dna's h2g2 flick nearly here!

I heard about this through the strangest of ways - a competition ad on Kiwi FM. h2g2 is finally to be a film, and they have a blog.

See it's when something like this happens that I feel maybe I should reconsider h2g2.com, which finally pissed me off past the point of return due to the massive influx of Americans (particularly ones who hadn't heard of the books) and the switch to SSI which made it impossible to just dip in every few months. I would never have missed this astounding news if I'd still been hanging around. DNA tried for years and years to get the books on the big screen and not long before his death it looked like he was finally getting somewhere - this production has directly evolved from his project, which allays some of my fears about adapting the books when he isn't around to keep it faithful (or at least in tune), as does the involvement of Robbie Stamp as Executive Producer.

In other exciting news about the film, Martin Freeman (Tim from the Office) is to play Arthur Dent, and the fantastic Sam Rockwell will be Zaphod. Marvin looks perfect and will hopefully add some strength to my ongoing campaign to spread the "Marvin work" meme even further. The casting I am really doing cartwheels over though is Alan Rickman as Marvin's voice. I can hear him already - "brain the size of a planet and I'm..."

Release date for the UK has apparently been brought forward (when does that ever happen?) to 28 April, which will be the world premiere. We plebs over here in Kiwiland can expect to get the film 28 April (NZ Time) according to the Village site but clearly that must be wrong. Otherwise Kiwi FM's competition to make a couple of lucky listeners the first in the world to see it seems a bit bizarre. However the h2g2 unofficial site below backs this date up. Hmmmm.

Either way I am much more excited about this than the new Star Wars film. Guess I'm just a hoopy frood who knows where my towel is.

More news:
- h2g2.com's page on the film - bound to have good goss, as h2g2.com has had a longstanding association with Robbie Stamp and others involved in the flick
- IMDB listing - bit bare on info really, but good for cast list
- official h2g2 movie site - a bit of a bloody pain to those of us still in DialUp Hell (which is not an encouragement to order pizza, apparently)
- unofficial h2g2 movie site - much friendlier on the bandwidth, plus lots of links to other DNA related sites setup by fellow ZZ9ers

PS Mr The Red - did you know about this??? explanations are in order post haste!