a review of 猫女

2024 ANTI-CRITERION CHALLENGE #51: Someone holds a cat + FLOPUARY #17: Feels spiritually like the kind of superhero movie that generally got made prior to X-MEN and SPIDER-MAN cracking the code on how to do them "right" in terms of honoring the comic book origins while also making a mainstream-watchable film. Clearly, divorcing this movie from the previous BATMAN films (which was still in franchise hibernation, yet to be rebooted by Nolan) as well as the more recent comics/cartoon incarnations of Selina Kyle turned off a good chunk of the audience, myself included. But catching up to it now, and viewing it as its own eccentric riff on the idea of Catwoman -- a dominatrix-themed jewel thief with a quasi-spiritual connection to both cats and female empowerment -- it's not an outright bad movie, even if the screenplay feels like the product of superhero genre Mad Libs. Since we have a JOKER (2019) sequel on the way later this year, I might try asking defenders of the original movie (another riff on a classic villain that played it both ways in terms of connecting back to its source material) how they feel about CATWOMAN '04...