First, an excursion. We went to 大千美食林 to get some dinner before the movie. It was an asian dominated group: Evelyn, Phil, DJP, Andrea, Yoko, and I are all asian. Eric was the only one out. Food was pretty good. Not fabulous, but enjoyable enough. Their 北京烤鴨 was actually 兩吃: the tortilla wraps and soup. The soup was not good enough in my opinion. I much prefer 陶然亭 of Taipei, which actually makes 三吃 with the addition of a stirfried dish. The curious thing is that for one whole duck, there were 4 drumsticks. Creepy.

The other foods consumed include some ShangHai Dim Sum: 蟹肉湯包, 小籠包, and some vegetable steamed dumplings. The 包子 tasted pretty good. The 家常牛肉麵 was not good: I could make better. The two vegetable dishes 蒜蓉通菜 and 絲瓜麵筋 were nicely done, except instead of 蒜蓉 they had whole garlics, which is sacrilegious. The tab comes out to be about 17 bucks per, so not particularly cheap either. I think I will enjoy food lots on my little Taiwanese trip that's coming up.

The girls apparently had something better to do than watching a movie. So it was down to the four of us at the theatre. Two shows in the preview caught my eye: Valiant is a film about pigeons made by the guys who made Shrek, it looks rather funny; Corps Bride is an animated film by Tim Burton (Edward Scissorhand, Series of Unfortunate Events, Nightmare before Christmas) that looks grotesquely amusing.

The movie itself was a let down--if I hadn't read the negative reviews before hand. Having read the reviews, I find that it exceeded my expectations. It was not outrageously funny like the books were to me, nor was it sarcastically cynical, but it had its moments. The fact that I knew most the jokes already didn't detract me from enjoying its delivery. Alan Rickman did a superb job as Marvin, though the realisation of that character was certainly surprising... perhaps they took "Brain the size of a planet" a bit too literally. And I really, really wanted the diode down my left leg joke. The best part of the movie was the Vorgons. Their bureaucratic attitude is something that would have made DNA proud. Zaphod is strangely annoying compared to the book. Slartibartfast deserves a bigger part. Spoiler alert: highlight the text below to read them

I really hated the Hollywood ending. Earth gets restored? WTF? They really needed a sort of irreverent ending to it. Something like--Slarti: "Oops, you just killed our sponsors. No earth for you, since we won't get paid for this."--would be pretty good. And what's with the Trillian becoming a love interest? She was not just some hot chick Arthur dated fer crying out loud. She was a bloody astrophysicist. There's a reason she knows how to pilot the Heart of Gold better than anyone else. The whole "point of view gun" was not in the book. But I don't know if it were in the Radio Series. I will have to check that once I buy my copies. Incidentally, people suggested against buying the MP3 version, because they have some sort of artifacts from the encoding. I was told that the CD version is much better. Lastly, I do enjoy the part where Marvin goes: "Uh, guys, the restaurant is at the OTHER end of the universe..."

Over all it was enjoyable. The problem is that it might not be too accessible to people who haven't read the book. Coming out of the theatre I heard a girl say : "What's with that towel anyway? That's so dumb!" True, they didn't explain the wonderful uses of the towel. Nor did they explain the Sens-o-matic brand sun glasses that Ford and Zaphod wore (I was the only one in my group to recall that from Mostly Harmless). The Guide was done nicely though. I would say this was a better quality film than the old BBC movie, but I wouldn't say it was a better comedy.

comment by S @ 05/03 1:59AM EDT: you... saw it without me... waaaaaaaaa