This may or may not come as a shock, but very rarely do I ever plan on watching a movie for the sole purpose of doing a review. Nine times out of ten, I either watch a film that I think will be interesting, and then find it so much so that I feel the need to review it, or I look back on films that I've already seen for inspiration in order to find fodder for the microscope. This constitutes one of the rare times in over two years that I set out to watch a movie with the express purpose of reviewing it afterward. It's also the end of our Mr. Rogers inspired experiment that we embarked upon at the beginning of the month. I'm not sure what else I can say in regards to that, but I'll come up with some generic, but inspiring words of wisdom to play us out.
Catwoman falls into a rather narrow personal category of films that I like to call, "Movies that came out while I was serving my church mission". It's a category of films that encompasses a two year period wherein I just didn't watch movies and instead focused my time and efforts on more spiritual pursuits. There are a lot of films that fit in this box that I've since gone back and watched. To name a few, The Two Towers, Return of the King, Star Trek Nemesis, Chamber of Secrets, Prisoner of Azkaban, and the list probably goes on, but you get the idea. If a film seemed like it would be worth catching myself up on, then I went back and watched it. Catwoman did not. In fact, all I ever hear about it is how awful it was. Let's see if I was able to find anything to redeem this movie.
The plot of Catwoman is pretty straightforward. Patience Philips is an aspiring artist with dreams who is stuck working for the Man. She's got a mundane and soul crushing job designing ads for a cosmetics corporation. Her boss's wife, Laurel has been playing guinea pig for an experimental line called Beau-Line that apparently will wreck the faces of people who stop using it after prolonged usage. Patience gets in trouble for messing up the latest ad campaign, and given a last chance to fix things, shows up late to the company's secondary location only to witness Laurel and a lead scientist on the Beau-Line project talking about the harsh side effects of the product. Patience gives her presence away and Laurel has her killed. It's okay though because an Egyptian mau breathes new life into the recently deceased Philips, and Patience is reborn as Catwoman. After her rebirth, Philips spends the rest of the film learning about her new found abilities, and plumbing the depths of what it means to be a Catwoman. Yes, a Catwoman because in this version of Catwoman lore, Catwoman is a title passed down through the ages that started in ancient Egypt.
Patience mistakenly thinks that her boss, George, had her killed, and as Catwoman, she spends a lot of time during the movie trying to prove his complicity in her death, and expose the harmful effects of Beau-Line. Patience also has to juggle the life that she had before her transformation, which means carrying on a relationship with law enforcement officer Tom. Also, she has a lust for shiny things, which gets her into some trouble. Laurel realizes the threat that Catwoman poses to the empire that her husband built, and frames Catwoman for the murder of that lead scientist, and eventually George. Patience gets locked up when Tom finally sleuths his way to the truth, and Patience has to break out of jail for a final showdown with Laurel. Tom attempts to do the cop thing and gets shot in the shoulder, but he and Catwoman take out the thugs, and Catwoman defeats Laurel, clearing Patience's name, and bringing an end to the plan to slowly poison people.
Don't you love when the synopsis can be short? Yeah, me too. It's not that there wasn't more that happened, it's just that most of the other stuff is pretty unnecessary to the plot. I noticed a lot of things in this film were kind of... Off... Remember that category we were just talking about? There's another category that I created for myself called, "Late 90s, early 00s movies that exude awkward, but distinct style". It's not very hard to identify, even if it is a little harder to define. There are films like Die Another Day, The Hulk, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, and others that tap into this style, and I just associate with that particular era of film when we were trying to move past the extreme culture of the 90s and define what we were going to be at the start of a totally new millennium. You might call it cultural adolescence, and it was just as awkward as actual puberty, just more publicly accessible. Catwoman seethes with this style. And really, I have to applaud everyone involved in the project for taking such huge gambles with the style of this movie. Sometimes innovation fails to pay off, but there's courage in the attempt, and that alone is commendable.
Let's just start with the lowest hanging fruit for this film. It was quite competently made if you're just looking at it from a broad strokes perspective. It has a beginning, a middle, and and end. There's a climax. There's conflict. There's some intrigue, and even a few attempts at twists thrown in there. From that broad perspective, it's put together adequately. And believe me, I've watched some movies in my day that fail to clear even that lowest of benchmarks in movie making competency. So to have a well defined beginning, middle, and end, and to pepper it with elements that at least showed some attempts at effort is worth applauding. Sometimes it's the basic things that wreck a movie, and this one at least understood the basics. The finer points of nuance, and wit may not have translated as well, but I was glad that I could see at least a modicum of effort behind the attempt.
Okay, so the camera work in this film is extremely dynamic. I'm not against dynamic camera work. It can be fun, and it can help to break up the monotony of never ending steady cams. Used well, it really adds to a movie's visual impact, and there were some shots in this movie that were absolutely just kind of cool, and visually fun that involved that dynamic camera movement. A lot of them were establishing shots of buildings and cityscapes, and that's cool. I also kind of liked the use of color in this film. Don't get me wrong, I didn't see where there was any rhyme or reason to it, but I noticed on that ginormous 65" 4k tube, that at times, the color saturation appeared to be artificially increased, especially where the reds were involved, and that added vibrance made things pop off of the screen. Were they the right things? I don't think I'm qualified to answer that question. But it was appreciated nonetheless because in recent years, the DC Emo Universe has become pretty washed out, and bland in the color department.
One of the most basic foundations of storytelling is that a story should have some sort of theme to anchor it, and this movie did have some semblance of theme going on. I noticed the themes of rebirth and duality being leaned upon to prop this movie up. Those are pretty cliche, and were even in 2003. Also, they could have been explored a bit better, but at least they were there, and actually, the duality between Patience, and Catwoman is a major point in the movie as Patience is continually getting in trouble for Catwoman's antics. The whole rebirth thing doesn't feature as prominently, but it is there to kind of play wingman to the other theme. The themes also work to generate at least a little bit of character growth from Patience. It's pretty basic, but it's represented. Patience starts out a shy, demure pushover of a woman, and through her rebirth as Catwoman, she begins to morph into a woman who is more self-confident, and more self-assured, and who stops being a doormat, and who learns to stand up for herself. I think it's supposed to be a story of empowerment, but I think it's coming from the wrong source. People, when you've got a cause, always be mindful of who is supporting your cause and try to make sure that they're not doing more harm than good.
Man, that's about all I got to say that's nice. This really was a challenging movie to find some hidden good in. I guess sometimes you just have to trust the masses, but I think that's sad because I did see a lot of potential in this movie. I saw efforts being made by the actors as they tried to make their performances entertaining. I saw the potential for a fun romp with a DC character that, at the time, seemed like a good character to explore on account of the character hadn't been explored a great deal in film previously. I saw some imaginative ideas being attempted that may even have paid off well if they hadn't just fallen flat. For example, the portrayal of Patience tripping out when she first gets her Catwoman powers is a nice nod to the fact that cats naturally secrete a chemical in their brains that has the same effect on them that LSD does on humans. I got that because I'm a brainy nerd full of useless information, and it was a decent idea. Try to balance that one kind of imaginative idea with all of the weird CGI acrobatic choreography, or the catnip scene, and it gets lost. The actual cosmetics company being the villain was almost a clever nod to the 89 Batman wherein the Joker uses cosmetics to kill the people of Gotham en masse. There were definitely some potentially good elements floating around in that soup, but they just got lost, and from what I've been able to find, it's a blend of Warner Bros meddling a bit too much, and hiring a director who wanted to be way too auteur to pull off the project. I can understand why WB might have thought hiring the director that they did was a good idea though. He had previously directed a film called Vidocq. Have I seen it? No, but it's got a 6.5 rating on IMDb so it must not be too bad. I can even kind of understand WB's penchant for meddling in this project. After all, it was the first bigger name DC film to be released after Batman and Robin, although there were four theatrical releases between the two movies, but I'm sure that the execs were keen on avoiding a repeat of that Batman and Robin debacle. Ultimately, if mistakes are meant for us to learn and grow, then I really have to applaud Hollywood on this one because the guy who directed this movie, Pitof, hasn't directed anything since.
What have I learned as I've done my Mr. Rogers inspired experiment? Well, as I said last week, when you go into something expecting to find good things about it, you're going to regardless of how detestable it may seem from the outset. Oftentimes, you have to plumb pretty deep to find those good qualities, but I learned that the effort can yield some good rewards, mostly in avoiding getting caught up in all the unnecessary hate and mockery that just wastes energy and erodes our own personal character. There's a lesson to be learned there, especially in context of Mr. Rogers, where if you look for good in people, you'll probably find some. I think that it starts with looking for the good in ourselves and developing a desire to have others see us as we eventually see ourselves, which takes trying to see them the way we see ourselves. That takes the effort of learning to accept a person as they are in the same ways that we have to accept ourselves the way that we are. It's often difficult, but I think that some of those people we see who seem troubled may just need someone to look deep to find the qualities of goodness within them and offer to be a friend, no strings attached. These are not necessarily easy things, and they require us to rise above the base impulse for anger and frustration that our Internet connected world pushes upon us, but if we resolve and endeavor to do so, maybe we can begin to be good neighbors to those around us. Pretty deep, eh?! That's all I got. Stick around for next week because I've been feeling pretty schlocky!
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