Whatever Doesn't Kill Me...

It has now been officially one year since I realized my lifelong dream of never living in Quincy would not come to pass. What's worse, I kind of like it here. It's a little unsettling, actually. Before moving to Wollaston beach, I used to hate Quincy, although I'm not really sure why. It might have something to do with how narrow the streets are. People park on both sides of two way streets that are barely three cars wide. It wouldn't be a problem if the streets were one-way, or if people would actually use their freaking driveways. I don't understand that. It's one thing if you don't have anywhere else to park, but I go by houses that have three cars parked on the street and none in the driveway. These people should have Nicole Richie shipped to their home as punishment. Can you imagine if Ted Kaczynski had thrown Paulie Shore in a box with bubble wrap and mailed him to someone? That would have been a lot worse than getting a bomb.

I like where I live now. It's not as close to the highway as my parent's house, though, so going anywhere usually takes longer. But overall we've got a nice little place with an ocean view. And furniture that needs to be paid for before the ridiculously high interest rate kicks in. So we drove to the Jordan's in Avon Friday night to make a payment at the store. It's not that long of a ride, but there was an extra newspaper (well, the Boston Herald) in the car so I picked it up and started to read it. Ten minutes later it felt as if my head was in a vice and tried as hard as I could not to throw up everything I'd eaten since 1985. I could feel every single little bump in the road, and with every one the headache and nausea got more intense. Michele said it was from reading in the car, but I've read in the car several times before that without incident. No, it had to be something else.

About an hour and a half earlier, I was sitting at work, looking at a tin of Foosh Energy Mints that Michele bought. There's only twelve per tin, which should probably have been a good indicator of their potency, but I just thought the people that made them were cheap bastards, so I had three of them. Now, I can't say it was the mints that made me sick, or the reading in the car that did it, but certainly the combination of the two factored in somewhere.

Oh yeah, and it turned out that we couldn't make the payment at the store because a third party company deals with all purchases made with the charge card.

Two days later, my constitution was again tested, this time by the movie Catwoman. Nick brought it over Sunday night, along with Big Trouble. Nick actually saw Catwoman in the theater when it came out, and his take on it was basically, "However bad you think this movie is, it's worse than that." But Catwoman is important. A few years ago, we watched Gigli, and I think it made me a better person. The same goes for Catwoman. If you can sit through it without deciding midway through that you're going to go take a bath with your toaster, you come out a stronger, better person.

I was a little disappointed that it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, though. Don't get me wrong, everything, I mean everything from the script to the acting to the cheesy CGI shots, stank to high Heaven. How did they even get away with calling it Catwoman, anyway? No Selina Kyle. No Batman. No Gotham City. Instead, Halle Berry plays Patience Phillips, a graphic designer who is murdered after she uncovers a dark secret about a face creme. That's pretty lame, but if you check online, you can find some information about the original script, with Ashley Judd playing Catwoman. I found this on a site dedicated to Catwoman:

"Ms. Judd was apparently not happy with the working script penned by Kate Kondell, where Judd would have played Patience Price, a pet groomer whose mother was killed by a wealthy tycoon who stole her idea for a new design of dishwasher."

A pet groomer. Whose mother was killed. By a wealthy tycoon who stole her idea for a new design of dishwasher. Almost makes the makeup that eats your face sound intelligent. It's not, though. Face-eating makeup is still a stupid, stupid idea. And we have Sharon Stone to thank for that. Well, her character anyway. She had been the model for her husband's line of cosmetics for years. But he decided to go with a younger model to promote their new line, which supposedly reverses the aging process. Now, if that were the case, wouldn't it make more sense to use an older model to show how well it works? Anyway, she wants revenge. Or something. But let's get back to Patience.

Early on in the movie, she sees a cat out on the ledge of her apartment, so she follows it out to try to save it. Once she's out there, a crowd of people gather around, thinking she's going to jump. A detective pulls up and tries to talk her down, and hilarity ensues! Well, not really, but she explains to him that she was only up there to save a cat and he apologizes for jumping to conclusions and offers to take her to dinner. But before they go out, her employers flood her out of a giant drainpipe for overhearing something about their new make-up. It seems as though she won't be going on a date with the detective after all, but then the cat she saved (or at least a really sorry looking CGI version) appears with all his buddies and breathes new life into her. The next morning, the newly undead Patience wakes up on a shelf in her apartment and discovers she has amazing new catlike abilities, like purring when she talks and playing basketball really well. A crazy old cat lady tells her that Midnight, the GRAY cat she saved earlier was actually the reincarnation of the Egyptian Goddess Bast and has chosen to bestow upon her all the powers of a cat (including an attraction to catnip and an aversion to rain, there may be a deleted scene where she coughs up a hairball). This is the movie's way of explaining why we haven't been watching the exploits of Selena Kyle in Gotham City for the past hour. She's not the Catwoman, she's just a Cat Woman, and there's been hundreds of them throughout history. Oh, okay then. Using her new abilities, and the most ridiculous costume imaginable, she decides to find out who killed her and why.

Of course not all of her methods are legal, and her dumb as a stump detective boyfriend can't figure out that the woman he's dating is the Catwoman he's looking for. Yeah, I know no one ever figures out that Superman is just Clark Kent without his glasses, but Halle Berry has a rather distinctive skin tone so it really shouldn't be that hard to figure out, especially since her costume is so skimpy. She doesn't even try to disguise her voice. Maybe he doesn't realize it's her because in all of the CG shots her skins isn't the same shade as the non CG shots.

Anyway, a bunch of stuff happens and she eventually gets to the big fight with Sharon Stone, who tells her that terminating the use of the makeup will kill you, but continued use of it will make your skin hard as marble. Well that's just stupid. But I guess they put it in there to build this fight up. It won't be so easy to defeat her now, since her skin is like marble, right? Suprisingly, no, she still went down pretty fast.

Like I said earlier, I was expecting this to top the current worst movie I've ever seen, but sadly that title remains uncontested. Maybe if they had gone with the dishwasher story, but as it is, the worst movie I've ever seen is still House of the Dead. It's got scenes from the arcade game spliced into it all over the place, for crying out loud!