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jackspencerjr
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
262 Posts |
 Posted - 03/06/2006 : 4:11:26 PM
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Hoo boy, what a dog this cat is.
Now, the problems with this movie were kind of surprising to me.
Lots of comic book geeks didn't like how the character was named Patience Phillips instead of Selena Kyle. To be frank, this was not such a big deal. The way they set it up was that there have been "catwomen" throughout history. This is just one of them, and it still allows there to be a Selena Kyle Catwoman. I think the comic book geeks need to get over themselves.
From the HBO First Look, I thought the idea of the bad guy being an evil makeup company was stupid.
Yeah, we'll make a movie about a female super hero. So who should he fight? How about a Make-up company? Yeah. Great. Way to empower women, you guys. Who's going to be the villian in the sequel? An evil handbag manufacturer? An evil perfume company who's perfume takes over the minds of all women and they are drawn to their secret base under a volcano. Their evil plan is to take over the world, and with all the women captured, all they have to to is wait for all the men to starve to death because there's no one to cook them dinner or they can't leave the house since no one is there to do their laundry.
Great. Just great.
But, the evil make up company was not as bad as I thought. The idea in the first place is monumentally stupid, but the execution is not as bad as it should be. Not as bad as I know it is.
Ms. Berry's Razzie-winning performace was not as bad as I thought it was. I mean, true when she was in "Catwoman" mode, her lines and delivery were cheesy, but this is the Catwoman movie. I was expecting cheese. However, I do think they handled the "all women have a light and dark side" poorly because they made her look schitzophrenic. That's not the way I would have gone with it. It just made for clumbsy comedy.
No, while most of this stuff was bad in various was, what really clobbered this movie was the direction... or lack thereof. It seemed like the director, Pitof (one name, no waiting), was trying like the dickens to make a movie without a single dull second. John Frankenheimer used to "spice up" talky scenes by having the character walking or otherwise in motion. Pitof puts the camera in motion.
In one scene, Halle Berry and Benjamin Bratt and chatting and flirting on a basketball court. He had two shots, one on each of the principles, traveling in an arc. He then cut back and forth between the two, moving angles quickly. The effect is nauseating. Literally, I got sick. I had to stop eating my popcorn.
He also used way too many spinning establishing shots and far too many cuts. The first fight catwoman gets into after she gets her silly outfit had, like, a bajillion cuts. That's a lot. The idea was to make the fight more exciting and energetic. Instead it was confusing and migrane-inducing.
And Pitof was in love with filming Berry just walking, strutting her stuff in that silly outfit. Sure, she looks good and she has a nice wiggle going on, but the two or three scenes of her walking, just walking, clocked in for seconds and seemed like they took days.
Somehow, I can't help but think that if they had another director who was not so in love with roving camera angles and lots and lots of quick cuts (and just named the stupid character Selena Kyle to keep the geeks off their backs) this movie would have fared much better, in spite of all the other cheesey elements listed above. |
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Okay... I watched "Catwoman"
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