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Fairytales for a Practical Princess - 2008-11-30
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10:07 a.m. - 2005-04-29
‘Don’t panic’??? Heck, I’m barely paying attention. So yeah, Douglas Adams’ overrated mess comes to the big screen. Like LoTR, I’ve tried The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy at least a dozen times over the last 25 years. In different moods and states of sobriety. In wildly different life stages. Doesn’t matter. Just like Tolkien’s bloated ‘masterpiece’, Hitchhiker leaves me cold. I mean, I ‘get it’. I just don’t think the getting is worth all the hoopla. Like that other venerated hipster hack Tom Robbins, Adams’ work is threaded with a self-congratulatory preciousness that is too aggravating. “Ooooo! I’m soooo clever!” Tee Hee! Meh. And the cult of worshippers is just as aggravating. “Adams is soooo clever! And we are clever too!” Tee Hee! Blech. This isn’t sour grapes. The bitter grumbling of one who is too un-hip to see the humor and thus feels uncool. The day my cool depends on signing up with breathy twits who wouldn’t know irony if it hit them with a shovel is the day I turn in my black turtleneck and don a polyester gingham shirtwaist. I often find myself at odds with the literary cool kids. Take A Catcher in the Rye. Please. Take it away. I will grant it chops for talking about stuff that just was NOT discussed back in the day. Points for breaking barriers ala Fear of Flying. But have you REALLY read this thing? Awful! Misogynistic evil! Any woman who lists Catcher as one her favorites should be flogged. A woman who looooves Holden Caulfield is a woman who probably loves the movies You’ve Got Mail and What Women Want too. In both cases those movies are about a guy who has secret inside information about a woman and uses it to destroy both her career and her heart. And whee! She luvs him for it! Please, abuse my trust! Steal my thoughts! Wreck my ambitions! Get me fired! Drive my business into the ground! In the end I’ll go to work for you and suck your dick in the bargain! Ain’t love grand? Yuck. Seriously. Yuck. You want to read a British guy who’s so full of himself that his deliberate humor isn’t anywhere near as entertaining as the inadvertent humor of his monstrous ego? Go read Pepys’ Diary. You want unbridled silliness larded with sly social commentary? Read Christopher Moore. And Terry Pratchet. Weighty tomes filled with fey history and a bunch of folks with unpronounceable Middle English names? Try Marion Zimmer Bradley. Dialog so sharp your eyes will bleed and you won’t care because you’re laughing too hard? Elmore Leonard. How about porn that pretends it doesn’t know it’s porn and poses as literature? Any of Anne Rice’s Anne Rampling stuff. Or how about porn that knows it’s porn, but is literary anyhow? The Story of O. I know, what you want is stuff about suburban despair, mockery of iconic ideals, the nasty underbelly of family life and its awful non-Norman Rockwell truth. A brutal slice-n-dice of all things glorified in the media. A radical departure from the mainstream and its mythy Formica glossiness. True zeitgeist about Everyman and Everywoman. Well, there’s only one place you’re gonna find that, kids. The ultimate ironist…Erma Bombeck. . So long Douglas Adams. Keep your fricken fish and thanks for nothing. ~LA
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