The Last Movie You Watched

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project is Catwoman. I've had two films in a row be the worst film I've ever seen. Well, I think I owed it to myself to see something that I knew had at least a few redeeming qualities. Those redeeming qualities? In Roger Ebert's words, ""There are three good things in Catwoman: Halle Berry's face, Halle Berry's body, and Halle Berry's costume. Those are first-rate." Well, he's wrong about the last one, but at least the first two are more than I got with The Babe Ruth Story or One Missed Call.

Well, there's two major, deep-seated, problems with this film: the first is Catwoman herself. She's given a radically different identity; instead of being Selina Kyle, she's Patience Phillips. And she's got actual cat-related superpowers in this film (Hell, in one scene, she rubs her face in catnip), and damn near the only thing taken from previous media is that she managed to get revived by magical cats like is implied to be the case in Batman Returns, but even in that case, you could argue that it's not exactly what it looks like. In this case, there's no ambiguity.



Seriously, comics fans (who would seem to be the major demographic for this movie, especially in 2004) will almost certainly be pissed off at how badly you dropped the ball and threw out everything that had been written about her in the past 64 years.

The other major problem is their decision to compensate for alienating comics fans by marketing it towards women. Now, this is not a problem in and of itself; it can certainly be a good gateway for an entire demographic to get into comics. However, they dropped the ball so fucking bad. They push for a girl power agenda (foreshadowed early on, particularly after her boss' wife compliments her work after her boss dismisses it). But they ruin it by changing the costume around to cater to the male gaze. I mean, sure, the traditional catsuit does that already, but at least that left something to the imagination. And Tim Burton wasn't constantly showing us shots of Michelle Pfeiffer's tits and ass. See this scene:



Meanwhile, this is what Halle Berry is given: 

That shit has to be really impractical to fight in, and it barely counts as a catsuit, even if Lois Griffin says it is. Also, as a foot fetishist speaking ex cathedra, open toed boots are pointless (Well, at least we get a few decent shots of Halle's Berry's feet in this film.) And, back to the film, what's the big adversary Catwoman is fighting in this film? An evil cosmetics company. Yeah, that's a major letdown for anyone who's actually seen a superhero film before. I don't care if The Joker did that in the original Batman film; that was just one part in a larger plot with many different aims. And even the Smylex was actually pretty ingenious in its execution, since it involved several different parts that needed to be done in a specific order (which could potentially lead to some plausible deniability if anyone gets caught), and at least The Joker's endgame made sense: kill people and leave a big, creepy, smile on their faces. Why the fuck does the company in this film want to go through with selling a makeup like Beau-line, which will lead to people's faces disintegrating? What is the endgame here? And for bonus shallow feminism points: apparently, Catwomen have been around for millennia, but Patience's mentor hasn't had any success in promoting her idea, and it's all because of "male academia" (and given the boon in gender studies since the 1970s, that excuse can only go so far) and not because the idea is fucking insane. Also, if you like mediocre mid-2000s chick flicks, see how many tropes from them show up. Not all of them, of course, (I can't find a scene where she's complaining about her weight, and with all the proverbial ink I've spilled about that costume, there's no fashion montage scene), but there will be a lot of them. Overall, not anywhere near as bad as the Feminism Fail in The Emoji Movie, but it may be hard to drop the ball that bad. Thank Jah Wonder Woman proved you could pull it off.

Other miscellaneous crap I've noticed.

• They lay the cat motif onto the film way too damn thick. It includes a scene of Patience rubbing a ball of catnip in her face and it just gets worse from there.
  
• The obvious CGI, especially in the resurrection scene, is obvious.
  
• The writing is crap, as you might have guessed. But the first line, the opening monologue, really lets you know right off the bat what kind of shit you're in for:
  

  It all started on the day that I died. If there had been an obituary, it would have described the unremarkable life of an unremarkable woman, survived by no one. But there was no obituary, because the day that I died was also the day I started to live. But that comes later. This was my life

• A white Russian, hold the vodka, hold the Kahlua. I seriously always wanted to know if that worked in a real bar.
  
• Also, the whole subplot with the handwriting analysis makes no sense. Unless Patience was supposed to be a barista, since they're the ones who usually write on coffee cups.
  
• In the initial ledge scene, something strange I noticed: when she's hanging on the AC unit, she's barefoot, and she stays that way once she comes into the apartment. 30 seconds later, she's running out her apartment wearing shoes despite not having any opportunity to put shoes on.
  

And you know what, on that note, I'm going to leave you with a little present: a good parts version of Catwoman, although I may have cut the phone conversation down and added the catnip scene. Cause that shit's funny. Fucking three video limit.




That's it for now. I'm 69 minutes into the film (HAR DEE HAR), and dinner's just about ready. There may be more stupid shit in the last 35 minutes that bears mentioning, like there was with Hillary's America. Or there may not be.