The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Director: Garth Jennings
Year Released: 2005
Rating: 1.5

So-clever-it-hurts big-screen adaptation of the sci-fi book/political critique by Douglas Adams - it works better on the page than on the screen, and coincidentally, the parts on the screen that turn out to be the best are when the voiceover bits from Adams' text are used to describe the cute Macromedia Flash-type animations. The characters are less important than the concepts - Arthur Dent is a bland cipher to take you through the intergalactic weirdness - and Adams' extremely dry humor suffers when actually 'acted out.' Trying to film this particular author is like trying to film one of his peers, Kurt Vonnegut, and both authors' droll sensibility resists cinematic interpretation.