Feminism, Michelle Pfeiffer, and the Tragedy of Falling In Love At The Movies

Why do we go to the movies?

Aside from entertainment, or to learn something about the human condition, or because the neighbourhood Classic Bowl was closed due to a tragic gutter ball accident, I mean.

Speaking for myself, I know I go to the movies to fall in love.

It's like the safest one-night stand you can ever have, except instead of a physical connection (and risk), falling in love with someone in a film approaches the spiritual (and its accordant risk). I can vividly recall my cinematic loves, like the girl on Gordon Street, or the girl with a white parasol, glorious technicolour beauties with 5.1 surround voices, stuck in two dimensions and shared with strangers in the dark.

Rachel Weisz in THE MUMMY. Audrey Tautou in AMELIE. Eva Marie Saint in NORTH BY NORTHWEST. Leslie Bibb in SEX AND DEATH 101. Michelle Monaghan in KISS KISS BANG BANG. Rachael Leigh Cook in ... well, pretty much anything, but definitely SHE'S ALL THAT.

And Michelle Pfeiffer in BATMAN RETURNS.

Oh, Michelle Pfeiffer. Did you have any idea what you were doing when you stepped into Catwoman's knee-high boots? Did you set out to inflame desire and break hearts?

You played the demure secretary-turned sex kitten with such relish, such joy, that it's impossible to not fall in love with this performance. You play Selina Kyle as the epitome of confused female empowerment, an even-more perfect study in duality than the film's protagonist: both reveling in and scared by your power, alternately abused and loved by men, a product of society and trashing it at the same time. These are powerful forces, maybe too powerful for some viewers.

I would have been six in 1992, when BATMAN RETURNS came out. I didn't even know what the words were for what was happening to me. I wanted to save Catwoman; I wanted to make Selina Kyle smile. I wanted to hug Selina Kyle; I wanted to do ... something... to Catwoman. Only by looking back, can I name my pain: heartache. I'm no developmental psychologist, but I'd guess that six years old is too young for a boy to fall in love and have his heart broken. And Michelle Pfeiffer did it all in just 126 minutes, one chilly night in, of all places for a star-crossed romance, sleepy small-town Mississauga (a town so sleepy, we had a town mascot named 'Mister Sauga'. Now that's a tired PR staff).

That's the great tragedy of falling in love with film characters, of course - the credits are coming, and then it's all over. We'll be free to watch the film again, but it'll just be revisiting a memory. You only fall in love once, right? And like the hopeless romantics on a missed connections message board, we're doomed to relive those moments again and again.

But like those poor devils who exchange brief-but-meaningful glances from opposing subway cars, we eventually realize that there's always a new train coming (films are now trains, who are, of course, girls, in this horribly overwrought metaphor). We might only fall in love once, but if the string of names I listed above are any indication, we might not. We inevitably recognize that there are plenty of fish in the sea. Get it? Sea? 'C'? Catwoman!

Perhaps there are plenty of fish, but we can never forget the first time we were caught. Thank you, Ms. Pfieffer, for giving me another reason to go to the movies. If you'll excuse me, I'm off to watch THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO.

A Deliriously Infatuated Love Letter to THE MUMMY (1999)

Dearest THE MUMMY (1999):

Oh, how I missed you. It had been too long since I saw your Egyptologist-melting, fortune-hunter-dissolving, scarab-beetle-eating beauty.

I still remember our first time - the Erin Mills Town Centre Cineplex, long since closed down and turned into an Old Navy, on Canada Day, 1999. I'll be honest, I only remember it was July 1 because we had to go to a family event afterward, but it was still special because of you. I don't remember what we ate that day, or what set of directions my family argued about to make conversation (although it probably went something like this: "Who takes the 407? What are you, some sort of a Spanish consortium economic booster?"). No, my memories of that day are all about you - of Brendan Fraser shooting two pistols and makin' with the quips, of Rachel Weisz's stunning eyes and deadpan comic timing, of your stunning effects. It was new, it was beautiful, and it was scary.

Yeah, I'll admit it, you scared me. But I think what we shared that day would make anyone a little scared. You got inside me, THE MUMMY (1999). You changed me. I know this might be a little surprising to you. I know I tried to play it cool, treat you like I treated any other film. Or did you see right through my charade? Did you see how I got a little obsessive, daydreaming about you that whole summer, playing your video game and listening to your score?

Now, I probably should have realized that summer lovin' couldn't last. But I didn't see GREASE for another two years. We were both young, THE MUMMY (1999). Let's not pretend we were smarter than we were. Admittedly, our relationship soured at times. There was that sequel that barely deserved your name, and that time the man who played your titular character turned in the laziest guest spot in ALIAS' notorious history of lazy guest spots. Then there was that sorta-prequel with that guy from THE TOOTH FAIRY and then, of course, the infamous VAN HELSING "break". Oded Fehr did RESIDENT EVIL 2. And then there was that final sequel. I think I lost you, THE MUMMY (1999). I think I lost what I loved about you.

I know it's a cliché, THE MUMMY (1999), but I think those tough times might have just made us stronger. Because when I saw you the other day, I saw you. I mean, really saw you. I saw the obvious green screen work, and the horrifying beginnings of CGI animation. I saw the questionable ethnic stereotypes and the way you basically steal things from much better movies.

And I don't care.

Those aren't ugly green fuzzy halos around your actors' heads: they're love-green-screen-lines. You're not a pale imitation of others: you're full of homages to other classic beauties, and you make it your own. And if someone said that your effects weren't hot, I'd say they're cute.

I hope you can forgive me for ignoring you on my shelf for so long, THE MUMMY (1999). I know I've forgiven you for the six hours of MUMMY-related films I've been forced to sit through, and the considerably longer amount of time it's taken to remove any tainted memories those films have left in my mind about your purity.

So, since no love letter is complete without some bad poetry, I'd like to present you with some lines from one of our great poets, who can truly express my feelings. Hear Cassie's words, THE MUMMY (1999), and try to ignore the strip-club favourite undertones:

It's me and you, now

I've been waiting

Think I wanna make that move, now

Baby, tell me if you like it.

It's me and you, now

I've been waiting.

Death Is Only The Beginning,

Brandon

THE LOVELY BONES: But where are all the orcs?

My first Zip DVD came in the mail the other day and proceeded to sit on my living room table for four days. If that doesn't speak to the mixed reception of Peter Jackson's choice for follow-up to his two epics, I don't know what will.

THE LOVELY BONES is a very, very strange movie, and while I haven't read the book, I have to imagine the emotional fidelity to source material that served Jackson, Boyens and Walsh so well in THE LORD OF THE RINGS is at fault here. One-half of the movie tells the story of a young girl who is molested and murdered and how that destroys the lives of her entire family. This is, by far, the best part of the movie. Unfortunately, the other half of the movie deals with the murdered girl, Susie, as she spends time in a strange purgatory of her own design, as she looks back on her family and her murderer.

This device serves two masters: it gives Jackson some space to create some nifty visuals, and completely splits the focus of the story, with the effect that I desperately wanted to get back to the "real world" scenes (Marky Mark and all) whenever they came on. The "heaven" scenes bear almost no emotional weight, with Susie drily narrating as she prances around in Victorian dress and walking by trees with leaves that become birds.

There may be an argument for the value of the symbolism in these scenes, but it doesn't matter to me if I don't care about Susie. Her death is most dramatically interesting to the journeys of her father (Mark Wahlberg, in an admirable imitation of acting) and mother (the sadly-underused Rachel Weisz), but the film keeps cutting away from the two most compelling characters to look back at what Susie's up to. It's a frustrating effort, and the conclusion feels like it was written by a 12-year old girl who's gone to Sunday school one too many times.

It's almost impossible to reconcile this shockingly traditional movie with Jackson's ouvre. DEAD ALIVE showed a canny knack of approaching tried-and-trued themes through the horrifying and unusual, and his epic trilogy and even the remake of KING KONG showed that he could still wring emotional truths out of the absurd or fantastic. Compared to those three films, this feels like an overwrought TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL episode.