Retrospective: Worst Picture/Best Picture – ‘Catwoman’ and ‘Million Dollar Baby’ (2004)

“If you like this movie like i do, your rolling on the floor. Every second is purely genius. If you liked it for real, your bus just pulled up, get away from the comp.” – timetwister77, IMDb.com

“’Million Dollar Baby’ is about a woman determined to make something of herself, and a man who doesn’t want to do anything for this woman, and will finally do everything.” – Roger Ebert, Chicago Tribune

Raging Puss

Oh how the mighty have fallen. A young and attractive actress with a breakout role goes on to win the Academy Award which opens the door to so many possibilities in her career. And she follows it up with a disaster of an action film that bombed at the box office. But enough about Hilary Swank and The Core, on to some real business. Today I’ll be talking about two films, each about strong women who worked their way up and become powerful heroes. One is a creative artist who becomes a lethal vigilante with the help of a cat. The other is a determined fighter who becomes a champion boxer with the help of a coot. So, let’s get nitty kitty and talk about some glove and basketball.

Directed by the man with no name, Clint Eastwood, Million Dollar Baby tells the story of a pleasant young woman Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank). Living in the City of Angels, she hopes to be a successful boxer, but currently she’s stuck working a waitress job at a small time diner. One day she shows up to a small time gym run by a cantankerous old boxing cut-man and trainer Frankie Dunn (Eastwood). He’s been in the business all of his life, but now he’s just stuck running this place with the help of his pal Eddie “Scrap-Iron” Dupris (Morgan Freeman). Even though Frankie and Scrap are buddies, they always seem to bicker with each other. For example, Frankie tells Scrap to stop buying the expensive bleach to clean the place, but with his catlike sense, Scrap proclaims that this bleach smells better. Freddy’s just grumpy because Scrap bought the bleach for a few dollars more. And maybe Scrap’s just grumpy because he’s got a glass eye. He used to be a great boxer but he got his comeuppance because he was complaining about the Schofield Kid having poor eyesight, and now he’s only got one eye.

Directed by the man with one name, Pitof, Catwoman tells the story of a pleasant young woman Patience Phillips (Halle Berry). Living in the City of Gotham, she hopes to be a successful artist, but currently she’s stuck working an office job at a big time cosmetics company, Hedare Beauty. They’re about to release a brand new facial product Beau-line, so the owner George Hedare (Lambert Wilson) and his wife Laurel, played by Sharon Stone (no, not the sexy secretary from The Flintstones, the sexy serial killer from Basic Instinct), are especially frustrated and hoping everything goes as smoothly as her airbrushed skin. Patience is stressed too because they keep hounding her to turn in her advertisement that she’s still working on. It doesn’t help that she’s constantly tired because her annoying neighbors keep her up every night partying and listening to loud music. Not even her supportive co-worker Sally (Alex Borstein) can lift her spirits, nor her gay co-worker who’s there because it’s a cosmetics company so they needed a flamboyantly gay employee.

While the stakes are high at Hedare Beauty, there’s fresh meat back at the gym. When the spirited Maggie starts showing up to the gym hitting the bags, it catches Frankie by surprise because his rundown rink already has enough members. There’s the athletic Shawrelle (Anthony Mackie) who looks like he could be in the Marvel universe but is too cocky to apply. There’s Omar (Michael Pena), another fighter who does a lot of a shadowboxing, or maybe he’s just fighting someone who wears an invisible cape. And then there’s the simpleminded Danger (Jay Baruchel) with a heart of gold. He is determined to become the new boxing champion of the world, but nobody, not even Frankie, would know how to train the doofus. Frankie’s even got a future boxing star Big Willie Little who he’s been training for a long time, but he doesn’t think he’s ready for the title fight. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t think the kid can win, or maybe he feels guilty that he killed Little Bill a while back in the old west, so he thinks he’s gotta protect this new guy Big Willie. So, with all these regular guests at his gym, Frankie doesn’t need an inexperienced girl who doesn’t even know how to hit a speed bag correctly. She’s determined to get Frankie to train her, but he keeps telling her he doesn’t train girls and angrily tells her to get off his mat.

Meanwhile, trying to make her deadline, Patience hears a noise and notices that darn cat is stuck outside of her apartment window. Without hesitation she makes an executive decision and goes out onto the windowsill to rescue the poor thing. However, while she’s trying to save the cat, Detective Tom Lone (Benjamin Bratt) is in the neighborhood and mistakes her for a jumper. After an unsuccessful attempt at shouting at her not to jump, he runs up to her apartment and saves her from falling. But before she can even thank the friendly officer for saving her life, she rushes out because she’s late for work, leaving Mister Congeniality alone in her empty apartment.

While Patience leaves Tom, Frankie’s star fighter Big Willie decides to leave him after too much waiting. Or maybe it was because Frankie was just getting too old and wrinkly. Maybe if Frankie had used some Beau-Line he wouldn’t be without a promising new boxer. With no star pupil, he gives in and decides to train Maggie, even though he keeps telling her that she’s too old to be a prize fighter. But like the over-aged, Beau-line wearing Laurel who still believes she has the look of a model, Maggie’s determined to stick with it and prove herself that she can do it. Always calling him “Boss”, she insists he won’t regret it and that she won’t sully his good name.

Though things are looking up for Maggie, the same can’t be said for Hedare. It turns out Beau-line isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. Sure, if you use it, it does make your skin silky and smooth, but if you ever stop using it you end up looking like The English Patient. Patience happens to overhear this news, but gets caught eavesdropping. While Maggie’s boss does have his flaws, at least he doesn’t try killing her like Patience’s boss does. Knowing that they’ve gotta do something about Halle, they chase her into the water ducts so they can drain the pipe. After all, if word got out about the side effects of Beau-line they’d be ruined, so they need to be quick and make sure she’s dead. She manages to avoid the gunshots from the henchman, but she runs to the end of the ducts and has nowhere to go. Unlike Andy Dufresne, Patience didn’t have the luxury of a feces filled pipe to help her escape and instead the water is turned on and blasts her out, sending her hundreds of feet to the hard Eartha. Completely lifeless, it looks like all hope is lost for poor Patience. Fortunately, she’s in the feline of fire and a bunch of cats come to her aid. Deciding now is not her time and that she’ll have to die another day, the head cat approaches and gives Patience mouth to meowth, bringing her back to life. Waking up to pussies galore, covered in filth, and not knowing how lucky she is, dirty Berry rises up and starts to experience her second life.

Because Maggie doesn’t have the luxury of an army of cats to help her survive, when not working out at the gym she keeps working at the diner. To save on groceries, she would sometimes sneak away the leftovers at her job, though once she got caught by her other boss and pretended she was taking it home for her dog. At least Patience had the decency to actually go out and buy cat food even if it was to just eat it for herself. Waiting during the day and working out at night, either Maggie doesn’t need much sleep or she suffers from insomnia. Even though Frankie took her on, he hasn’t been helping her out too much so far, but thankfully Scrap’s been giving her some tips and is starting to turn her into a striving Miss Maggie.

With no job to go back to, Patience spends her day wandering the city and learning her awesome new powers like the love of fish and loud hissing. Noticing that the cat who saved her life has a collar, she decides to take it to its owner. It turns out the cat, whose name is Midnight, is owned by crazy cat lady Ophelia (Frances Conroy). She invites Patience in and explains to her what’s happening and why she’s feeling so different, such as jumping 20 feet in the air and crawling on all fours at 100 mph. Ophelia tells her that she in fact did die that night, and that Midnight brought her back to life and turned her into a Catwoman. The process has been going on for thousands of years and Patience is the next Karate Kitty. Patience looked through the coffee table book of past Catwoman, but she must have stopped before she got to the important pages like Julie Newmar, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Sean Young. Embracing her new self, she gets decked out in her new leather look and heads out into the night to be a fearless feline.

As our cat loving Patience improves her skills, Maggie starts to improve hers as well thanks to the orangutan loving Frankie. One time he saw her punching a speed bag incorrectly and told her to slow it down and act like you’re hitting it like an ice pick. Because after all, we all know women can be lethal with an ice pick. We even get a training montage to show her improvement, but unfortunately compared to the lightning speed editing in Catwoman, this montage is slower than the movie’s piano score.

No longer having to worry about her deadlines at the job, Patience starts to just have some fun. First she decides to do something about her loud neighbors. During one of their usual wild bashes next door, she pounces in and bashes in their stereo. With that rush of adrenaline, she then decides to go stop some diamond thieves by bouncing about like a cat out of hell and whooping their butts. However, even though she’s having a lot of fun now that she’s a gritty kitty, she also remembers it’s another Saturday and she ain’t got nobody.

While Patience may have the eye of a cat, Maggie’s starting to get the eye of a tiger and has been getting really great in the ring. She had one close call in a particular fight when her opponent broke her nose. With no Beau-line nearby to help out, Frankie managed to snap it back into place and Maggie ended up winning the fight. With all of these wins, she’s been making quite a bit of money. So much in fact that she decided to buy her trailer living mom her own house. Frankie took Maggie to the location so she could show her mom, but unfortunately, the mom wasn’t too happy about the gift because it would screw up with her welfare. On the ride home, Maggie and Frankie start talking and it turns out they both have a lot in common. Like Maggie’s rocky relationship with her family, he’s got a daughter who doesn’t really care about him as well. Oh, and they both love lemon meringue pie. No longer does he hate being her trainer, he starts to be a bit of a father figure to her and wants to keep her safe. Which is why he doesn’t want her to fight the Blue Bear, the current champion who has a history of fighting dirty. Besides, she’s not ready, she’s still a too much of a rookie.

Sure, we’ve been getting some decent sport scenes thanks to Maggie’s boxing matches, but nothing holds a candle to the epic display we’re about to witness. Patience keeps bumping into her cop in shining armor Tom. So one day she decides to visit him at the school he’s speaking at. After his speech in front the kids about safety, he decided to contradict everything he just said by getting his ass kicked by Patience in a one on one game of the year. Putting down her monster ball and picking up a basketball, she is ready to beat on the Bratt. The game is so thrilling, your eyes are wide open watching it because if you blink you’ll miss 17 cuts in the scene. More talented than Air Bud, it turns out Catwomen can jump. Tom is no match for Patience, hell, she could probably even beat Teen Wolf. She was so good in fact that by the end of the match there were 137 shots, not basketball shots, I mean camera shots. Move over Michael Bay, there’s a bad girl in town. To celebrate her victory, the two head to the carnival to have a good time. Unfortunately, while on the ferris wheel, some of gears break down and the the ride starts to fall apart, putting all the passengers in danger. While Tom climbs down from the top to try to stop the ride, Patience’s kitty senses kick in and sees that a lone kid is about to fall from his seat. Leaping down from the top of the ride, she climbs into his cart and says “hello kiddie”, and rescues him while the bystanders cheer on. After all that action, Tom decides he wants some more action, so he heads back to Patience’s place to get a piece of tail.

While Maggie and Frankie are off having fun winning fights, Scrap is back at the gym trying to keep things in order. However, while he’s off cleaning the bathroom, the regulars decide mess around with dopey Danger. Shawrelle challenges him to a fight and beats the crap out of him. Luckily, Scrap gets back just in time to stop Danger from getting completely destroyed. Well, now he’s pissed, so Scrap gets in the ring to show the hard hitting hooligan who the real god of the gym is. With quite a lot of wrath, Scrap threw some mighty punches and made a deep impact, turning the whippersnapper into one hurt socker. Scrap finally achieved goal of wanting to win one last fight. I guess even though that punk had it coming, you could say thanks to him, Scrap got a Shawrelle redemption.

Meanwhile, Patience is dealing with some troublemakers of her own. Recently her friend Sally got sick, and it turns out it’s because she’s been using Beau-line. Even though her face looks great, she’s stuck in a hospital bed, so Patience tells the marvelous Mrs. Sally to get out of that facial, otherwise it may kill her. That encounter pushed Miss Kitty over the edge so she headed to her boss’s mansion at night to deal with things. The cat burglar successfully sneaks in but is caught off guard when only Mrs. Hedare is home. It turns out Miss Photoshop doesn’t have the greatest relationship with her hubby, and when Patience tells her about Beau-line’s side effects, Laurel seems concerned and tells her where she can find him. So she heads off to the opera in two shakes of a cat’s tail. Dressed in his penguin suit, Hedare is caught completely off guard when a lady in a leather bikini shows up in his opera box. She tells him she knows about his menacing moisturizer, but before she can do anything else, the police and security show up. And wouldn’t you know it, even Detective Tom shows up to try to stop the vigilante. After a bit of a scuffle on the catwalk, Patience dashes out, but not before she can purr into her stud’s ear. Having finally encountered this foxy feline, he starts to suspect his girlfriend may be her because he totally recalled that she loves sushi, hates the rain, and is feisty in the bedroom with her fingernails.

While the fast cat is having fun, our underdog Maggie is finally ready to fight the Blue Bear. It’s a rough fight and Maggie doesn’t think she can win it. During the first round she’s getting mauled by the Bear, but faster than you can say “Showgirls” she’s saved by the bell and heads off to her corner to have a rest. She tells Frankie that the Bear is made of steel, so I guess the Bear’s cut-man is using Beau-line on her face. It was looking like our hero was about to lose, but she decided to play dirty like the Bear and started to come back. Before the next round ended she threw a big punch and made a magnum force making the Bear cower into the corner. But, the villain didn’t take kindly to that and after the bell rang, she threw a punch connecting right with Maggie’s face. With that sucker punch, she fell to the mat, but before she landed, her stool jumped into the ring, looked at her neck and said “I will break you”. Maggie’s neck landed with a sudden impact right on the side of the stool and the match was over. Maybe if she had actually fed a dog that leftover steak she would’ve had a group of canines come to save her, but alas, she was out of luck.

Not sure if he wants to risk his neck for the new product anymore, after his night the opera, the grouchy Mr. Hedare feels like a cat on a hot tin roof and tells his wife Laurel that Beau-line may be in trouble. But it turns out that George isn’t the one with all the power and is instead the hard headed woman. I guess all that cream went to her head because now she calls all the shots. It also helps that because she’s been using the lotion for so long she’s an indestructible specimen and can handle the occasional slaps from mean George. So when Catwoman returns to the Hedare mansion to get some updates from the supposedly supportive spouse, she’s shocked to discover that she’s been beguiled by the marbleous Mrs. Laurel and that she is in fact the true villain of the relationship. With the cat out of the bag, the wicked woman decides to kill her husband right in front of Patience and frame her for the murder. The police show up and the stone-faced killer tells them Catwoman did it, so they arrest the framed feline.

Things aren’t going too well for our other fighting heroine. The aftermath of the brawl with the Bear left Maggie paralyzed from the neck down and hooked up to a ventilator. Feeling guilty and responsible, Frankie is constantly by her side and watching over her. In the meantime, after hearing of the fight with the fight the Blue Bear, Maggie’s family comes to visit her faster than a cocaine bear. But it turns out they only came so that Maggie could sign over all of her assets to them. Because she couldn’t get up to kick them out of the room, instead she told them to get the hell out of there and never speak to her again. Now feeling all alone and feeling like she’s had a good enough life, because she’s unable to do it herself, the American patient asks Frankie to help take her life. Extremely opposed to it, Frankie refuses, but Maggie insists she’s not afraid and tells him, “go ahead, make me die”. Again, he refuses and leaves the hospital to think things over. However, after one particular harsh night by herself in the hospital, Maggie tried to pull a Miggs from Silence of the Lambs and swallow her own tongue. Thankfully the doctors got to her in time and prevented it from happening. Finally, after a touching moment together and saying his goodbye, Frankie agrees to grant her wish. Without Detective Lone nearby to convince Maggie that it’s not worth it, Dr. KevorkiDunn gives her a lethal shot. I guess Clint just has a hard time letting people with new homes rest easy. First Little Bill builds a new house and Clint kills him, now Maggie gets a new house for her family and Clint kills her. With no cats in sight to give her CPR, Maggie died peacefully.

Just as our hero Maggie is gone, so too is our hero Patience. Stuck in the slammer, our courageous kitten is running out of time to stop Beau-line from hitting the market. With her cat ear head gear off, Tom finally realizes that Patience is in fact Catwoman, and after a bit convincing, he decides to let her go so she can stop the heinous Hedare. After defeating some of the villain’s henchmen with her cat-poeira skills, Patience finally gets to face off against the cosmetic company’s top dog. It’s a grueling fight because Laurel’s got a concrete cranium and can’t feel a thing. Because alloys don’t cry, it looks like the evildoer is unbeatable. But Catwoman discovers the metal model’s weakness: falling from the roof of a skyscraper. Defeating the lead Laurel, Patience decides rather than taking it easy and living her normal life as an artist, she has to go on clad in her skimpy swimsuit and save the day. Saying goodbye to Tom, she heads out into the night to continue fighting justice so that the people can go on living in a purr-fect world. Saying goodbye to Tom, the jellicle Catwoman heads out into the night to continue fighting justice so that the people can go on living in a purr-fect world.

All right meow, what do we think about these two films? Both are rags to riches tales about sympathetic women. Granted, one of the women got her riches by stealing it from a jewelry story, but that’s beside the point. Both women have men in their lives who care for them and would do anything for them. Granted, one of the men is 50 years older than the woman, but that’s beside the point. But in the end, both films are about transformation, one transforms into a champion boxer, the other transforms into a cat. Granted, one of them doesn’t have the most successful end to their transformation, but that’s beside the point. Each woman manages to overcome the odds and start fresh and live the life they wanted to live, even if each woman has trouble rising from a crucial fall in their story. Unlike anyone else who would have died and stayed dead after an extremely high fall, the painter Patience survived and become a savior to the city. But do you know what happens to a boxer whose neck lands on a stool? The same thing that happens to everyone else.