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Thread: Upcoming DVD's

  1. #1
    Obsolete
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    Upcoming DVD's



    I just had to post this review because I couldn't stop laughing! Anyone planning on owning the DVD?

    Review: Catwoman

    Rating: Half a star

    If you see Catwoman, you'll see enough of Halle Berry's ass to last you a lifetime. Backlit, in soft focus, close-up, playing basketball, lounging in bed, peeking around corners, slumming in sweatpants, packed into leather or just giving Ms. Berry somewhere to sit.

    Perhaps you find this notion of superfluous ass hard to swallow. Maybe you have a Halle Berry's ass screensaver on your computer, and anxiously avoid doing any work so that it manifests itself like two colliding soccer balls. If you're in such an unhappy (and unproductive) state, Catwoman will free your mind.

    For the rest of us, the movie betrays our trust. I don't mean it flouts the rules of cinematic storytelling (although it does). I refer to the opening voiceover by Berry. "It all started on the day I died," she begins. She goes on to say that her obituary, had there been one, would have been quite ordinary. "But there was no obituary, because the day I died is the day I started to live. But that comes later." Aha! So it all starts before the day she died! How can we believe anything this movie says now?

    But it wants our trust, wrapping itself around our legs and looking all cute and believable. For instance, we're supposed to buy that Berry's character, Patience Phillips, starts the movie as Ditzwoman, clumsy, frumpy and mousy. And crazy -- she goes out on a ledge to rescue a stray cat and almost falls to her death. Also, the villain is Hedare, a cosmetics firm, which is launching a new product that, if you stop using it, makes you look like Charlize Theron in her Monster makeup. As if L'Oreal or any of the other fine purveyors of beauty products would sell us anything overpriced, useless or dangerous! In any case, Ditzwoman gets herself killed learning this small-print information, so now we're back to where we started.

    Patience is brought back to life by what looks suspiciously like a computer-generated version of Toonces, Saturday Night Live's driving cat. (It accomplishes this by breathing in her face; if you've ever had a cat breathe in your face, you'll be surprised that it reverses rather than cements her demise.)

    The CG work would look great in an animated film, but falls as flat as Roger Rabbit in this live-action environment. As does Berry's digital stand-in -- once she becomes Catwoman and starts hopping from ledges and climbing walls, she loses both definition and inertia. This is one movie in which the computer-game spinoff actually looks better than the original, and an instance in which the ease of digital effects have convinced the filmmaker, French director Pitof, to employ them in places when an old-fashioned bluescreen would do nicely.

    Berry gets a love interest with a porn-star name in Tom Lone, police detective, played by Benjamin Bratt at a simmer that never quite boils over -- he spends most of the movie looking handsomely puzzled at the similarities between his new girlfriend and the new kitty criminal on the loose. For instance, their handwriting matches, and the "o" in her spelling of "sorry" has the handwriting guy conclude that "she plays by her own rules." (And by the way, any police department with flat-screen computers that compare lip prints and deliver a "99.9% match" in snazzy graphics is getting way too much of your tax dollar.)

    The husband-and-wife baddies running the cosmetics giant are Sharon Stone and Lambert Wilson. Wilson's character is just as maritally wayward as his Merovingian in the Matrix movies, but sadly he is less overtly French this time out. Stone, a former Revlon spokesperson (Berry is a current one) gets to rail: "I was never more beautiful, never more powerful, and then I turned 40 and they threw me away." This might help explain the 46-year-old Stone, and it certainly explains her character: Hell hath no fury ...

    Berry's motivation is another matter. Frances Conroy (Six Feet Under) plays a funereal cat lady who understands that Toonces -- sorry, Midnight -- has given Patience mysterious feline powers. She spins a speech about freedom and power that sounds more like a bad horoscope for a Leo than a mantra for Patience's new pussycat persona. Catwoman subsequently trashes a neighbourhood rave, busts up a couple of cat burglars, leaves with their loot and then feels bad and returns it -- well, most of it. But she also saves a child from a freak Ferris wheel accident and has a vendetta against the cosmetics couple. The way a cat will stand on your doorstep for 15 minutes trying to decide whether to go in or out mirrors Catwoman's conflicted nature.

    But between Berry's digital double and the plot's silly foundation and, er, makeup, there is little to recommend Catwoman. We have seen more realistic superheroes in Spider-Man, more complex characters in Hellboy and better-looking cats in Shrek 2. Of course, none of these films can boast Halle Berry's ass. But that comes later.

  2. #2
    Senior Seņor boputnam's Avatar
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    Purrrr...

    Here, kitty kitty...
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    bo

    "Indeed, not!!"

  3. #3
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    Re: Purrrr...

    Wow! From the review I thought the whole movie was ass shots. Where'd you happen on the frontal?

  4. #4
    Senior Seņor boputnam's Avatar
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    Michelle Pfeifer

    My personal favorite. Wow.

    Up the bat pole now, darlin'...
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    bo

    "Indeed, not!!"

  5. #5
    Senior Seņor boputnam's Avatar
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    'nuther frontal...

    for my buddy, Giskard.
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    bo

    "Indeed, not!!"

  6. #6
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    She's so goofy

    If she clawed Rynn's loudspeaker grilles, Rynn would put her in a bag with a rock and drop her in a lake!

  7. #7
    Senior Seņor boputnam's Avatar
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    Yea, no kidding.

    I wish I could find some good stills of the Pfeiffer era - she was breathtaking.

    Maybe some Barbarella...?
    bo

    "Indeed, not!!"

  8. #8
    Alex Lancaster
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    Smile

    Slow day, He?

  9. #9
    Senior Seņor boputnam's Avatar
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    Slow day...

    Too much to do, and no enthusiasm for the task. So many numbers, so little time...
    bo

    "Indeed, not!!"

  10. #10
    JBL Dog
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    If you see Catwoman, you'll see enough of Halle Berry's ass to last you a lifetime.

    And the problem with that would be??



    This message comes from JBL Dog

  11. #11
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    Question Is Fahrenheit 9/11 a DVD to own?

    I haven't seen this movie yet. Anyone else see it?

    Here's something from the folks down under.

    Bob Brown: Whose lies hurt more?

    July 29, 2004
    MICHAEL Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, which officially opens today in cinemas across the nation, is a polemic. It mercilessly reveals the inadequacy and, at times, immaturity of US President George W. Bush and, in doing so, turns the tables on the farce we often get when watching television news.

    We got it last October when John and Janette Howard climbed up the steps of Air Force One instead of waiting at the bottom to welcome George and Laura Bush to Canberra. All four turned to wave under floodlights to a nonexistent crowd in the middle of the night to beguile Australian TV audiences next morning.

    We got it when the terracotta pots and plants were stacked outside Parliament House so the cameras would not see Bush exposed to thousands of Australians protesting against his Iraq war down the slopes of Capitol Hill.

    Remember how the Australian people were locked out, TV cameras banned and the elected representatives gagged while the non-elected Bush gave his speech in our House of Representatives instead of in the perfectly adequate Great Hall next door?

    What about Bush's scrambled eulogy to Howard in Canberra in which he claimed that the term "man of steel" was the Texan equivalent of the Australian fair dinkum. Howard would have vetted the speech. He let the gaffe stand -- it made him feel so good. That helps answer Moore's question: "How is it that someone like John Howard could get in bed with George W. Bush?" Which begs the question: Has our Prime Minister seen Fahrenheit 9/11 and did he feel as good afterwards?

    Moore a villain? How about Howard's 2004 justification of the Iraq imbroglio despite his 2003 statement that: "I couldn't justify on its own a military invasion of Iraq to change the regime"?

    Moore takes licence, but his film is no match for the most fallacious polemic of the past decade: the weapons of mass destruction lie used by Bush, Howard and Tony Blair to justify the invasion of Iraq and the consequent death toll of tens of thousands of men, women and children.

    Bush's moment of truth came when he sat reading My Pet Goat to schoolchildren while the twin towers burned. Where was the maturity, intelligence and action to be expected of the most powerful human being on the planet in such a moment of peril? What do his defenders make of the gormless failure of the Commander-in-Chief to take immediate command in the crisis?

    The office of the president is held in great respect by Americans. Maybe Moore's film is doing so well in cinemas because he shows how the office, not Bush, has been betrayed. Bush has purloined the office for himself and his rich cronies while poor Americans are sidelined, sent to the Iraq frontline or, worst of all, brought home secretly in body bags.

    "I really hope they don't re-elect that fool," US soldier Michael Pederson wrote to his mother before he was killed in Iraq. Pederson was talking about Bush.

    Now that Moore has made a film aimed to help Pederson's wish come true, the critics are howling from every fence. The problem for Moore's critics is Bush, not Moore. The documentary is successful not because Moore nails the President but because the President nails himself. No Bush absurdities, no Moore Palme d'Or.

    Moore's earlier film, Bowling for Columbine, had a signal scene in which a boss at the nearby Titan rocket factory cannot comprehend how the boys who shot their fellow pupils at Columbine High could plan such a violent act.

    Fahrenheit 9/11 has a signal scene in which Bush regales wealthy Republican donors with a toast to "the haves and have-mores". This, in a nation with 30million people too poor to access hospital care. It is an unforgettable scene where Bush exhibits his unfitness as president of a great nation, let alone as world leader.

    One is left wondering how else the US might be. What if the President, instead of spending $60 billion extra per annum on armaments for Iraq, had set up a new Marshall Plan to feed, clothe and ensure schools for the world's 1 billion citizens living in abject poverty?

  12. #12
    dancing-dave
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    Here here.

    I bought Farenheit 9/11 in Chinatown, NYC for $5 and saw it this week. It was really scary finding out how this whole game has been played out on the US public. The horrible thing is the families and individuals who are left alive with the pain of having lost a loved one.

    Back to Catwoman..... $5 in Chinatown would be what I would be willing to pay for such a film. I don't think Catwoman, as a comic character, is deserving of a full film. It's about as much sense as doing an entire film on Poison Ivy, or the Riddler without Batman. Sure Halle Berry is hot, but if I want to see some nice rear shots; I'll stick to Seymor Butts, or Buttman films.

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