"Bitch, Be Cool!"

I quote Sam Jackson's line from Pulp Fiction because 1) Pulp Fiction was one of the last good movies that John Travolta has been in, and 2) it contains the title of Travolta's new movie, which I recently saw. But, before I express my opinion on the film (and it will all come together; trust me), let me discuss the slippery slope that has become adapting Elmore Leonard's work to the screen.

Next to Stephen King, Elmore Leornard is probably the most adapted author in the world. (And why wouldn't he be; man is nearly 80 and still turns out a book a year.) The problem with Leonard adaptations used to be that no one understood Leonard's writing. You watch movies adapted from Leonard, like 52 Pick-Up or Stick, and you see a grimy movie with scummy characters that do mean and violent things. And that's exactly how Leonard writes them: He's a hardboiled crime-noir writer. But what's in the books that the movies are missing is Leonard's tongue-in-cheek attitude. He knows no one acts or talks like that in real life, and that's part of his brilliance (other than his gift for dialogue). He's writing the same stories that Jim Thompson wrote in the 50s, but he knows it's all bullshit. He's writing all this hardboiled pulp fiction, and laughing the whole time. And that's the thing that Hollywood screenwriters never seemed to understand about Leonard.

And then came Get Shorty.

For some reason, someone in Hollywood actually sat down and read Leonard's book. Not just the words, but actually read the subtext: that it's all a big joke. "Hey, wait a minute, this shit is actually funny!" And so, Get Shorty comes to the screen and completely slam dunks Leonard's style. Everyone suddenly takes notice that Leonard's work actually has some humor in it, and begins to adapt it with that in mind. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, some confusion ensues. Adaptors begin to think that Leonard's work is to crime fiction as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is to sci-fi: It's actually a comedy. It gets so bad that Dave Barry writes Big Trouble, a Leonard-esque crime novel without the crime (or the jokes, for that matter), and it, in turn, gets adapted into a movie. For some reason, this now seems to be the Rosetta Stone for interpreting Leonard's work. Which brings us back to Be Cool.

Whereas Get Shorty was a perfect balance between seriousness and comedy, its sequel, Be Cool, is allll about the jokes. There are characters in this movie that exist solely to be funny. (These characters are also in the book, but they don't come off as Laurel-and-Hardyish in the book.) Vince Vaughn, playing a "wigger" music manager, is allowed to just do whatever the fuck he wants for hours at a time. The Rock, playing a gay bodyguard, is made to do some incredibly embarrassing things. There are others, but I'll kill myself listing them off. It's kinda hard to come of as hardboiled when you're trying to win a Razzie.

And then there's the screenplay, which has made an incredibly wrongheaded change in Leonard's story. In Leonard's Be Cool, the main female character is Linda Moon, Christina Milian's character in the movie. Uma Thurman's character, Edie Athens, simply serves as a way for Chili to get into the music business. In the movie Be Cool, the roles are reversed, with Edie as the main female and Linda as Chili's reason for getting into the music biz. Works movie-wise, because Uma is a bigger star than Christina, but it kills the story. The book is about Linda Moon. Linda is the reason Chili wants to get in the biz, and he uses Edie, who owns a record label, to accomplish this. Linda could essentially be written out of the movie with no effect on the story. She's onscreen for about 10 minutes; needless to say, she's not really the focus of the story. But then, neither is Edie or Chili. That honor goes to Raji, Vince Vaughn's character, who, at one point in the movie, I believe, actually began to eat the scenery. Yes, it really is that bad.

After all that slamming I've laid upon the movie, I will say there are some funny bits in the movie. (One of the best is an in-joke that involves how many times you can say "fuck" in a PG-13 movie.) If you're going in blind, you might enjoy it, but I doubt it, because it's really just a terrible movie. If you're a Leonard fan and have read the book, you'll hate it, because, once again, Hollywood wanted to make another Get Shorty, and made another Big Trouble instead.