Ed Parnell
Tuesday 3rd July 2007 3:36am
LONDON
360 posts
Quote: Ydna @ June 30, 2007, 9:28 PM
Does nobody remember the classics???
Red Dwarf was great!
They said there would be a movie yet nothing has come from that rumor!
Anyone up for a thread pertition?
I own every Series!
Andy
Dwarf was great up until they brought back the crew - possibly when they had that woman join. I thought the whole premise of the thing, men without women, was excellent, simply because it was kind of like a sci-fi Porridge.
Once they tried to expand the cast and mess with the idea they left on a mission up their own arse.
Quote: SlagA @ July 2, 2007, 10:56 PM
I'll admit DNA had an amazing knack for one-liners, he wrote some of the best I've ever read but oddly some of the worst too. Some cringe-worthy ones, but I guess if you write so many then some will miss. The film was hideous. Not something to woo a newbie to DNA material.
I'm a stickler for watching films all the way through even if I realise they are fly-blown carcasses. Only two films I've ever turned off, fight club because I couldn't see the point of the Tyler Durdan character (i found him loathsome and too evil) although I was persuaded to rewatch it and since rate it as brilliant, mainly because I reached the moment at which the Durdan character is unravelled.
The other was HHGTTG. Not even Freeman could save it. It was high gloss special effect shite of the highest calibre. After a fantastic start, the plot was feeble beyond belief. When the whale appeared in the atmosphere, I thought that DNA was getting lazy and just throwing in as surreal an image as he could just for comic effect. Surreal really has to serve a purpose or else you can just throw in "and a penguin skated across the skin of his cooling tomato soup" or any other random sentence to generate a 'laugh'. Surreal needs to make you think. It's paradoxically not the juxtoposition of random items but the clever juxtoposition of well-thought out objects.
DNA's genius was in the one-liner, the surreal was added (i suspect) to make it appeal to the 'students' which is where i was inducted into the books.
As to RD film, please God no. I loved the show but it's past. If the movie came out then they'd certainly reprise the Kachansky part and give it to that hideously feeble actress who made such a good job of euthanising the series and hiding its body under the floorboards.
Better to imagine what might have been than rue the fact that they left us with a sour taste.
If you rea Hitchhiker you realise what a last chance saloon Douglas was in. he was either going to make this work of go and be a body guard in Hong Kong. He was a mysterious man, genius and clown, really. I never met him, but he died on my Birthday which was a downer.
When I was a kid I got a radio for my ninth birthday and I remember tuning into something - I didn't know what it was - and wanting more. It was Hitchikers. Since then I was hooked. This was something that was funny, well executed and possibly the only sci-fi comedy to work in all the genres (apart from the Martin Freeman film) it was put into. I still have the first editions of the book, which I carried around school for years.
Anyone wanting to write sci-fi comedy should read it because it covers so much ground, yet leaves so much for the reader to delight in working out for themselves. Some of the best comedy does this; it draws you in so you work otu the joke rather than some of the more tag/punchline shows of latter years