by Matt Barr

Hitchhiker's Guide

Saw Hitchhiker's Guide last night, but I can't tell you how good it was. Not just because I learned long ago I can't review movies, TV shows, CDs or anything, but because I had too much invested in it. I read the books when I was beginning my teen years, and they supplanted the Wrinkle In Time series as my favorite books.

If you collected X-Men comics when you were young, like I did, to the point where the numbers 94 and 137 mean something to you, you remember that when you saw the X-Men movies you couldn't really get a sense of how good or bad they were because they were, in their way, so faithful to what you were familiar with. Same with Hitchhiker's Guide. There's some new stuff, but they bent over backwards not to stray too far from the book. The sheer delight of watching something so "yours" from your youth come alive in a theater, right down to the bowl of petunias thinking "oh, no, not again" as it falls to the surface of Magrathea, is thrilling.

Put it this way. If you're my age, you remember how you felt when the score began and the words STAR WARS appeared on the screen at the beginning of Episode I. (That it was all downhill from there is immaterial.) Same deal.

So, here's the best review you're going to get from me: It was really good. Some parts that were probably funny even if you didn't read the books. Zooey Deschanel was appealing in a nondescript way in Elf, but pulls off playing Trillian as a hottie in this movie. Clever special effects. Six year olds dig the singing dolphins at the beginning.

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