Catwoman!
I have a special surprise for you.
A review of Catwoman!
Friends, I have not seen such great quantities of high-velocity shit since observing a cottonmouth stricken with sudden attack of diarrhea.
Okay. That's not true. I have not seen such high-velocity shit since I watched Timeline. But pain, mercifully, dulls memories.
This is, as near as I can determine, the first full directorial excursion for director Pitof. His bio on the IMDB states that "peers called him the nickname, Pitof, as a child, so it stuck with him." Much like the rancid smell of feline ass-musk that stuck with this movie. And, seriously, that awkwardly worded sentence is all he has in the way of a bio.
I'm going to assume that "pitof" is Elbonian for "mule-dicked humper of syphilitic swine," and let that explain the copious amounts of suppurating cinematic smegma that cheesed my screen for the duration of this film's shrill whine of pain.
I'm sorry. I get ahead of myself.
"It all started with an awful voiceover stolen from The Crow . . ."
Judging from her style of reading, Halle Berry could not convince us that there is sugar in Coke, no matter how slow they roll the TelePrompTer. And, as slack as the narration is, her performance is even more limp. Harried artist and office mensch Patience Phillips embodies everything I find annoying and rodential in parts written around the conceit of the timid woman. We are obviously meant to find her cringing cute and endearing, but that sort of damp-nosed, boggle-eyed quivering only makes me want to thump the boggler like a half-grown rat and fling it to one of my two blood-drinking bullsnakes.
The part of Patience is as spineless as a thawed rodent, but once she becomes Catwoman it becomes a grotesque parody. She sasses and swaggers, but cannot manage to convince us that she could scratch litter over her own pee. She's about as menacing as the aforementioned dead rodent, jiggled in a sick mockery of life in order to stimulate a feeding response from an audience that is never going to bite.
Before I go further, let me say two words about Halle Berry. I am aware that I may be in the presence of her fans, so I would like to say that before this movie I have never actively hated her. As an actress, I find her popularity a bit boggling, but she isn't actively annoying to me. She is very pretty, though I have yet to see any indication that she has that charisma so vital to a leading woman. As far as I am concerned, the high point of her career came in Swordfish, when an ill-tempered Hugh Jackman flung her out of his trailer like last night's ass-banged hooker. Her shrill squeak of protest never fails to amuse me.
Now, I understand Halle's performance in Monster's Ball was truly impressive, and I was glad to see her get the Oscar if only because Nicole Kidman was up for the same award due to that placental malformation that is Moulin Rouge. Watching a haggard, lizard-faced Nicole swallow back bile in order to grin with numb, politically-correct goodwill as Halle claimed the award for every black girl was a truly beautiful thing. (As an aside, I'd like to see Hollywood acknowledge truly ethnic-looking women as beautiful. How about a golden, phallic Academy party favor for Angela Bassett?)
Anyway, I don't hate Halle, but this movie was definitely the bellyflop at the end of a painful career plunge.
Catwoman was not improved by the addition of Benjamin Bratt as "hunky" cop Tom Lone. If there is any justice, he will be punished lengthily in Purgatory for his stupid portrayal of a stupid character. However, since he dated Julia Roberts for four or five years, we may count it as time served. At any rate, the addition of his strained, leathery face did not improve matters.
I cringe to say this, but the crop-haired and gravely handsome Sharon Stone was the high point of the movie. Her character was ridiculous but compared to the others her performance was positively nuanced. She was the only person who managed to exude even the slightest inkling of menace.
Part of this is the fault of the script. It leaped from cliché to cliché like a corner-pooping cat desperately fleeing a well-deserved beating. Halle Berry's character is surrounded by them, in fact.
Patience's zany co-workers include the Sex-Obsessed woman, who is economically merged with the Straight-Talking Fat Chick into one Horny Loudmouthed Fat Chick whole. The Tasteful and Good-Humored Homosexual puts in an appearance as a cubicle neighbor, though we thankfully don't see much of him. She also suffers the disdain of her Inexplicably Evil Boss and his Brooding And Perhaps Dangerous Ex-Model Wife.
Poor, jittery Patience dies as the victim of a the Dumbest Evil Plot Ever - a vast corporate conspiracy to market a deadly beauty cream. It is made of monkey come, you know, and it cannot be allowed in the hands of an unwitting public, who will become addicted to it or suffer withdrawal and/or death. Anyway, Patience gets flushed down the corporate toilet like an unwanted goldfish and summarily drowns.
The movie, unfortunately, did not end there.
After a lengthy and painful digital pan and zoom,* a filth-encrusted Patience is revived from death by an atrocious CG gato with breath that no doubt puts my own cat's to sorrowful shame. This is breath so bad it can apparently wake the dead. Dead they should have left her. Her revival only made me angry. I could only fervently hope that once she became Catwoman, things would improve.
Alas.
In the comics, Catwoman was just a woman in a sexy outfit. There was none of this mystical mumbo-jumbo bullshit. I can't help but feel that it brings the quality of the character down to inflict a half-baked mystical origin for her alter-ego upon her. But such are the liberties Hollywood takes with the sphincters of all who come within its grasp.
Watching Halle Berry rub her face against a catnip ball, hiss at dogs, and cringe unconvincingly from rain is less amusing than it sounds. In fact, the director would have done better to replace every scene in which Catwoman appears with footage of a yowling pinhead dressed in full Elizabethan costume walloping herself in the head with a frying pan while polka music plays in the background.
Once Patience embraces her cat heritage, as explained to her by Silver RavenWolf, who makes an appearance as the actual Crazy Cat Lady, she learns that cats can do all kinds of fun things. Crack whips, for example, and scamper up walls like Tokay geckos.** She also craves cream and tuna. One would think that, with skills like this, she would rent herself out as a dominatrix for the next available five-guy cream-pie video by Anabolic, but one would be wrong.***
Cats can shoot mean hoops, too. In a scene genuinely less interesting than the backdrop to a muted Jessica Simpson video, Patience plays basketball with cleverly-named love interest Tom, and together they prove that there are no likeable characters in the movie. As Sargon said, "this scene is only slightly less interesting than the teeter-totter fight in Daredevil . . . it's like watching retarded people flirt."
By which I assumed he meant pathetically sad, and not unintentionally hilarious. Because there was nothing funny about this scene.
It's sad that by the time Patience gives herself the worst haircut in cinema history and hops on a motorcycle while some really crappy faux-hip-hop music plays in the background, I was having fond flashbacks to Dark Angel. We all know what a paragon of character, screenwriting, and musical virtuosity THAT show was.
Note To Movie: when you are getting unfavorably compared to the series that gave us the Penis-shaped Spoogemonster from Season Two, you are on your ninth goddamn life.
While we're at it, why didn't they hire Jessica Alba? Or even Kim Smith, who was in this actual movie?
Halle's stripperrific outfit, complete with open-toed heels, computer-generated swagger, and awkward spurting of such catchphrases as "Let's Accessorize!" and "Meow!" make her seem less like a super-chick and more like a Bondage Den Barbie whose hair has been cruelly assaulted by the eight-year-old daughter of a beauty-college dropout. She is utterly unconvincing as anything other than annoying.
Her outfit alone is worthy of an entry in the "What the Bleeding Hamster Fuck" hall of fame (in Peoria, IL). It looks like it was assembled from secondhand descriptions of fetish outfits by sweatshop child labor. Children who have lost fingers to giant, carnivorous parrots. Parts of it are pretty cool, or would have been on someone with an identifiable figure, but the conehead mask/headpiece really was the sputtering candle on the cat-turd cake. I can only assume that its considerable bulk was there to cushion Halle Berry's falls during the blinding, feces-induced siezures that doubtless occurred during filming.
Most of the stunts are CG, which is fine, except that they are so incredibly crappy they make the contents of my cat box look like Godiva chocolate. The digital Catwoman looks so fake, she should be dating the werewolf from Van Helsing.
To make things worse, Halle makes what few real stunts she does attempt completely unconvincing. I understand she had to train 90 minutes a day for a week to learn to use a whip, and that she was body-doubled by a man. Proof that Catwoman, in this movie, is sadly unsexy and unintimidating.
We wince through scenes that include such stereotypical gems as Foiling the Inept Jewel Thieves and the obligatory Save My Baby scene. By the time she corners one of the baddies at a club (after wiping away a crappy digital milk mustache), a miner's canary placed in the room with the audience would be paralyzed by the gorgon-like emanations of not caring.
It is Kim Smith who provides this film's only redeeming moment. While on a date with the Inexplicably Evil Boss, she is subjected to a cross between the Cirque du Soleil and the Muppet Show. Unamused by these bubble- and taffeta-festooned antics, she utters her only two lines.
"I think this is a complete waste of time," followed by "What?"
Words that, all unwitting, sum up my feelings about this circus of fellatio with admirable brevity.
She then proceeds to walk offscreen and is not seen again, making her the wisest person involved in the production of this movie.
It was redeemed somewhat by the climactic fight scene, where Sharon Stone stabs Halle Berry in the ass with a huge shard of glass, and then beats the crap out of her with a lead pipe, provoking gales of howling laughter from myself and from Sargon.
This was not the worst movie I have ever seen. It wasn't even terrible enough to justify repeated viewings to mock it, which makes it rather a disappointment. I love very little more than a truly terrible bad movie.
What it is, is stupid in every way. There is no level on which this movie does not fail. Character, plot, dialogue, direction, costume, music . . . it's a festering stew of the ridiculous and inane, seasoned with a healthy dose of tripe.
This review is not cruel enough, really, since this movie does not deserve to be seen, even to be lampooned. So in order to clear the remaining stink of it from my nostrils I must now search for hot pictures of Ryan Phillippe and Oded Fehr, and then chase that with a healthy dose of the Batman cartoons.
If you're still tempted to watch this movie, even after all I have said, I insist you get Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman and watch the included Catwoman short, "Chase Me," instead. Your expectations will be far better rewarded, and you can use that extra time to clean the litterbox.
*****
* The first of many, all of which are incredibly painful to watch.
** Fun fact! Tokay geckoes are colloquially referred to as the "Fuck-You" lizard, for their distinctive bark.
*** If you don't know the kind of video I mean, you should pray you are not enlightened. Cream-pie does not refer to food of any kind.
link
A review of Catwoman!
Friends, I have not seen such great quantities of high-velocity shit since observing a cottonmouth stricken with sudden attack of diarrhea.
Okay. That's not true. I have not seen such high-velocity shit since I watched Timeline. But pain, mercifully, dulls memories.
This is, as near as I can determine, the first full directorial excursion for director Pitof. His bio on the IMDB states that "peers called him the nickname, Pitof, as a child, so it stuck with him." Much like the rancid smell of feline ass-musk that stuck with this movie. And, seriously, that awkwardly worded sentence is all he has in the way of a bio.
I'm going to assume that "pitof" is Elbonian for "mule-dicked humper of syphilitic swine," and let that explain the copious amounts of suppurating cinematic smegma that cheesed my screen for the duration of this film's shrill whine of pain.
I'm sorry. I get ahead of myself.
"It all started with an awful voiceover stolen from The Crow . . ."
Judging from her style of reading, Halle Berry could not convince us that there is sugar in Coke, no matter how slow they roll the TelePrompTer. And, as slack as the narration is, her performance is even more limp. Harried artist and office mensch Patience Phillips embodies everything I find annoying and rodential in parts written around the conceit of the timid woman. We are obviously meant to find her cringing cute and endearing, but that sort of damp-nosed, boggle-eyed quivering only makes me want to thump the boggler like a half-grown rat and fling it to one of my two blood-drinking bullsnakes.
The part of Patience is as spineless as a thawed rodent, but once she becomes Catwoman it becomes a grotesque parody. She sasses and swaggers, but cannot manage to convince us that she could scratch litter over her own pee. She's about as menacing as the aforementioned dead rodent, jiggled in a sick mockery of life in order to stimulate a feeding response from an audience that is never going to bite.
Before I go further, let me say two words about Halle Berry. I am aware that I may be in the presence of her fans, so I would like to say that before this movie I have never actively hated her. As an actress, I find her popularity a bit boggling, but she isn't actively annoying to me. She is very pretty, though I have yet to see any indication that she has that charisma so vital to a leading woman. As far as I am concerned, the high point of her career came in Swordfish, when an ill-tempered Hugh Jackman flung her out of his trailer like last night's ass-banged hooker. Her shrill squeak of protest never fails to amuse me.
Now, I understand Halle's performance in Monster's Ball was truly impressive, and I was glad to see her get the Oscar if only because Nicole Kidman was up for the same award due to that placental malformation that is Moulin Rouge. Watching a haggard, lizard-faced Nicole swallow back bile in order to grin with numb, politically-correct goodwill as Halle claimed the award for every black girl was a truly beautiful thing. (As an aside, I'd like to see Hollywood acknowledge truly ethnic-looking women as beautiful. How about a golden, phallic Academy party favor for Angela Bassett?)
Anyway, I don't hate Halle, but this movie was definitely the bellyflop at the end of a painful career plunge.
Catwoman was not improved by the addition of Benjamin Bratt as "hunky" cop Tom Lone. If there is any justice, he will be punished lengthily in Purgatory for his stupid portrayal of a stupid character. However, since he dated Julia Roberts for four or five years, we may count it as time served. At any rate, the addition of his strained, leathery face did not improve matters.
I cringe to say this, but the crop-haired and gravely handsome Sharon Stone was the high point of the movie. Her character was ridiculous but compared to the others her performance was positively nuanced. She was the only person who managed to exude even the slightest inkling of menace.
Part of this is the fault of the script. It leaped from cliché to cliché like a corner-pooping cat desperately fleeing a well-deserved beating. Halle Berry's character is surrounded by them, in fact.
Patience's zany co-workers include the Sex-Obsessed woman, who is economically merged with the Straight-Talking Fat Chick into one Horny Loudmouthed Fat Chick whole. The Tasteful and Good-Humored Homosexual puts in an appearance as a cubicle neighbor, though we thankfully don't see much of him. She also suffers the disdain of her Inexplicably Evil Boss and his Brooding And Perhaps Dangerous Ex-Model Wife.
Poor, jittery Patience dies as the victim of a the Dumbest Evil Plot Ever - a vast corporate conspiracy to market a deadly beauty cream. It is made of monkey come, you know, and it cannot be allowed in the hands of an unwitting public, who will become addicted to it or suffer withdrawal and/or death. Anyway, Patience gets flushed down the corporate toilet like an unwanted goldfish and summarily drowns.
The movie, unfortunately, did not end there.
After a lengthy and painful digital pan and zoom,* a filth-encrusted Patience is revived from death by an atrocious CG gato with breath that no doubt puts my own cat's to sorrowful shame. This is breath so bad it can apparently wake the dead. Dead they should have left her. Her revival only made me angry. I could only fervently hope that once she became Catwoman, things would improve.
Alas.
In the comics, Catwoman was just a woman in a sexy outfit. There was none of this mystical mumbo-jumbo bullshit. I can't help but feel that it brings the quality of the character down to inflict a half-baked mystical origin for her alter-ego upon her. But such are the liberties Hollywood takes with the sphincters of all who come within its grasp.
Watching Halle Berry rub her face against a catnip ball, hiss at dogs, and cringe unconvincingly from rain is less amusing than it sounds. In fact, the director would have done better to replace every scene in which Catwoman appears with footage of a yowling pinhead dressed in full Elizabethan costume walloping herself in the head with a frying pan while polka music plays in the background.
Once Patience embraces her cat heritage, as explained to her by Silver RavenWolf, who makes an appearance as the actual Crazy Cat Lady, she learns that cats can do all kinds of fun things. Crack whips, for example, and scamper up walls like Tokay geckos.** She also craves cream and tuna. One would think that, with skills like this, she would rent herself out as a dominatrix for the next available five-guy cream-pie video by Anabolic, but one would be wrong.***
Cats can shoot mean hoops, too. In a scene genuinely less interesting than the backdrop to a muted Jessica Simpson video, Patience plays basketball with cleverly-named love interest Tom, and together they prove that there are no likeable characters in the movie. As Sargon said, "this scene is only slightly less interesting than the teeter-totter fight in Daredevil . . . it's like watching retarded people flirt."
By which I assumed he meant pathetically sad, and not unintentionally hilarious. Because there was nothing funny about this scene.
It's sad that by the time Patience gives herself the worst haircut in cinema history and hops on a motorcycle while some really crappy faux-hip-hop music plays in the background, I was having fond flashbacks to Dark Angel. We all know what a paragon of character, screenwriting, and musical virtuosity THAT show was.
Note To Movie: when you are getting unfavorably compared to the series that gave us the Penis-shaped Spoogemonster from Season Two, you are on your ninth goddamn life.
While we're at it, why didn't they hire Jessica Alba? Or even Kim Smith, who was in this actual movie?
Halle's stripperrific outfit, complete with open-toed heels, computer-generated swagger, and awkward spurting of such catchphrases as "Let's Accessorize!" and "Meow!" make her seem less like a super-chick and more like a Bondage Den Barbie whose hair has been cruelly assaulted by the eight-year-old daughter of a beauty-college dropout. She is utterly unconvincing as anything other than annoying.
Her outfit alone is worthy of an entry in the "What the Bleeding Hamster Fuck" hall of fame (in Peoria, IL). It looks like it was assembled from secondhand descriptions of fetish outfits by sweatshop child labor. Children who have lost fingers to giant, carnivorous parrots. Parts of it are pretty cool, or would have been on someone with an identifiable figure, but the conehead mask/headpiece really was the sputtering candle on the cat-turd cake. I can only assume that its considerable bulk was there to cushion Halle Berry's falls during the blinding, feces-induced siezures that doubtless occurred during filming.
Most of the stunts are CG, which is fine, except that they are so incredibly crappy they make the contents of my cat box look like Godiva chocolate. The digital Catwoman looks so fake, she should be dating the werewolf from Van Helsing.
To make things worse, Halle makes what few real stunts she does attempt completely unconvincing. I understand she had to train 90 minutes a day for a week to learn to use a whip, and that she was body-doubled by a man. Proof that Catwoman, in this movie, is sadly unsexy and unintimidating.
We wince through scenes that include such stereotypical gems as Foiling the Inept Jewel Thieves and the obligatory Save My Baby scene. By the time she corners one of the baddies at a club (after wiping away a crappy digital milk mustache), a miner's canary placed in the room with the audience would be paralyzed by the gorgon-like emanations of not caring.
It is Kim Smith who provides this film's only redeeming moment. While on a date with the Inexplicably Evil Boss, she is subjected to a cross between the Cirque du Soleil and the Muppet Show. Unamused by these bubble- and taffeta-festooned antics, she utters her only two lines.
"I think this is a complete waste of time," followed by "What?"
Words that, all unwitting, sum up my feelings about this circus of fellatio with admirable brevity.
She then proceeds to walk offscreen and is not seen again, making her the wisest person involved in the production of this movie.
It was redeemed somewhat by the climactic fight scene, where Sharon Stone stabs Halle Berry in the ass with a huge shard of glass, and then beats the crap out of her with a lead pipe, provoking gales of howling laughter from myself and from Sargon.
This was not the worst movie I have ever seen. It wasn't even terrible enough to justify repeated viewings to mock it, which makes it rather a disappointment. I love very little more than a truly terrible bad movie.
What it is, is stupid in every way. There is no level on which this movie does not fail. Character, plot, dialogue, direction, costume, music . . . it's a festering stew of the ridiculous and inane, seasoned with a healthy dose of tripe.
This review is not cruel enough, really, since this movie does not deserve to be seen, even to be lampooned. So in order to clear the remaining stink of it from my nostrils I must now search for hot pictures of Ryan Phillippe and Oded Fehr, and then chase that with a healthy dose of the Batman cartoons.
If you're still tempted to watch this movie, even after all I have said, I insist you get Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman and watch the included Catwoman short, "Chase Me," instead. Your expectations will be far better rewarded, and you can use that extra time to clean the litterbox.
*****
* The first of many, all of which are incredibly painful to watch.
** Fun fact! Tokay geckoes are colloquially referred to as the "Fuck-You" lizard, for their distinctive bark.
*** If you don't know the kind of video I mean, you should pray you are not enlightened. Cream-pie does not refer to food of any kind.
link