Friday's Footnote

Striptease, It's Better than the Scarlet Letter

The third weekend in July, 2009. It will never again happen. Know what we’re saying? Make it last, make it memorable, make it worth your while. Here’s what we have planned for Saturday: Ferry to downtown Seattle, walk to Capitol Hill, browse, cross to Queen Anne, browse, hurry to Pioneer Square, browse. Then it’s up to Belltown, where we will drink beer, then to Fremont, where we will drink beer, and finally back to Vashon Island by ferry and bus, in which we will review in our spinning head all the things we’ve learned, all the things we’ve done. You see? Big time weekend fun! Sunday in our recovery we will read. We like books. We like movies, too. But we like books more. Sometimes books become movies. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not. Here’s a list of movies made from books that you should not, under any circumstances, watch. Unless you are hungover on Sunday and have a masochistic bone to pick. In which case, enjoy! – Kevin Murphy

The Scarlet Letter

Striptease is generally considered the movie that short-circuited Demi Moore’s career, but as an act of commercial and aesthetic miscalculation, it has nothing on this misbegotten adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic story of guilt, sin, and betrayal in colonial New England. Casting Moore as a stripper in a light comic caper based on a Carl Hiaasen book makes a certain amount of sense, and its obvious appeals could potentially boost it past the bad press; casting a dubiously accented Moore as Hester Prynne in a “free adaptation” of Hawthorne’s book, however, is a recipe for disaster, because a prestige costume drama like this one needs the support of critics who aren’t keen on Hollywood-style revisionism. Still, no one could have imagined how poorly The Scarlet Letter would turn out. “Freely adapted” apparently means adding a softcore coupling between Prynne and Gary Oldman’s Rev. Dimmesdale that wouldn’t be out of place on Cinemax After Dark. There’s also some politically correct business involving Prynne’s long-lost husband going native with the local Algonquin tribe, a voyeuristic interlude featuring a horny slave girl and Prynne furtively pleasuring herself in a bath, and a widely reviled “happy ending” for a book that pointedly lacks one.

All the King’s Men

When this version of Robert Penn Warren’s powerful staple about abuse within the American political system was first conceived, it seemed like the stencil-work on its Oscars could safely be done in advance. Warren’s thinly veiled take on Huey Long, the charismatic Louisiana populist whose gubernatorial reign was tainted by demagoguery and corruption, has obvious resonances in today’s political climate. Add to that a sterling pedigree, including writer-director Steven Zaillian, who won an Oscar for adapting Schindler’s List, and a murderer’s row of thespians (Sean Penn, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Mark Ruffalo, James Gandolfini, and Patricia Clarkson, among others), and the project seemed like it was in good hands. (And if anyone needed a road map, they could always turn to Robert Rossen’s superb 1949 film version with Broderick Crawford.) Yet it would be hard to imagine a more leaden adaptation; the film just sits there like a dead fish that did most of its flapping in pre-production. The cast struggles haplessly with their Louisiana accents (a never-worse Penn and Gandolfini being the most egregious), every scene drags on several beats too long, and James Horner’s brutal percussion score (bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum… clang!) makes for an oppressive exclamation point.

Tropic of Cancer (1970)

According to his autobiography (which, incidentally, everyone on Earth should read) Robert Evans ended up green-lighting 1970′s Tropic Of Cancer as part of a bet with good buddy Henry Miller. Yet even in the freewheeling Hollywood of the late ’60s and early ’70s, the resulting film was self-indulgent and rambling even by the era’s exceedingly lenient standards, and its X rating sure didn’t do much for its box-office. It could be much worse: Claude Chabrol’s Quiet Days In Clichy cast Andrew McCarthy, of all people, as Henry Miller (a big step down from Cancer’s ever-dependable Rip Torn), though the casting makes a little more sense in light of the film’s subplot about Miller falling in love with a beautiful mannequin come to life.