Abomination

A NYT reviewer evinces a complete failure to grok the Hitchhiker’s trilogy:

Dent, it happens, has been saved from extinction by his alien buddy Ford Prefect (Mos Def), a smooth operator in a snow-white suit who fends off trouble with an ordinary bath towel and knows how to hitch rides on passing spaceships. Arthur and Ford initially land on such a ship, operated by the Vogons, an unpleasant race that constitute the bulk of the galaxy’s bureaucracy and come equipped with expansive girths and lumpy porcine faces with smushed-in snouts. Beautifully constructed by the Jim Henson Creature Shop with an attention to expressive detail that recalls the political caricatures of Honoré Daumier, the Vogons function as the villains in this tale, though it is a measure of Adams’s dry, gentle humor that the creatures’ most devastating weapon is their exceptionally bad poetry….

This narrative bagginess is partly what makes the film feel true to Adams, if not in precise letter then certainly in mellow spirit. One of the pleasures of this loopy adventure – along with its gloriously singing dolphins and knit puppets – is that what keeps the story in gear are the moments when its four space trekkers – and Marvin, the depressed robot mellifluously voiced by Alan Rickman – are chattering about all manner of cheery nonsense.

Gentle humor? Mellow spirit? Douglas Adams??!!?? Did I accidentally cross over into some bizarre alternate universe where Ann Coulter writes an etiquette column for Good Housekeeping and Bob Novak is known as the Prince of Niceness?

Yeah, I’ll mos definitely be bagging this movie.