn't always work.
• Marvin, visually speaking, was all wrong - too round and slick and shiny. Marvin, voice-wise, was an inspired and inevitable piece of casting which made my little Alan-Rickman-fangirl heart go pit-a-pat.
• Didn't like the Vogon lips. Eeeuw.
• WTF was with Zaphod's head? You're telling me the movie didn't have enough special effects budget to keep two of them on his shoulders throughout? Not only was it a deeply inferior Lower-Case Sub-Head, they sawed it off halfway through. Cheap, I tell you. Cheap.
• Probably my biggest beef, sadly enough, was with the plot. There is a huge amount of material in the books; more situations and planets and people and subplots and random digressions than the most insane and megalomanic scriptwriter could possibly use. Given that, why this wild yen to introduce whole new scads of plot? Especially since quite a few of them seemed to be designed solely to show off (a) the planet Vogsphere, which is ugly, (b) lots of Very Big Blocky Things, which are profoundly uninteresting, (c) bureaucracy, which is deeply unfunny and unsexy, and (d) John Malkovitch*. Inscrutable. With an intense lack of scrute.
• I loved the planet-building workfloor. Lovely, playful combination of the sublime (those incredible spaces) and the ridiculous (lots of orange men in hard hats). If for nothing else, the whole film would have been worth it for the worker pushing the button to make mushrooms explode up from the ground. I want one, for daffodils.
• The film is both amusing and disappointing, an odd combination which is, for some reason, giving me a stiff neck.

In the interests of accuracy I should probably note that yesterday's overheard quote, below, should read "eyebrow" in place of "eyelash", a fact I assume I didn't remember because the implications are so unsettling.

* I'm not sure there's ever an excuse for John Malkovitch.