IT'S nice to see women headlining big studio releases, and this week Michelle Pfeiffer (Dangerous Minds ), Demi Moore (The Scarlet Letter) and Holly Hunter and Sigourney Weaver (Copycat) swing into action, with varying degrees of success.
The Scarlet Letter is easily the most painful to behold, with director Roland Joffe murdering Nathaniel Hawthorne's 150-year-old classic novel.
Moore and Gary Oldman play the star-crossed 17th century lovers Hester Prynne and the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale. Prynne arrives in the tiny village of Boston ahead of her physician husband Roger (Robert Duvall) to set up house in this rigid Puritan colony, and between her heaving bosoms and outspoken notions, soon falls foul of the community's elders; all except Dimmesdale. When her husband is presumed dead at sea, Hester and Arthur indulge in a lengthy, artfully-shot bonking sequence after which she becomes pregnant.
Prynne takes the rap, spends months in jail and is forced to do her shopping with a scarlet 'A' - for adultress - pinned to her magnificent chest. Dimmesdale, meanwhile, stews in existential torture.
Dangerous Minds, meanwhile, has met with critical indifference but it's not hard to work out why teenagers are attracted to this update of To Sir With Love. It's got a cracking soundtrack, makes huge stabs at being relevant to the 90s.
Pfeiffer plays Louanne Johnson, a former marine trying to earn credentials as an English teacher who gets landed with a class of 'rejects from hell'. Based on a real-life story, it pits the feisty Pfeiffer against a wall of seemingly impenetrable students bussed in from the projects.
