Mr. Pinup

Usually, Hollywood is a tad standoffish about tackling the great novels. If they do it right, they win the admiration of critics, but risk losing the mainstream audience, who will think of their project as snooty and highbrow. If they do it wrong, people still won’t go see the movie, plus the critics will turn the whole thing into a laughingstock. Producers are generally willing to let someone take a crack at one of the classics once and only once, and then only if they’re an established filmmaker and there’s nothing too controversial about the book. How, then, did not one but two movie versions get made of one of the most inflammatory, misunderstood and potentially dangerous books of the 21st century — a book that not only quite openly asks us to identify, to a certain degree, with an effete intellectual pederast, but which was written by one of the pioneers of postmodernism? Some might suggest that certain producers and/or directors simply jump at the chance to cast a movie starring a hot nymphet, but we are not so cynical here at the Screengrab, oh goodness no. We will not speculate how it came to pass that two high-profile film adaptations of Vladimir Nabokov‘s brilliant, subtle, subversive and daring story came to pass — one of them, by a titan of the silver screen, made less than a decade after the novel’s publication and the other, by a flaky British director whose movies have always been a heartbeat away from softcore porn — and instead focus on the respective qualities of the two films.

via No, But I’ve Read the Movie: LOLITA – The Screengrab.

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