h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

We went to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on Sunday. It was a sell-out, so we were wise to have booked in advance. The cinema had 31 showings on the Saturday; this is a popular film!

I wasn't feeling terribly well (I went to the doctor yesterday and was given some antibiotics to help get rid of a lingering chesty cough and took yesterday off - I'll be off today too), however the film was worth going out of the warm house for.

Time says that this is the first time the film has been better than the book: http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1132300,00.html and although it missed a couple of bits out (Madame Maxime's huff with Hagrid ' I'm just big-boned!'), the time passed remarkably quickly. We all thoroughly enjoyed it. I didn't know that Eric Sykes was it it - I spotted him in the opening sequence.

It was really interesting seeing how the cast has aged and I have a soft spot for Neville Longbottom, who's coming along nicely.

I agree that is was better than the book. Rowling herself said that she regretted the fourth book. She was under pressure from her publishers and they persuaded her to publish long before it was ready. There was far too much incidental stuff in it, which she would have trimmed out later.

(Ironically, for the fifth book she decided she was rich enough and famous enough to set her own conditions and only release the book when it was ready - number five turned out longer than ever and with even more extraneous detail; the weakest of the series in my opinion).

The film was great. I particularly liked Mad Eye Moody!

Yes, wasn't he great! Did you spot Eric Sykes? I also thought that Frances de la Tour was a nice choice too, although my mental image of Mme Maxime was of a broader woman.

I've been trying to remember where I last saw the actor playing Amos Diggery. Was he in 'The Vicar of Dibley'? Cedric was nicely handsome. Victor Krum didn't look like a seeker, mind - he was more like a prop forward!

I didn't spot Eric Sykes. Mrs G was convinced it was him, but I didn't believe it.

I always thought Mme Maxine was built more along the lines of Dawn French. And it's true that Krum looked like a prop forward, but that's the impression I had of him from reading the book (although it's a few years since I read it).

Dawn French! Yes, come to think of it, that's more like my mental image too. Both have that va-va-voom, though.

And yes, although Krum was a bit heavier than my mental concept, he was within the bounds of it. Cast list: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0330373/fullcredits

It's not out here yet

I'll have to unsubscribe from this thread: I don't want any inadvertant spoilers

what spoilers? Have you NOT READ the BOOKS?

But Dawn French was already the Fat Lady in one of the previous ones.

Oh yes! I'd forgotten that.

That struck me too, Patches - maybe Fb hasn't read the book! Shame she's unsubscribed. I wonder when it does come out in Oz?

'But Dawn French was already the Fat Lady in one of the previous ones.' Thanks for reminding me, TC, I'd forgotten that too - you're not alone there, Gnomon.

Yay-hay - I went to see it last night. It really moves at a breathtaking pace, but that is obviously because the book is so much thicker and there's more to fit in.

Miranda Robertson wasn't anything like the Rita Skeeter I'd imaginged (I'd imagined her with short dark hair - like Una Stubbs in the 60s) but she did a very good job in her own way.

The film was very funny, got lots of laughs. The cinema was full to the last seat, although it was the English version showing in Germany and it was the last night of a week of three showings a week. (Probably everyone dashing to get to it in case it isn't on next week!)

Madam Maxine was also just right, although not how I'd imagined. But the previous posts did set me thinking that Robbie Coltrane and Dawn French would make a very good comedy couple.

I haf2 wait til the 2nd of december b4 i can c it.

Oh and Serenity starts today in Germany. Got non-commital comments in our paper. Probably bad translating and dubbing again.

Going back to the title of this thread, has anyone ever wondered why movies are not as good as the books they are based on?

Who was it that made the decision to cut parts out of the movie version of the first ever 'book-to-movie' project?

What were the reasons for the omissions?
Lack of funds? Lack of time? Lack of film?

What would movies be like today if this (for lack of a more suitable word) 'trend' hadn't cottoned on?

Movies and books are different media. They move at very different paces. A book can describe the events of a day in a few sentences. To get that across in a movie could take five minutes. On the other hand, pages of description of something in a book can be encompassed in one frame in a movie. So it is essential that parts of a book will expand greatly and other parts compress when they are moved to film. But in general, a literal filming of any book would produce a film so long that it would be unwatchable. It is therefore always necessary to cut certain scenes out when filming a book.

The only film I ever saw which was the same as the book was "The Accidental Tourist" with William Hurt and Geena Davis. There was one scene in the book which was omitted in the film, but the mood was identical throughout, and the ground covered was the same. Both the book and the film were excellent and were directly comparable in quality.

It's not a question of making a decision to cut out parts of the book, because if you included absolutely everything in the book, the film would be 9-10 hours long, apart from the fact that a cinema audience are used to having their attention grabbed the whole time.

What is important is : *which bits* are left out. These decisions are what make or break a film.

And, as no two people see the same film in their head while they are reading, a director can only reproduce what he saw when he read the book and hope that it hits a nerve with the audiences.

Chris Columbus got it right, as far as I'm concerned. Mike Sewell made some characters look rather silly, (particularly Filch, and partly Professor McDonegal) which I didn't agree with, but on the whole, he, too, caught the atmosphere of the book.

Simulpost, Gnomon. I didn't know there was a film of The Accidental Tourist (one of my favourite books). Must have a look at that.

Think about this, then: If we had decided to put everything from the book into the movie version of everything, and got used to having to sit through 8/9hour movies, would we still have gone the route we're on now?
Or would the route I'm suggesting just be taken for granted as "THE WAY" as this, the route we're on has been?

There's some interesting stuff on this subject in the various DVDs of extras that come with Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" movies.

Stuff had to be cut out just for time reasons alone: the Extended Editions run for 12 hours and still don't have all of the material from the book, but more interestingly, there's a huge contrast between the segments talking about Tolkien writing the books and the bits about the screenwriters doing their treatment.

All of the bits about Tolkien say "Of course, no novelist would write it this way, but it works because..."

All of the bits about the screenplay say "Of course no movie can do it that way, so we changed it." As Patches says, the filmmaker's notions about what can and can't be in a movie have a great influence on what *is* in the movie, and that affects the next film-maker, and the next audience.

Once in a long while someone does a movie which confounds all these expectations and is a success anyway, like, say, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and then a new set of things become "things that can be in a movie", and echoes of those few original works are seen for years afterwards.

Zube

But now that we have the ability to do things like Gollum and Dobby and flying on broomsticks without looking too fake, because of the advent of "cgi", should we not re-pose the question: "what is stopping us from accepting that a movie should go on for 8-12 hours?"