The Booklover's Guide to the Movies

In my limited experience of books being made into movies, there is only one movie which can be said to be as good as (or doing justice to) the original book. And that movie is the Godfather. It is my theory that it is impossible to make a movie which is better than the book from which it is adapted. Even so, I found, surprisingly, that people who have not read the original books sometimes enjoy the movies better. A good example is the LotR and HP movies. I for one don't really enjoy the HP movies much but a few friends of mine who haven't read the books love it. The reason for me pondering this is that I experienced the same feeling today. The movie in question as anyone who has read the title of this post can tell, is the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I really liked it very much. It captures with perfection, the zany sometimes crazy feel of the books. The dialogues and screenplay are great and keep you (well me atleast) riveted. However, I must caution you that to enjoy this movie you must have some idea of the books. If you haven't even heard of the HGttG, you are going to have a hard time making sense of what's going on the screen (as I felt my companion had). Ideally you should be like me. I have read only the first two books of the trilogy. So I had just enough background for the movie to make sense and just enough ignorance for it to be new and interesting to me. In any case, my advice is go and take a look. It's a very well made, well paced and well edited piece of celluloid.