blogwaffe

We arrived at the Paseo at six thirty: precisely the time we were told by our invitation would be the appropriate one. We found ahead of us some several hundred people. People who had cheated. They had read the invitation as well, surely; yet there they were. All queued up and looking behind them (at us) with smug little grins and knowledge that they, certainly, would get in, but we… well it would be best not to harp on it.

But that was all right. We tried to tell ourselves we were having a fine time chatting amongst ourselves (Paul.za, Mom.za, Greg, Heidi, BJ and Adam), and that we might even get free passes to see something else if we were refused entrance. Plus, many more people lined up behind us, so we got to assume smug little grins of our own.

I am, of course, referring to our chance to see a screening of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And we were, of course, wrong; we did not get free passes to see something else when we were refused entrance.

We were granted entrance.

Aside from a few in college, I’ve been to one movie screening before. It’s sort of an interesting process involving three tickets, two (or more) security screenings, at least one questionnaire, several warnings about the legality of recording any part of the screening, and a free popcorn and drink.

I’m sure by agreeing to screen the movie, I had accepted conditions which included, but were not necessarily limited to, not revealing to the public anything about the movie’s plot, not reproducing any dialogue, narrative or imagery from the movie, not describing in any detail how the movie differed from the various, previously published tellings of the story, and, under no circumstances revealing any surprise bits such as the removal of one head and some (undisclosed) number of his arms (two).

I’m sure I can mention, however, that Alan Rickman was truly the perfect choice to voice Marvin, the paranoid android, the interesting coincidence that the two actors playing Marvin (the above mentioned Rickman and Warwick Davis) both play professors in the celebrated Harry Potter film series, that the film is neither Mos Def’s nor John Malkovich’s best performance, and that Zooey Deschanel has a standing invitation to come over and subsequently leave after finding out I’m not really as interesting as I sound.

Overall, the movie was “pretty good” even though it left out some of my favorite quotes (as surely it had to), and made references to things that it never fully explained (peanuts, for example). “Would [I] recommend it to a friend?” Sure, it’s just zis movie, ya know?