Obviously, there are extraordinary guys like Guillermo del Toro, Bryan Singer and Sam Raimi working this line of country, so all is not lost. But this cancer has affected things at all the big studios, and it's just about taken over at Warner Bros. And the proof -- the latest proof, I mean -- is CATWOMAN.

I'm trying to show restraint here, but I'm obviously pointing to the way things are being handled by Warner Bros. Entertainment president Alan Horn. His financial record can't be faulted (the MATRIX and HARRY POTTER franchises delivered, and TROY, flaccid as it was, was a big worldwide hit), but Horn's creative-spiritual input has been rancid. He's serving the devil. The man wanted McG, for God's sake...one of the most satanic figures to ever break into the Hollywood big leagues, surpassed only by Michael Bay and George Lucas .....to direct the next SUPERMAN film.

Or is Horn just going along with this crap, and the real driving villain is WB production prexy Jeff Robinov? It's hard to lay blame in these matters, but if I were Judge Spencer Tracy on the Movie Crimes tribunal of 2009 and they were both in the dock, I would not go easy.

CATWOMAN is GIGLI bad, HUDSON HAWK bad...but not SHOWGIRLS bad. That's the problem. I wanted to laugh at it. The people I saw it with did laugh here and there when they weren't supposed to, but I couldn't do it. Chuckling at a fatuous female empowerment fantasy is a bit of an uphill thing.

Watching CATWOMAN is like being trapped in Oprah Winfrey's head after she's snorted twenty lines of crystal meth. It's actually like being inside Winfrey when she's starting to crash. And the crazier she gets the more desperate she becomes, so she goes to a French director named Pitof and gives him $90 million bucks and says, "I'm unhappy. Restore me...indulge me. I need a You-Go-Girl injection."

Pitof was actually hired on the strength of his visual-effects work on three French-made films -- Luc Besson's MESSENGER: THE STORY OF JOAN OF ARC, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's ALIEN: RESURRECTION and DELICATESSEN.

Is there any way out of the iron-maiden confines of these superhero plots? Mousey guy or girl stuck in a groveling lifestyle, blah, blah...gets screwed over by a grossly preening villain and nearly killed...but then reborn as a hero with extraordinary, death-defying powers, blah, blah....but needs to keep this secret and apart from his/her everyday life while coping with a romantic relationship strained by this double-tracking?

Seeing this story told over and over isn't just boring or perverse....it's close to surreal. The corporations and the comic-book cultists are obviously intending to go this route until audiences have had enough...but is there a secret sub-agenda? It's like some kind of bizarre social experiment.

Patience Phillips (Halle Berry) is the mouse. The ad agency she works for does ads for a cosmetics firm that's about to release a dangerous addictive skin cream called Beau-Line. Patience discovers the truth one night by accident, and is killed...but is soon after reborn when a 3000 year-old Egyptian cat named Midnight comes along and breathes into her mouth. I'm being smirky, okay, but this is what happens....really.

You know the rest. You knew the rest before this movie was even conceived, much less written. You knew the rest before Michelle Pfeiffer went through the same feline paces in Tim Burton's vastly superior BATMAN RETURNS.

The difference is that once Berry inherits her cat powers, she doesn't become a cat. She becomes Spider-Woman without the webbing. She can climb up sheer walls, crab-walk along ceilings, jump off any building, etc. And she's super-strong and can dodge bullets like Superman. I feel degraded just typing this out.

The grossly preening villains are played by Lambert Wilson and Sharon Stone. The confused boyfriend, a cop, is played by Benjamin Bratt. The secondary bad guys are played by clones who look like every perfectly-dressed, oily-looking bad guy stooge in every corrosively shitty big-studio movie ever made.

If Ashley Judd had done this (she was attached in early '03) she would have definitely killed her career. Berry has almost certainly done damage to hers. If she hadn't done MONSTER'S BALL or won that Oscar....leave it alone. She'll recover.

I'm glad Stone was hired, but I feel badly for her at the same time. I feel badly for every paid member of the team except Pitof. Wilson was just right in those two or three scenes in THE MATRIX RELOADED; the best you can say about his CATWOMAN work is that he got paid.

Why is it that in every shitty big-budget movie...and I mean every last one....that the girl who's about to fall from a building (or meet some similar violent fate) is always saved at the very last millisecond? Never with two or three seconds to spare....always at the last possible instant. We've seen this dozens and dozens of times, and it never goes away.

There was one bit I was really up for -- a one-on-one basketball duel between Bratt and Berry. But the editing is so antsy-jerky that I couldn't follow the action. I gave up after 10 seconds. Pitof clearly doesn't care about basketball or anything else exuding a shred of natural beauty. I started to really hate CATWOMAN after this.

My favorite cat movies are (a) Val Lewton's CAT PEOPLE, (b) Alfred Hitchcock's TO CATCH A THIEF (the spirit of four-pawed slyness and agility was summed up in Cary Grant's John Robie), (c) Burton's BATMAN RETURNS, (d) Richard Quine's BELL, BOOK AND CANDLE (Kim Novak's eye makeup more than Piewacket) and (e) Paul Schrader's CAT PEOPLE (flawed, but five or six times better than CATWOMAN).

And oh, yeah...the opening credits for Edward Dmytryk's WALK ON THE WILD SIDE. But not GREY GARDENS. And I hated CATS AND DOGS.

This is a BOURNE SUPREMACY weekend, guys. BOURNE and FAHRENHEIT 9/11 and MARIA FULL OF GRACE and whatever good DVDs are out there. But of course, readers of this column only number in the tens of thousands.

Mean Streets

I said I was going to riff a bit more about COLLATERAL (DreamWorks, August 6). I got so high off this Michael Mann film I can't wait to see it again, which will be next week, I suppose. I had a better time with it than anything since FAHRENHEIT 9/11. And I love guy movies that are really smart and have awesome sounding gunshots, and at once feel familiar, fresh and adventurous.

I loved the surprise of Cruise's performance as Vincent, the hit man. I went in hoping for something interesting or at least different, and I came out convinced he's an Oscar contender. (Especially if DreamWorks puts him into the Best Supporting category.) The remarkable thing is that Cruise does it without a single "big" emotional moment. He does it with a lot of small ones.

Of course, now that I've built him up people are going to go on opening weekend and write in and say, "What's the big deal?" Or they're gonna say the movie doesn't carry the wallop of HEAT or whatever. But I said that myself in Wednesday's piece. It's a beautiful, nocturnal streets-of-LA deal, and about as sharp and satisfying as a ride like this can be.

I'd begun to forget about Jamie Foxx, frankly. He was good as Drew "Bundini" Brown in Mann's ALI, but the last really big impression he made was five years ago, as a hot- dog quarterback in Oliver Stone's ANY GIVEN SUNDAY. I didn't catch him in SHADE or BREAKIN' ALL THE RULES, and I haven't heard anything about Taylor Hackford's RAY (Universal, 10.29), in which he plays the recently departed Ray Charles. But his COLLATERAL performance as Max, the dilettante cab driver, feels like his best ever.

And again, without any one big soul-baring scene to point to. It's more of a case of a thousand tiny brushstrokes.

I have to again mention the sound editing. The gunshots that come out of Cruise's .45 handgun sound fantastic, and I don't know how to explain how or why. It's not just the sound; you can feel the rounds exploding and slamming into their targets. Credit should go to senior sound editor Elliott Korretz and his two assistants, Paul Alicino and William Crawley. Gunshots can almost feel like performances when they're done right.

(The worst gunshots I've ever heard were in John Sturges' THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. The ones in Richard Donner's original LETHAL WEAPON had a startling punch. The coolest I've ever heard out of an old-fashioned, pre-digital shoot-em-up were in George Stevens' SHANE. Warren Beatty once told a fascinating story about trying to duplicate the SHANE gunshots for BONNIE AND CLYDE. It's in the 1985 documentary GEORGE STEVENS: A FILMMAKER'S JOURNEY.)

Again

My final Poop Shoot column will run five weeks from now -- on Friday, August 27th. On Wednesday, September 1, Hollywood Elsewhere will be a stand-alone entity....I think. I may work out a deal with somebody to host it in exchange for what I require, but come hell or high water my column and I will be alive and pulsing as of 9.1.04.

The URL will be www.hollywood-elsewhere.com. I'm going to run this information repeatedly over for the next several weeks. Hollywood-hyphen-elsewhere-dot-com. You don't even need to write it down, but I guess it couldn't hurt if you did.

The Battle Won?

In the wake of last week's piece about Columbia Tristar Home Video's decision to issue only a pan-and-scan version of Sydney Pollack's CASTLE KEEP, a 1969 oddball war film that was shot in 2.35 to 1 Scope, which everyone regarded as either an outrage or a joke (or both), a reader sent me a link to a piece by Slate's Bryan Curtis (5.27.04) that seemed a bit ironic.

It basically claimed that the popularity of DVDs showing matted or widescreen movies with black bars on the tops and bottoms has far surpassed that of DVDs showing full-screen, pan-and-scan versions. I don't think there's any question that he's right, but the CASTLE KEEP episode indicated there's still a modest contingent of pan-and-scan holdouts out there. You know...like those Japanese soldiers who refused to come out of their caves after the end of World War II.

Curtis's article noted the following: (a) Blockbuster Video, the country's biggest rental chain, announced last year that it officially preferred widescreen DVDs to pan-and-scan; (b) most "serious" DVDs these days are issued only in widescreen; and (c) more and more, studios release mass-market titles like PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN exclusively in widescreen format, too. (Pan-and-scan DVDs of the big titles are still released, but even then they're always accompanied by a widescreen version.)

Curtis also reported that in mid-May, "Amazon.com's list of the top 50 best-selling DVDs contained only two films in full-screen format -- THE RETURN OF THE KING and MIRACLE -- and each was selling far fewer copies than its widescreen counterpart."

One reason for the popularity of widescreen versions "is that big-screen TVs have eliminated the aesthetic problem with widescreen viewing. Since the major complaint about widescreen DVDs is the smaller picture, super-sized TVs point the way toward nirvana: On a 55-incher, widescreen's black bars are a minor irritation. Plus, there's the emerging line of widescreen TVs, which for most widescreen DVDs will eliminate the black bars altogether."

A bigger factor behind widescreen's triumph, Curtis said, is the continuing education of the filmgoer.

"If casual movie fans prefer pan-and-scan and film buffs prefer widescreen, then one way to tip the balance is to turn the casual fans into buffs" he wrote. "The DVD format seems to have had precisely that effect. When you sift through Amazon.com's sales data, it's no surprise to find that for so-called "geek" movies -- say, THE LORD OF THE RINGS -- the widescreen disc outsells the pan-and-scan. But what is surprising is that when you call up films that aren't the province of geeks -- say, MIRACLE -- the widescreen version still comes out on top."

Fine, except this doesn't seem to square with last week's statement from ColTristar Home Video vp Alison Eiggers that the pan-and-scan decision over CASTLE KEEP was "basically intended to appeal to the home- video viewers who are used to pan-and-scan VHS and have recently come over to DVD.

"We're getting a broader base these days, and as DVD becomes more of a mass product you have an emerging consumer base that is more interested in pan-and-scan versions," she said.

When I asked why CTHV simply hadn't issued a double-sided DVD (a.k.a., a "flipper") with both pan-and-scan and widescreen version, Eiggers said that expense was a factor in their decision, along with a marketing call not to alienate the new-to-DVD crowd. "Some people get confused flipping discs over and trying to decide which side to play," she said.

I asked Curtis about this a couple of days ago, and he wrote the following:

"Forgive the metaphor, but I still think major combat operations have ended on pan-and-scan vs. widescreen front. Here you have a minor-key Sydney Pollack film released only in pan-and-scan. And -- praise be -- the internet community, the director, and even some at the studio are going nuts about it.

"Back in the VHS era, we were fretting about not being able to find LAWRENCE OF ARABIA in widescreen. Now, we're up in arms about CASTLE KEEP and HOT DOG: THE MOVIE. I'd say that counts as progress."

Collateral

"I'm thrilled about your response to COLLATERAL. I love Michael Mann (HEAT, THE INSIDER and THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS are favorites) and thrilled to hear that this time out the acting matters, and that it's not just a visual fest. Good for Jamie Foxx, and I'm thrilled for Cruise. Can't wait to see it.

"Take a look at JERRY MAGUIRE again, though. Watch Cruise again. Cameron Crowe gets a seriously full- bodied performance from him. His character ain't so nice, and seems a bit nihilistic, actually. All that slick shit,I mean.... even with the kid and Renee Zellweger at the airport. Then it's all stripped away, and he becomes a real person. There were parts of VANILLA SKY like that, too. I think he likes to take risks." -- Roderick Durham, Tallahassee.

Ronstadt

"So why does Linda Rondstat get to 'say any asinine thing [she] wants' but the owner of the Alladin doesn't? I suppose if you refuse to print this email, then you're just as guilty of stiffling my dissent. Or maybe, just maybe, you have the right (and dare I say obligation to your readers) to use your own judgement about what gets said in your specific part of the public arena.

"Ronstadt has every right to say whatever pops into her noggin. The owner of the Alladin has every right to decide whether or not he wants that on his stage. And the patrons and public at large have every right to voice their agreement or displeasure at both decisions. (Granted, the reported acts of vandalism cross the line.)

"God Bless America! Even the Blue parts!" -- Bryan Farris, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Wells to Farris: I repeat that if I were at some country music concert and a singer or a lead guitarist told the crowd he loves his country and that the country needs George Bush right now, I would just shrug it off. I wouldn't boo or throw anything or try to shout him down. Dedicating a song to Michael Moore is a fairly simple and concise thing (nothing messy or unruly about it) and saying that he's a patriot is not in the least bit off-the-wall.

"Shouting down people expressing their mind is nothing new. While I am proud to be a rightie, I believe people should express opinions by silently walking out or, in Ronstadt's case, refusing to buy their albums etc.

"And yet college campuses across the US have been shouting down anyone who doesn't follow the orthodoxy on a variety of issues -- especially affirmative action. This is another way young people have exerted their influence on the process, which isn't too good. (I am 33). And with the proliferation of left and right wing media and the media bias, we've moved into an age when we believe our entire media and our elites are constantly lying to us, depending on our viewpoints." -- J.P. Weiske

"Both of your right-wing readers proved what's so damn wrong with them all:

"Bryan Farris says the Aladdin owner should be able to express his opinion. He did express his opinion but only after suppressing Linda Rondstat's right to free speech. He could have simply said afterward, I disagree with her politics.

"{And the right-wingers in the audience could have (as you say shrugged it off) and say they disagree.

"And J.P. Weiske says people should protest instead by boycotting the artist who exercises free speech. This is simply another way of punishing someone for exercising their damn rights! If you disagree say you disagree.

"Boycotting and kicking them out of stadiums for speaking their minds is just another form of facism, not the absence of it." -- Richard Elvers

Amram

"Thanks for the piece on David Amram. I really need to see The original MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE again so I can listen to his score. As I was reading the article I kept wondering why his name was familiar, and then it hit me. I had one of his jazz or classical records back in the 70's and remember liking his music, but for the life of me I can't remember which album it was. I did a search at Amazon, but nothing looked familiar. Looks like I have a good excuse to haunt music stores, not that I ever need an excuse for expanding my CD collection. Anyway, good article and thanks for the memory jog." -- Edward Klein , Salem, Oregon.

Catwoman

"Is it possible that studio execs are living off the fumes of SHOWGIRLS? That is, instead of taking the time (and money) to make a good movie, they settle for making a piece of crap, figuring they'll sell enough tickets to the 'so-bad-it's-good' crowd to make it profitable? Or am I giving them too much credit for thinking that way at all?" -- Kevin Kusinitz, NYC.

Wells to Kusinitz: Anyone with the chutzpah to think that way most likely wouldn't be involved with a stinker like CATWOMAN in the first place. Studio execs are way too timid -- cautious, political, scared of what's around the corner -- and nowhere near perverse enough. So yeah...too much credit.

"While CATWOMAN looks to be one of the most offensive violations of a comic book property ever, I'm not sure how much fault can be placed at the feet of Pitof, the French director. I would recommend his first directorial effort, VIDOCQ, as an indicator. It's a fun, not-very-predictable action mystery. It was shot on the earliest version of the 24p camera (which eventually became the Cinealta), and therefore has an overly video-ish look, but it still has a certain something. You can get the Korean DVD at Amoeba." -- Nick Lund-Ulrich.

Wells to Lund-Ulrich: Ameoba, Korean DVD, "a certain something"...sounds like a plan. I'm sure that poor Pitof was mauled or at least overwhelmed to some extent by the Warner Bros. corporate process and forced to make something that wasn't precisely "his" (which of course is totally standard), but that one- on-one basketball sequence was atrocious (especially the editing) and he's the director. Somebody has to jump into the volcano over this thing. The natives demand it.