Return of the Ghost of the 31 Days of Cheese - Day 26 - Catwoman

And today we get another Hollywood film that makes you go huh?

Okay at the time Halle Berry was riding high – won an Oscar and everything.  A beautiful woman and a great actor to boot.  So she is cast as Catwoman – which was intriguing to the comic fan boys. Catwoman is a very interesting feature of the Batman universe.  Foes and sometimes allies with of course heaps and heaps of sexual tension between them.  And Catwoman herself is a wonderfully amoral character well worth diving into – in that to live outside the law you must be honest sort of way.

So they ditched all that. Every single bit of it.

No Gotham City, No Batman. No DC Universe. None of this. She’s not even named Solana Kyle. 

Why?

What we got was Halle Berry pretending to be a mousy little graphic designer (or something) working for a major makeup manufacturer – headed up by Sharon Stone who has been the face of the company for years and years. But now time is taking its toll – which Sharon isn’t really thrilled at  all this – and actually the new product is designed to fight back against that. With some nasty side effects – your skin turns to stone or some such.

At any rate Halle sees something she shouldn’t and ends up dead and tossed into New York Harbor.

There she is rescued by Cats.

Yep. Cats. One of them breathes life into here.

After that Halle is Catwoman. One of a long line of Catwomen from down the ages a helpful woman who exists only to say such things says.  Apparently a Catwoman with, like oh Spiderman, powers and abilities that are catlike.  Leaping, balance, seeing in the dark, stronger.  

And a weird fashion sense is part of the equation. While the costume shows off Ms. Berry’s figure in a very entertaining way,  one is not sure it’s the most practicable garment one could have designed for nighttime superhumaning.

The high heels especially are bothersome. Yeah it’s hot but she’s not on a walkway .

She’s also mad for Tuna – there is a scene where Halle is balanced on the back of her sofa and eating tuna fish straight out of a can.  It’s as if the producer, writer and director all got together and said, how can we make this beautiful woman look stupid? And came up with this.

There is a love interest played by someone from Law and Order he tries but really  can’t get past the silliness of the whole idea here.  

And there is an embarrassing catnip huffing moment.

There is the final confrontation between Catwoman and Sharon who really did her best acting in the publicity material for this movie. “This film is about a woman discovering her power.” She managed to say to the camera, with a straight face, like she meant it. I don’t know how many takes it took but still it was an impressive bit of acting.

In the end bad guys vanquished, carriers are hurt and Halle sails off into the night with the promise of a sequel that will never ever see the light of day.

Enjoy with a tuna fish sandwich.